Causa Causae

Causa Causae

Many, many years ago, when the afternoons echoed with children’s laughter and the sun scattered happiness into every corner of the world, there were three little girls who studied piano in a house that smelled of waxed floors and roses. Their teacher, Myra, was a woman of porcelain kindness, whose fingers moved across the keys like white doves learning to fly. Bella, Bianca, and I: three names that once rang together like a simple chord. We spent our childhood bowing before Bach’s Minuets and Telemann’s Gavotte, while the metronome clicked on, patient and affectionate as our parents.

Later, when youth arrived with its noisy textbooks, music was replaced by the drumming of facts. We filled our minds with axioms, as if our lives could be protected by algebra. I no longer recall the subject; was it a test on French irregular verbs in eight tenses, or calculus with its limits? But on that bright morning, Bianca, the smallest of us, asked to leave the classroom. The teacher, unaware of destiny’s treacherous intentions, allowed her to go. Bianca did not return. She climbed instead to her family’s top-floor apartment and leapt into the air like a note escaping the chord. A note escaping into freedom.

Four years passed. The world grew smaller, or perhaps only the sky did. Bella became a flight attendant. On the day she boarded her flight, Mont San Petru smelled of rosemary and tragedy. The plane struck the mountain and burned its brief music into the rock. No one survived.

Ever since, I have believed that life is a conspiracy of trajectories: cars, a cyclist, a narrow bridge—all arriving at the same moment, as if ordained by an invisible law. My father called it the “Law of Masses,” and I once thought it was his private invention. Later, I learned it was Newton’s real discovery: the attraction between masses.

And between fates. One sorrow attracts another just as stars attract planets.

When Bella died, I was twenty-two and still believed in Latin logic. Causa causae est causa causati—the cause of the cause is the cause of the effect. Not as lawyers argue it, but as poets feel it: that grief has a history, and every accident descends from another.

On the Saturday after Bella’s funeral, I met our teacher, Myra, walking through the park, her hair now touched with gray. We spoke of the girls, the music. I told her my fear that I was the third note in this unfinished chord, the final tone in a melody written by death itself. That it was my turn to die.

She smiled sadly and shook her head in denial.

“That’s life,” she said. “Accidents happen all the time.”

I wished to believe her. I had to believe her with my whole heart.

But even then, I felt the slow uncoiling of time; the secret pulse of the world that binds one cause to another.

2 — The Chain Continues

Fifteen years later, history changed its uniform but not its soul. We were already part of the European Union, a grand name that promised belonging but delivered only new ways of being alone. The border guards vanished, but the old suspicions merely changed offices.

Before I continue, you must learn a few facts, as cold and stubborn as Triglav.

Slovenia had led the world in suicides for many decades. The expiration date of communism had been indefinitely postponed. Indoctrination, repeated like a hymn, had seeped into the blood. Over time, people began to resemble their lessons. They obeyed without orders, envied without reason.

One spring afternoon, during a lunch break when the light was too bright for thinking, I made what the angels of bureaucracy later called two “fatal mistakes.” I read aloud from a newspaper criticizing the government. And I met a friend for coffee; a friend who criticized a renowned physician whose work was marked by German precision, almost Swabian accuracy. In foolish honesty, I said that both the journalist and my friend were right. My voice trembled with grief: my daughter’s nanny had taken her own life because she could no longer afford to eat. Meanwhile, a weapons merchant named Oman had grown rich enough to bury his conscience in a tax haven.

Factories closed. Chimneys fell silent, gray and cold. Families lived on bread and resignation. I believed, like a naïve disciple of the Enlightenment, that democracy meant one could speak freely.

After that day, my life began to contract. I became a selected target, a chased animal. All the participants enjoyed it; except me.

The laboratory where I worked grew cold, not from winter but from glances. Conversations stopped when I entered the room. The telephone rang without sound. My parents received threats; my mother wept in secrecy, and my father’s face hardened into stone. My daughter returned from school each afternoon with swollen eyes, bullied for being my child.

Then came the fires. Our summer house burned once, then again, as if the flames themselves were learning perseverance. The police were unmoved; indifference had become their religion. My apartment was looted, my car vandalized, my documents stolen. But what I missed most were my diaries. In them I had recorded everything the city refused to acknowledge: slander that led to my destruction; the planned humiliations; the meetings where co-workers screamed as though their rage had been rehearsed by a distant director.

One of them, Brenda, smiled too knowingly, as if she could read my thoughts before I had them. She orchestrated the ragebaiting: gatherings where everyone shouted the same words, the same insults, as though possessed by a single mind.

When I sought help from medical authorities, the coordinator for medical residents diagnosed the persecution as madness. Methodically, she wrote that I was “in need of hospitalization.” She claimed I did not remove my jacket in a warm room, that I spoke of being followed by young strangers. Her report closed every door to my profession. In a single sentence, she buried my name beneath the weight of her credibility. The Medical Chamber of Slovenia terminated my education.

I appealed to the court, an institution still dreaming of the old Party. The judges, whose faces resembled icons of a bygone era, declared that nothing was wrong.

“Are you suing for money?” the coordinator asked when I faced her again.

“No,” I said incredulously at such complete lack of conscience. “For making a false diagnosis intentionally.”

My lawyer, a young man with eloquent speech, warned me: “If they had confined you to the hospital, you would have stayed there until their lies became true.”

So I left. I crossed the Austrian border not as a traveler but as an exile of reason.

And I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that I was taking part in “dancing,” as the Enlightenment named it—when a person acts according to a forced, programmed way because there is no other way, because all other ways have been blocked.

I was an elderly doctor, a scholar without credentials. In Yugoslavia, I had been a resident in Microbiology, a faculty member with extensive list of publications; after returning from the USA research fellowship, the independent Slovenia refused to let me finish my studies. As a doctor, I was barred from Laboratory Medicine, governed by jealous pharmacists and chemists. The Medical Chamber and the coordinator discontinued my residency in Occupational Health. I was declared mad. My diploma meant nothing against the invisible hand that had already erased me, nor against the rumors that followed wherever I went.

If I expected peace in Austria, I was wrong. The chase continued. The Austrian police was informed I was interested in men and women. That my intentions are not moral. Police on both sides of the border played football with my life until I was kicked back into my homeland. It was not possible to find friends or legal protection in Austria.

Years followed like smoke. Letters vanished from the mail. Emails vanished from the Inbox. Job offers dissolved before I could answer them. When I walked through the streets, I sensed watchers: patient, unhurried, omnipresent. Years of unemployment came. I earned so little that I could save nothing. And then, during the pandemic, I was ordered—despite my protests—to make home calls without protective clothing. I fell ill with COVID. Due to unexplained bureaucratic delays, my insurance did not function and I received no treatment. I could not walk or speak. My employer demanded I return to work. When I finally ordered an MRI, a brain hemorrhage explained everything.

In 2005, when my body was violated and I begged the police for help and justice; they dismissed it as a dream. The crimes multiplied under the silence of authority. Even my shame became public, circulated online as videos and entertainment. I became another Gisèle Pelicot.

I reached out to Canada for asylum, believing distant continents might offer new beginnings. But even there, Slovenia’s shadow followed. My passport was confiscated. I was not allowed to travel to any other country in the world and seek help. Canada returned me with deep satisfaction to the country I had fled, like a library book long overdue.

For twenty-five years, I lived like someone breathing underwater. My family, bound to the same machinery that crushed me, withdrew one by one, until even blood turned against blood. Churches closed their doors politely; prayers bounced off their walls. Isolation became my atmosphere, Jovanka Broz my mirror image. And though my heart beat loud and clear, I had died a long time ago.

In 2015, after prolonged unemployment, I applied for a job in my hometown. The doctor who interviewed me looked at my name, then my face, and smiled a small, astonished smile.

“Oh,” he said. “It’s you. How come you’re not dead yet?”

I was stunned.

Then he added, “Oh, I see. You are a medical doctor.”

For the first time in years, I understood he was right. I was alive only because I wrote my own prescriptions, traveled abroad for diagnoses, and underwent surgery in foreign countries.

When I asked if I would be hired, the doctor shrugged.

“No, of course not.”

By then, I no longer expected mercy. Slovenia refused to be my home; it was a laboratory where suffering was distilled into obedience.

And so, forty years after Bianca’s leap and Bella’s fall, I finally understood: the law of causes had not ended with them. It had merely changed its disguise, wearing the face of every official, every silence, every bureaucratic delay.

—3—

The Law of Uttermost Pain

The persecution, like the most faithful and deranged lover, never abandoned me; it merely changed hosts with enthusiastic precision. By the time it reached my parents, it had matured into its final doctrine: the law of uttermost pain: an invisible edict decreeing that the innocent must suffer for the simple sin of surviving too long.

My mother had once been a woman of gentle obedience, a believer in order, in government, in the inherent dignity of human beings. But in 2005, the first stroke arrived, and with it a peculiar softening of memory. First she forgot names, then faces, and finally the very reason for her suffering. The nursing home smelled of antiseptic and resignation. Her body lay motionless under a white sheet that concealed both bad organisation and ignorance.

By the time I understood the gravity of her condition, the infection had already spread; slow, methodical, as if destiny itself had decided to consume her inch by inch. Bedsores blossomed across her body like red, accusing flowers. She could no longer speak, but one day, through the fog of her failing mind, she whispered two words that have never stopped echoing inside me:

“It hurts.”

No doctor had been notified. When I carried her to the hospital, she was hovering between two worlds. They amputated her leg, as if pain could be subtracted by carving away a part of her. But the infection had already infiltrated her blood. She died of sepsis, though I have always believed she died of exhaustion and terror—like a hunted fox collapsing mid-run .

While my mother was leaving, my father was already drifting into his own final season. His body was a battlefield ravaged by cancer; his face was carved with silent torment. When I begged for help, the doctor, I considered a friend, told me it was “natural,” that old men must die without complaint, as though endurance were a moral obligation. Intervention, he said sincerely, would be unnecessary interference with the order of things.

But I did not surrender. I pleaded for hospital admission, for mercy, for stronger analgesics; anything to soften the edges of father 's agony. I was told, with patient detachment: “This is cancer. Nothing can be done.”

The next day, my father was returned to the hospital unconscious, his eyes closed. Only then did the same doctor, startled by the sight of his patient’s coma, murmur with a sigh:

“I couldn’t imagine the pain was so extreme.”

He ordered the needed medication.

For a full year afterward, I couldn’t pass the hospital without nausea. It was then that I understood: the system never kills by its own hand; it simply waits, watching calmly as time finishes what indoctrination begins.

—4—

The Law on Dying

This morning, a small gray booklet arrived with the municipal mail; sixteen pages printed on coarse paper, its title phrased like a question from fate:

Do you support the Law on Assisted Dying?

I read it as though it were a message from a distant tribunal, written in the dry voice of an accountant of souls. Many countries have legalized assisted death. But, Slovenia is a very particular creation.

According to the proposal, three doctors must agree that a patient suffers “extremely.” The patient must confirm it by signing, or, if too weak, marking the paper with a cross. Then the process proceeds: swift, orderly, bureaucratically merciful.

The patient’s intention to die must remain confidential; a secret kept from all but the designated medical circle.

The patient must take the final substance with his own hands.The document mentions approved “other methods,” but names none, as if anonymity could purify the act. Officially, it is neither suicide nor murder, but the fulfillment of an illness’s trajectory.

The Ministry keeps a register of all who obtain assisted deaths: names, dates, and any errors in execution. After five years, the names are permanently erased from any official record and the dead are freed not only from life but from official statistics.

I closed the booklet and felt a coldness settle into my bones, like hearing my own verdict read aloud. Somewhere between Newton’s equations and the causa causae, I stopped believing in coincidence. In this country, causes never vanish; they simply acquire new titles.

I thought of my father’s trembling hands, his pain that reached that sacred threshold the law now calls “uttermost suffering.”Had this law existed in 2012, would he have received palliative care, stronger pain relief or only the final drink? In his torment, I have no doubt he would have accepted the death offer if asked.Such questions no longer belong to reason, but to destiny.

And so I sit beneath the same sky under which Bianca leapt and Bella crashed, reading the fine print of civilization’s progress. Waiting for whatever comes next.

—5—

Epilogue: The Circle of Causes

In the years that followed, the city forgot my parents the way it forgets all its dead. The nursing home was repainted a paler shade of white, the hospital rebuilt a few departments, and the doctor who had refused analgesics received a certificate for “ethical excellence.” Only the old lilacs by the cemetery remembered my mother’s voice; each spring they bloomed with extravagant tenderness, as if expecting her return.

The law of uttermost pain appears in no constitution. It is older than mercy, older than civilization itself. It governs the transformation of compassion into paperwork. It moves through time like a phantom, wearing new words over ancient cruelties: choice, progress, reform.

Once, I wanted to believe that history was a scattering of random tragedies: my parents’ suffering, Bianca’s fall, Bella’s fiery descent: beads spilled from a broken string. Now I see the invisible thread that runs through them. The same hand that denied my father analgesics writes the laws promising “dignified death.” The same silence that condemned my mother now speaks with bureaucratic eloquence through pamphlets and referendums.

The cause of causes continues.