The Last Embrace: A True Story of Euthanasia in Brazil

On a sunny Sunday in September 2014, Nelson Irineu Golla, 74, at the begging of his wife, Neusa, 72, embraces her with a homemade bomb pressed against his chest and lights the fuse. Although it reads like a novel, The Last Embrace is a major report, whose leitmotif is the protagonists' desire to die. After two strokes, she languishes in a nursing home; he, disabled in one arm, can no longer bear to see her pleading with her eyes for someone to kill her. The case, which had become known in the courts as "a Romeo and Juliet for the elderly," is reconstructed here by Vitor Hugo Brandalise in minute detail.