I finally finished watching I’ve Loved You So Long, which I’d downloaded an entire vacation ago, and I feel I should write something down. This seemingly quiet, understated film deeply struck some of my most sensitive nerves. Its subject matter is very similar to I’m Not a Murderer, which I watched last semester — both can be considered moral meditations on euthanasia. What the characters do is, by moral standards, considered an unforgivably evil act of murder — something I once wanted to do but never dared. Perhaps that counts as one of the film’s effects on me, too.

In the film, the mother says her son’s whole body was wracked with pain and convulsions, until he suffocated. Watching her own son tormented by illness with no relief in sight — what must that mother’s state of mind have been? I can only partly understand it. I remember a friend once told me he had stood at the bedside of a relative who was critically ill. The patient’s body was full of tubes — inserted wherever there was already an opening, and where there wasn’t one, cut open by hand. Looking at his dim gray eyes and sallow, sickly face, my friend said he truly wanted to rip out all those beeping machines attached to him.

The hopeless outcome had already become clear by then. I honestly don’t understand — were people in that moment waiting for a miracle, or simply waiting a little longer before having to look death in the face? In that state, does a person still have consciousness? Probably not. Or maybe they do, only they can no longer express it in their own words (which would be the truest suffering of all). Something that happened afterward taught me that for a person to be conscious, to want to die, and yet be powerless to end their own life — that might be the most unbearable thing in the world.

Was it my friend’s story mixed in that struck a chord in me, or did the story itself resonate with me on its own? I don’t know. But the mother in the film, who “loved” her son so deeply, moved me. Her resolve was the same as Mizushima’s resolve in The Burmese Harp, when he parts ways with his fellow soldiers — both defend some unwavering core of humanity, heedless of others’ persuasion, obstruction, anything at all. Driven by the demand of atonement, Mizushima firmly gives up his chance to return home, and quietly departs with his harp. Driven by the demand of love, the mother firmly kills her son.

Will she repent? Maybe. But the judgment of the law, the demands of ethics — on this particular question, they absolutely have no business weighing in. Whether it is right or wrong to end a patient’s suffering through euthanasia is not something I dare comment on, nor something I’m entitled to comment on. You could say love clouded her judgment — but does she really need to atone for it? And if so, to whom? To the bewildered family members? Or to the child who was killed, yet also delivered? “Death has no excuse,” the mother says in the film. But to my mind, the iron bars erected by this so-called civilized society aren’t fit to hold this kind of “criminal.”

There’s a moment in the film worth mentioning. The protagonist’s sister discovers the medical report on her nephew’s condition from fifteen years ago, and asks her doctor friend to look into the details. When that doctor makes the phone call, we never hear what’s said on the other end — but the sister’s tears, which she cannot hold back, tell us enough. Filling that “gap” is the voice of the sister’s daughter reading a fairy tale aloud… The truth lies hidden beneath an innocent, pure reason: love.

Some people kill with their own hands, and yet are not murderers. The truly tragic ones, though, are those who never lay a hand on anyone, yet kill countless people all the same.