Affected by Charcot’s disease – diagnosed in 2022 -, the legendary sports journalist Charles Bietry knows that he has only “a few weeks or months to live”. He compares the suffering linked to his neurodegenerative disease to a kind of “torture”. The 81 -year -old Frenchman can no longer speak. Eating is extremely difficult and will soon have a probe to eat. He can only walk a few meters, with rods.
In a poignant testimony broadcast on Sunday in “7 to 8”, on TF1, Charles Biétry told this reality, without minimizing anything. However, he wanted above all to show a fighter and even smiling and optimistic face. And that’s what he managed to do.
The interview, face camera, was made in special conditions. The questions had been sent in advance. Charles Biétry prepared his answers, which he disseminated one after the other with his lost voice, which was recreated by artificial intelligence. Diffusion which he has often accompanied by smiles, gestures and expressions, looks to his wife.
“We will laugh to the end”
With the lost word, with the autonomy that disappears, “we curl up and we risk having no more contact with the outside,” said the one who made the beautiful hours of Canal+, reports BFMTV. And to launch: “But I’m alive! Why do you want me to spoil the moments I have left and spoil the life of my loved ones? ”
From his Morbihan house, facing the ocean, the Breton has said his fierce desire to “enjoy” the time left and “do everything in my power to help research and other patients”. “With my wife, we have loved each other for 45 years in extreme happiness and the situation is not easy for her. However, when we have a blow of blues, it is she who puts us back with a sentence that has become mythical in the family: “We will laugh to the end”. And it works. She helps me by just existing, ”he paid tribute to her.
“Dying is a double pain …”
Charles Biétry, as we expected, wanted to express himself on euthanasia or help to die, always impossible in France. A highly anticipated text on the end of life had to be debated when everything had been stopped by the dissolution of the National Assembly, announced by President Macron last June.
“It’s already hard to die, but then to die, it is double pain …”, he commented, imagining in the event of a painful end, “the pain of loved ones who hurt you to hope for death”.
The Frenchman, as we knew, prepared a suicide assisted in Switzerland. But he explained his state of mind, which is probably that of the majority in the same case: he is ready to die in Switzerland but hopes that it will not happen. And wants his country or the conditions in palliative care will allow him a “gentle death”.
“Going to commit suicide in Switzerland is not the dream of my end of life. The car trip with my wife and two children. And knowing that they will return to France all three, with the funerary urn in the trunk … the more I think about it, the less I want, “he summed up.
