United in life and dance—that’s how we all remember them—Alice and Ellen Kessler were also united in their final farewell, with a double assisted suicide. Alice and Ellen Kessler, the famous German artistic duo the Kessler Twins, beloved in Italy since the 1960s, have died at the age of 89.

The news shocked many, not only because of their celebrity, but also because of their unusual choice to die together, apparently without a terminal illness. They had made a pact long beforehand: to die at the same time and be buried in the same urn, next to their mother and their beloved dog, Yello.

“After many successes, many in Italy,” ANSA reports, they “had retreated to their home in Gruenwald, a small town on the outskirts of Munich. And it was there that the Bavarian police, who responded with a patrol around noon, found them today, unable to do anything but declare them dead, ruling out third-party liability. Confirming their conscious and planned choice was the German Association for a Dignified Death (DGHS), which explained to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that it was an assisted suicide. The two sisters had been in contact with the organization for some time about resorting to a practice that, in Germany, is permitted under certain conditions: assisted suicide can be performed by adults who are capable of acting and do so solely on their own responsibility (euthanasia is prohibited in the country).”

What particularly struck me was a phrase they repeated in several interviews: “We no longer have any relatives, and if we do, we don’t know them” — profound loneliness, eased only by the unbreakable bond between twins, but evidently not enough to overcome the fear of being alone. The unpredictability of death, in fact, raised fears that one would outlive the other, condemning them to an empty existence.

This double suicide makes us reflect on how widespread, in our society, is a culture devoid of a horizon beyond this world, a nihilistic culture that replaces the sonship of a good Father—who out of love wanted us and created us from nothing—with a human relationship, however strong, necessarily limited and incapable of satisfying the longing for fullness and eternity we carry within. When the perception of the sacredness of life is lost, the fear of loneliness and the sense of existential emptiness can only produce aberrant outcomes.

This isn’t a suicide caused by a terminal and unbearable illness, but rather the so-called “pain of living”: that existential pessimism, that uneasiness faced with an existence perceived as absurd and meaningless. When the limelight has long since faded and one approaches the final stage of life with no horizon beyond death, this “nonsense” becomes unbearable.

Eugenio Montale, in the poem “I have often encountered the pain of living” (from Ossi di seppia, 1925), describes it with vivid and crude images:

I have often encountered the pain of living:
it was the strangled stream that gurgles,
it was the curling up of the parched leaf,
it was the collapsed horse.

But in the case of the Kesslers there is something more: a cultural weed with poisonous roots that inevitably produces death.

Cardinal Giacomo Biffi repeatedly spoke of Bologna (but just replace “Bologna” with “society” and the result remains the same) as a “satiated and desperate” reality. In his Christmas homily in 1985, he said, “Bologna is a city both satiated and desperate. Satiated with goods, entertainment, and possibilities; desperate because it no longer knows why it lives, why it works, why it suffers, why it dies. It is the desperation of those who have everything and have nothing left to hope for.” And he added elsewhere: “…desperate because this well-being has failed to give her a reason to live and die. It is the desperation of those who possess everything and no longer possess themselves.”

Cardinal Biffi was absolutely right: This is the evil that grips our society—an evil borne of the loss of the meaning of life and death. When these ultimate reasons disappear, all that remains is loneliness (even amidst the din) and the sickly coldness of death.

The friends of Pro Vita & Famiglia Onlus wrote lucidly:

After a successful career that brightened the lives of millions, the Kessler twins’ lives shouldn’t have ended this way. In a truly humane society, no life should end this way. The Kessler twins join the long and sad line of people driven to suicide by assisted suicide laws, created by a sick society, incapable of fully including and valuing each person, even in the most precarious phases of existence, preferring instead to offer death as the cheapest and quickest solution.

The real risk is that this case will become a tragic precedent, applauded by the bards of practical nihilism, the sirens of the mainstream, and the trombones of absolute emptiness as a “cool” gesture, a show of dignity. Or, even, they will casually gloss over the double suicide, as if it were a given, obvious, ordinary fact. In reality, it is simply a tragic and senseless event. Especially when you consider that tomorrow, instead of two, there could be three, ten, a hundred…

Brandi is right to raise the alarm: Describing the Kesslers’ choice as “self-determination” risks pushing “thousands of vulnerable citizens” toward the same abyss, normalizing euthanasia for the elderly or sick.

It’s important that those—especially Catholics—who are working to introduce a law on assisted suicide in Italy reflect deeply on this case and make amends. A sick culture breeds a sick society. There’s no doubt about it.