‘La luz difícil’ by Tomás González

Suffering unbearable pain years after a traffic accident left him paraplegic, Jacobo has decided to die. At the time of the accident, he was only eighteen and about to start medical school at NYU. Now in his twenties, Jacobo lives with his Colombian-immigrant parents in New York City, where assisted dying is illegal. Jacobo and one of his brothers are driving to Chicago, and will then fly to Portland, Oregon, where a doctor is willing to assist with Jacobo’s death. In the meantime, his parents, his youngest brother, and several friends of the family await news in the family’s NY apartment. They all support Jacobo’s decision but worry: will he be able to carry out his will of a peaceful death, or will something fail to go according to plan? Will he change his mind at the last minute – and would he even be able to change his mind? Tomás González’s 2011 novel La luz difícil tells the story of that anxious night from the point of view of Jacobo’s ageing father David, a painter who is writing twenty years after his son’s death. In the narrative’s present day, David has left the US for his home country of Colombia, has been a widower for two years, and is gradually losing his sight; using a magnifying glass to write and often employing vivid descriptions befitting a painter’s perspective, David dispenses his time-bending memoir in alternating chapters – between his account of the excruciatingly slow-moving night when his son died, and his present-day grappling with diminishing abilities and mortality.

González’s novel has not only been critically acclaimed but also cited as an important narrative to reflect on the ethics and legality of assisted dying. Media Patiño and Hernández, for example, name it (alongside Carlos Framb’s memoir Del otro lado del jardín) as a landmark reflection on euthanasia; they take the novel as a reminder of the need to legislate the right to die in Colombia – and as an indictment of Congress’s failure to do so, in spite of the Constitutional Court’s reiterated urging. Colombia’s Constitutional Court decriminalized euthanasia in 1997 (Sentence C-239-97) – and further expansions of the right-to-die would be issued as of 2015 – but Congress has yet to pass legislation on it. González’s novel has been translated into English and French, among other languages, sparking discussions beyond Colombia. This international readership is in keeping with the border-crossing nature of the novel, which switches between Colombia and the US, while also crossing state borders within the US – from New York, where assisted dying is not legal, to Oregon, where it is. In Oregon, physician-assisted dying was first legalized by the 1994 Ballot Measure 16, which established Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act, even though its effect was delayed by lawsuits until 1997. So, in González’s novel, when Jacobo’s accident takes place in 1998, assisted dying was already legal in Oregon. It is remarkable, thus, that González manages to meaningfully engage with two pioneering places of the right to die in the Americas. Besides the complexities of multiple legal frameworks involving the case of a non-terminal patient, the novel also shows how differently people deal with grief – which, in the case of the narrator, is never overcome. Such embracing of complexity has made the novel a focal point for debates around assisted dying. Several branches of the Fundación Pro Derecho a Morir Dignamente (DMD) have recommended the novel and discussed it in book clubs and public events. First printed in 2011 by the Colombian publishing house Alfaguara, it was reissued in 2023 by the Spanish Sexto Piso, and rendered into English by Archipelago Books in 2020.