Viviane, the mother of Vincent Lambert, died this Monday, December 19, as indicated by BFMTV. For eleven years, her son was the subject of a legal battle between family members to keep him alive.
Viviane Lambert, a key figure in the end-of-life debate, died at the age of 77 on Monday, December 19, after several weeks of hospitalization. Information revealed by BFMTV. His name is not unknown to the French since his son has been the center of attention for many years. In 2008, Vincent Lambert is the victim of a road accident. In a vegetative state, he was the subject of a long legal battle between his wife, who demanded the cessation of his care, and his parents, Viviane and Pierre Lambert, very practicing Catholics. After eleven years of a long fight, Vincent Lambert dies nine days after stopping treatmenton July 11, 2019. It was a real relief for his wife Rachel as well as five of his siblings, who could no longer bear to see him in this situation. For their part, Anne, one of her sisters and David, one of her half-brothers, were also opposed to stopping treatment.
It was in 2013 that this case came to the fore. One of Vincent Lambert’s doctors had decided to stop treatmentbelieving that there was a “unreasonable stubbornness” from the parents of the victim. He wanted to apply the Leonetti law on the rights of the sick and at the end of life. However, Viviane and Pierre Lambert had reacted quickly since they had seized the judge of summary liberties, in the name of their son’s right to life. In January 2014, the court took up the case and suspended the doctor’s decision. It was then the beginning of a long legal battle. After having had to face many failures, Vincent Lambert’s parents turned to Europe in 2018, in vain. They had done appeal to international bodies but the Court of Cassation had finally overturned a decision of the Paris Court of Appeal in July 2019. A few days later, their son died after several years of remaining in a vegetative state. “We are deeply marked, I am in depression, our health has fallen very low“, had explained Viviane Lambert in the columns of France Info.
Viviane Lambert: “We killed my son”
For several years, Viviane Lambert did everything to keep her son alive, ensuring that he was still present but also with the hope that his condition would improve. Vincent Lambert died in July 2019, at the age of 42, after stopping diet and hydration. The following year, it was in the columns of France Info that Viviane Lambert had mentioned her fight. “They took away my son, they took him away! He was not at the end of his life! He wasn’t brain dead, my son!“, she had first said before adding: “No, I will never accept that my child was killed. Vincent was not at the end of his life”. What had particularly upset her? The fact that the decision was made without his consent. “Why did they decide to delete it? Even if there was no improvement, we don’t throw people away like a Kleenex!“, she had lamented. A mother who had a lot of trouble recovering from the death of her son.