How Do You Argue with a Dying Man?

By Iván L. Nagy

It’s mid-day inside the Dániel Karsai Law Firm in Budapest, an old inner-city apartment turned office space with high ceilings, and windows facing a quiet cobblestone street. Clerks and interns work away at their desks while Dániel takes a call and starts pacing around in his room.

With each minute on the line, his excitement grows. The knocking of his shoes on the wooden floors is audible across the office even though he’s behind closed doors. 

Then, Dániel hangs up and walks out to his colleagues. Everyone looks up from their screens.

“Guys, we’re going to Strasbourg,” he says proudly.

There are only a few sentences that give goosebumps to human rights lawyers — this is one of them. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France is Europe’s highest court for civil injustices, where states are held to account for their abuses of power.

Dániel knows this well: even though he’s only in his forties, this will already be his third time before the court. Hungary, his home country, has only been to Strasbourg a few times, and he led a third of those efforts. It would be any lawyer’s dream to do it just once.

So for the clerks and interns in his firm, this is a life-changing opportunity. The case is about a public blacklist of tax evaders, one that names the home addresses of citizens, even if they have paid their dues.

But Dániel can’t be bothered with the fine print. He’s a high-flyer. He’s the face of civil rights in his country. He passes on the thankless task of writing the application to his colleagues, and gets to work on what he views as the most important part. 

He starts writing his speech.

He’s a performer, and the court is his theatre. As the hearing date nears, he begins practicing in the office each day. With elaborate hand gestures and a playful tone, he makes a strong argument, but his talk is hurried and his Hungarian accent often makes it unintelligible. A friend steps in to help. He takes the speech and delivers it for him. It’s much better than any version he’s done so far. Humbled, he crawls back into the woodwork.

By the time Dániel and his team fly out to France — in November 2021 — Dániel is in high spirits; he cannot wait to return to the court, which is not only the venue of his greatest victories, but a place where he worked in the early 2000s for four years. He takes everyone to his favorite restaurant and holds one, final rehearsal. This time he oozes confidence, and it infects everyone around him.

The next morning, Dániel sits in the front row of the chamber, shaking his legs under the desk. As he stands up to hold his speech, his team holds their breath, but it seems like hearing someone outperform him did its job. He delivers a powerful plea, and outshines the government’s representatives in the Q&A session that follows.

Although the verdict will only come a year and a half later, his speech itself feels victorious enough to celebrate afterward. Everyone heads to town to revel in it together. Everyone except Dániel.

Dániel, instead, disappears. He’s decided to meet his own friends in the city. He only returns to his colleagues late in the evening. And when he does, he sits down, and starts talking about his case. His speech. As it turned out, his victory.

His arrogance sucks the joy from everyone. They’re disappointed — but not surprised. 

After all, this is Dániel Karsai: not only one of the most talented lawyers of his generation, but at 6 foot 2, with broad shoulders, big, blue eyes and a meticulously curated wardrobe, he’s a standalone figure. He owns any room he walks in. He’s got a beautiful mind and his words draw everyone’s attention. But a presence like that tends to draw admiration and contempt in equal measure. 

Two years later, on a cold and damp Tuesday morning in November of 2023, Dániel Karsai enters the grand hall of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for the last time. This time, it’s different. It’s personal.

He looks around with a curious smirk as he slowly descends on a mobility lift into the bright, imposing room, with white panels towering above the floor, and the judges' seats forming a giant horseshoe at its furthest end. The chamber is filled to the brim with spectators and journalists. All eyes and cameras are on him as his wheelchair is pushed to the very first row.

He is wearing a powder blue shirt that is too large and beige trousers that are too loose; a vastly different sight from the well-tailored suit that he would usually put on here. His hands are covered in lime green medical tape to help his circulation, but his fingers are still clawed and clumsy as he scrolls through the speech on his iPad.

The title of his final case reads his own name: Dániel Karsai v. Hungary.

He is asking for the right to die.

He was eager to return, but he’s been miserable since he arrived three days ago from Budapest. This man — in a wheelchair with crooked limbs and slurred speech — is nothing like the athlete with a voice of thunder who last walked the streets of this picturesque Alsatian town.

Meeting his old colleagues fills him with agony rather than joy. Even going to the local soccer team's game can not lift his spirits. He cancels dinner at his favorite restaurant and decides to stay in ahead of his big day in court.

But when Dániel enters the courtroom, he’s happy to feel his confidence return. He came to win his final battle in front of the judges. With his brown belt in Japanese ju-jitsu by his side as a lucky charm, he leans into the microphone. Despite his shaky tone and thick accent, his words echo clearly through the chamber.

“Yesterday, I had a dream. I dreamt that I was celebrating my 80th birthday. All my family and friends came to my place. We watched a soccer game and had some wine. We discussed politics, soccer, and other things in life. After this heartwarming evening, I went to bed late at night. During my sleep, I passed away peacefully with a smile on my face. Then I woke up and faced my new, harsh reality. I am only 46 years old, and I have ALS.”

Dániel Karsai becomes a national hero in Hungary during the year following his speech: a champion of freedom and bravery, who uses his remaining time alive to fight for the right to die.

In the process, he unites a broken society.

But inside the Dániel whose spirit took Hungary by storm, there is Dani, as only his closest friends and family know him — a stark contrast with the public figure.

Dani is rude, hardheaded and out-of-touch. He only becomes the man he wants to be when he finds out that it’s too late. When he finds out he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the same terminal motor neuron disease that Stephen Hawking and Lou Gehrig suffered from.

Before the summer of 2022, before he is diagnosed with a disease that invades and cripples his body, Dániel Karsai is Hungary’s top constitutional lawyer.

Intellectuals like him — lawyers, scientists, civil rights activists and journalists — have been fighting an uphill battle for 15 years against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán derailed the Westernization of the former Eastern bloc country and performed an authoritarian state capture, one that continues to inspire right-wing politicians across the world. 

In this climate, Dániel’s efforts do not go unnoticed. Like anyone else who dares to challenge the system, he finds himself labelled by the regime as a “foreign agent” of Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros. He’s made the subject of an array of smear articles by the government’s mouthpieces.

But even in this public sphere divided by political polarization, Dániel is regarded highly. Beyond his illustrious resumé, he is a face on TV, known for his unquestionable expertise and no-nonsense attitude.

As far as success goes in Hungary, he ticks most boxes.

He is passionate about fighting injustice, but he finds the greatest joy in playing sports and breaking records in his free time. He travels the world climbing mountains, visits Nepal four times, and reaches as high as the base camp of Mount Everest. He completes the National Blue Trail, a 750-mile-long hiking route across Hungary — twice. He takes up Japanese ju-jitsu as an adult and earns a brown belt, the second-highest level achievable as a martial artist. More importantly, he is fanatical about soccer, often rescheduling work meetings to catch every second of his favorite teams’ games: London-based Fulham FC and Vasas, his boyhood club in Budapest.

Work attire and expensive watches fit just as snugly as hiking gear, soccer jerseys, and kimonos on his tall frame. His bright, blue eyes give him a gaze filled with charm and intellect. He is idolized by his peers and adored by women.

There seems to be no external force formidable enough to bring down Daniel. The enemy, it turns out, is within. 

ALS has no known cure. It consumes the body while leaving the mind intact, trapping the soul in a prison with the walls getting closer every day. It’s a terminal disease, causing motor neurons to degenerate over time, leaving people unable to control their muscles, gradually taking away their ability to move, speak and, eventually, to breathe. From its onset, patients are given two to five years to live.

The final, harrowing phase of the illness is spent in a vegetative state, unable to communicate with the outside world, despite being at full cognitive capability.

The cruelty of illnesses like ALS have pushed slivers of society to embrace a form of euthanasia known as physician-assisted death, when a trained medical professional helps terminal patients who decide to end their lives in their full conscience, pass painlessly.

Places that have opted to legalize it — states like Oregon, Washington or countries like Switzerland and the Netherlands — argue that it is part of a patient’s autonomy to decide when and how they want to die.

Hungary, however, remains in the majority — one of many places rejecting the idea based on religion, medical ethics such as the Hippocratic Oath, and the potential for abuse and coercion.

For Hungarians, travelling to a country where physician-assisted dying is available is also not an option, and not just because it costs tens of thousands of dollars, a sum most Hungarians would struggle to raise. Crucially, those helping the patient to die abroad face criminal prosecution and up to five years in prison in Hungary.

Patients with incurable diseases can only follow a tedious procedure to opt out of life-sustaining treatment or choose to receive palliative sedation in their final hours to reduce their awareness of unbearable pain. But those facing the irreversible decline of their health without requiring life support, like ALS patients, have no choice but to wait.

In legal terms, Dániel’s diagnosis is a death sentence set at an undetermined but foreseeable date.

Fortunately, he speaks the language of the law fluently.

He assembles a team of human and patients’ rights lawyers in Budapest and takes the case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Although Dániel is unsure whether he would push the red button if given the opportunity, he argues that Hungarian laws, which derive from the “sanctity of human life,” violate his right to self-determination, the prohibition of inhuman treatment, and the freedom of choice of worldview.

The court approves his urgent application, setting a hearing two months out.

On September 27, 2023, a day after receiving the court notice, he turns to the public on Facebook, the de facto digital public sphere of Hungary.

The first line of his post reads: “My name is Dániel András Karsai, and I am a 46-year-old constitutional lawyer. Also: terminally ill.”

Other than letting people know about his condition and announcing that he is taking the state to court, he has another, ambitious idea. He hopes that his case will initiate a public debate about, as he puts it, “the tough, and understandably, controversial question of end-of-life decisions.”

He ends his message with a promise: “For this dialogue, I remain available for everyone.”

He doesn’t have high expectations, though. While he is sort of known by Budapest intellectuals, he is by no means a celebrity across the country, nor someone who boasts a huge social media following.

Plus, the public has many other things to worry about.

Hungarian society seems perpetually polarized. A decade and a half of disruptive politics and exclusionary communication put a wedge between people based on their worldview and killed social debate, a dynamic that also boiled down to everyday life. Suspicion and ignorance has come to define a once open and welcoming country.

Dániel could not fathom that his Facebook post — which he titles “Post Mortem” as a pun, and ends with a quote from the Roman philosopher Seneca about purposeless suffering —  would break through the noise.

But in a single day, it reaches a million people, one in 10 Hungarians — and he keeps his word of talking to everyone.

The media attention gets so intense that he immediately hires a press manager. He allows dozens of journalists into his home, appears on television talk shows, and debates with spiritual leaders.

In great detail, he explains how receiving a terminal diagnosis feels, talks about the undignified reality of requiring assistance in the simplest tasks like eating or going to the toilet, and lays out his argument for legalizing assisted suicide. 

When asked what motivates him, he plainly says: “For now, I have no time to die. I have plenty to do while living.”

He is deliberately seeking a dramatic effect. He shares a video that switches back and forth between two clips, recorded exactly two years apart: performing exercises and submissions for his ju-jitsu brown belt exam in 2021, and him in the present day, taking three minutes to get up standing during a physiotherapy session.

“Viewer discretion is advised, I should say, but I won’t. We all have to face our destiny at some point — hopefully, most of us not in the way that I had to,” he writes in the caption.

Dániel’s plan works. Every public appearance and post on Facebook sends shockwaves through society. The right to die becomes a question of national interest. From Left to Right, urban to rural, people start discussing an issue that had never been raised before.

The tone of the discourse is even more striking. Dániel’s fight reintroduces cultured debate into a society that has long forgotten how to disagree respectfully.

Those in support realize how medical dilemmas and religious beliefs complicate the question. Those in opposition understand the reality of suffering and the desire to escape it. Newspapers open their opinion pages to public intellectuals to further the debate, and even pro-government outlets take a peaceful approach, as if they never portrayed Dániel as treasonous.

As a more traditional, Eastern European society, Hungarians are not used to talking about death. Dániel breaks this taboo, and his raw, unfiltered approach fuels support for his cause.

But for many, what he is doing is also an act of defiance, taking an ignorant regime to a place where they have no choice but to engage: a court. His fight inspires everyone who feels helpless against oppression. Just as the Orbán government benefits from polarization, it becomes less powerful when its people start talking.

When asked at a press conference about Dániel’s case, Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office Gergely Gulyás, who carries out communication duties on behalf of Viktor Orbán, is caught off guard, saying that they wish him a speedy recovery. When pressed with the fact that Dániel’s disease is terminal, Gulyás adds, “Let’s hope for a miracle.”

In December 2023, opposition party Momentum invites Dániel to a plenary session at the Hungarian Parliament. As he sits in the gallery wearing a Fulham FC-themed ugly Christmas sweater, he listens to Momentum announcing a draft resolution for physician-assisted dying and calling the members of parliament to discuss the question with Dániel. While the draft itself is hardly going to make a difference, given that Viktor Orbán’s party, Fidesz, holds a two-thirds majority and only they can pass legislation, the governing party is still unprepared for Dániel’s appearance. Following the session, Dániel sits at the exit of the chamber. Every single one of Fidesz’s 135 representatives walk past him without saying a word.

Similarly, Orbán himself gives a reserved response to a question about Dániel. “We are with him, we sympathize with him, we are wishing him great strength, and we will pray for him if he does not mind,” he says at a press conference.

However, Orbán emphasizes that the government is “not looking at a social cause, but the fate of one human being.”

At the same time, the public clearly sees the bigger issue. According to a poll published after Dániel steps out to the public, four out of five Hungarians are in favor of legalizing some form of assisted death.

Seeing the nationwide support behind him convinces Dániel that he is on the right track.

Having inspired other ALS patients to come forward and tell their stories alongside him, he doubles down on his quest for the right to die. He files a referendum initiative, asking the public whether those who help terminally ill patients take their own lives should continue to face criminal prosecution.

Both the ECHR’s verdict and the National Election Committee’s decision on whether to validate the referendum are tales of a distant future, one that Dániel might not even live to see. But with time ticking away, he cannot be complacent. He wants to build a lasting legacy — and leave a better Hungary behind.

As an enthusiast of theatre, he starts writing a script for a play, featuring episodes of his battle with ALS. He also allows a documentary team to capture his most intimate and vulnerable moments to serve as a gift for the future.

He uses his newfound social media following to help the vulnerable, asking people to support a charity for severely disabled children to pay their bills over the winter. In a few weeks, the public helps the care home survive going into the new year.

By the end of 2023, Dániel is celebrated as a national hero.

He wins the Person of the Year award from multiple news outlets, beating the likes of Katalin Karikó, the first Hungarian female Nobel Prize winner, in the popular votes.

He is proud to be recognized. “I never denied that I was the best student of Al Pacino — my favorite sin is also vanity,” he says jokingly in a video message, accepting one of the honors. But then he explains why it matters so much to him.

“As a society, we try to reward those who had a lasting impact. I am not there yet — not sure if I ever will be. But I am proud of the social debate that has begun, and even prouder of its respectful nature. If there is one thing I hope to have a lasting impact other than the right to make end-of-life decisions, it is this: being able to discuss our common interests, however controversial they might be, while respecting those with different opinions.”

But by 2024, Dániel is running out of time. His health begins to deteriorate at a faster pace. The country first saw him standing by a rollator, then sitting in a wheelchair, but by the new year, he is practically bedridden, requiring 24/7 care. He is admitted to the hospital with an infection, spends days having a stomach tube fitted, and nearly loses his life to pneumonia, all within the first few months of the year. With each complication, his speech becomes less intelligible, and if journalists visit him on a bad day, his interviews only consist of a few yes/no questions.

At the same time, Hungarian politics enters its most turbulent year since Viktor Orbán’s second rise to power in 2010. Scandals decimate the ranks of Fidesz and mobilize disenchanted voters behind regime-elite-member-turned-opposition-leader, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party in June’s municipal and European Parliament elections. The run-up to the vote turns particularly gruesome, filled with tabloid-style smear campaigns and inflammatory language. While Dániel celebrates the awakening political spirit against a regime he too openly condemns, the respectful tone of affairs dissipates at a snap of a finger.

Still, he refuses to give up on public debate. He secures a meeting with President Katalin Novák. They have a fruitful discussion about the possibility of using the presidential pardon to acquit those helping a terminally ill person pass away — a week before Novák resigns from the presidency for a controversial pardon she had given in the past to a convicted pedophile accomplice. Dániel also meets her successor, President Tamás Sulyok, as well as aforementioned politicians Gergely Gulyás and Péter Magyar.

As Dániel’s world closes in, he keeps a window on it open. He launches a TikTok channel and shares more details of his everyday life, like a video of him titled “Feast,” published not long after he barely survived pneumonia. The clip shows him being fed through his stomach tube, sarcastically noting that it is “a heavenly meal” afterwards. It reaches more than a million people.

But the most intimate account of his battle plays out in the most public of settings. With the help of two playwrights, Dániel finishes his autobiographical theatre piece by April 2024.

“I’ve always wanted to create a theatrical play because it’s a beautiful, creative exercise,” he says. “But I’ve never had the drama for it. Now I do. I’m mining the raw materials, they are crafting the final product. If I never get to see the play, so be it.”

A Perfect Day — About Life, Death, and Other Demons premieres in a cozy theatre in downtown Budapest in June 2024, with Dániel in attendance.

The play is a journey through time and through Daniel’s mind.

It depicts ALS as a tiny, old woman, crawling on the back of a rugged young man, always holding back his arms and legs slightly more, and eventually giving him a kiss of death. From the first symptoms to his diagnosis, spiritual moments in the Himalayas alone to ecstatic games of Fulham FC with his friends, it shows intimate episodes of Dániel’s life from his own perspective.

He sits through the show with a smile, laughing at the jokes he wrote and contemplating the out-of-body experience of seeing himself on stage. The play ends with a standing ovation coming from the crowd and the actors, pointing at Dániel, who is fighting his tears as he sits in his wheelchair in the audience.

This was supposed to be a story about the final chapter of Dániel’s life. In the little time, presumably, months, that he had left, I was curious to hear about the meaning he found in life, and the future he saw for Hungary.

By the time I reach out to him in the fall of 2024, he is rapidly losing his ability to speak, so we agree that I would visit him as soon as possible. I work out the details with his brother, Péter, and I book a flight to Budapest.

“Looking forward to having you around in October,” Dániel writes in an email, but we never get to meet.

He dies on September 28, 2024, aged 47.

Four days after Dániel’s death, my phone rings in the early hours in New York. Péter is calling, with unexpected enthusiasm in his voice.

“I hope you did not cancel your flight,” he says. “Dani said, ‘Let’s do this.’ Who are we to say no?”

The country is still in grief. Public figures and private individuals alike are saying goodbye to Dániel across social media. TV channels are airing montages of his battle and editorials are paying respect to his legacy. All members of parliament join for a minute of silence for him, Fidesz and opposition alike. Vasas fans hold a memorial ahead of their next home game, and players come out wearing black armbands to remember the man the team calls “one of their greatest fans ever.”

My plane lands in Budapest on October 16. The next morning, Péter and I meet in person for the first time, in Vasas’s stadium. It is not a game day, but the staff let us take a seat in the shiny VIP area, right where he and his brother used to watch the games every other week.

Péter is both perfectly like and unlike Dániel. On the outside, they share a striking resemblance: three years younger, he has the same blue eyes and curious gaze, and his strong, sturdy build is also recognizable in any room, although there is a different aura around him. A family man with 8 and 11-year-old sons, Péter is calm and collected, unlike the force of nature that his brother was.

They also share a specific, Eastern European sense of humor that is so common for Budapest intellectuals, a kind of cheeky cynicism towards life and a crude sense of reality that allows them to look hardships straight in the eye and laugh at them.

So, it is by no means an out-of-character thing for him to start our first conversation by saying: “Please put this on record — Dani was insufferable.”

The image of a hero I hold in my head shatters. It turns out that Dani, and especially Dani before his illness, was nothing like Dániel as the country knew him.

“His mind was a battlefield,” Péter continues. “He was always tearing himself apart. Whether about mountains to climb or legal cases to win, it was a non-stop struggle. And this made him unavailable to others.”

Ever since his teenage years, Dani had always been the odd one out. He struggled to connect with others on an emotional level. Fully indulged in his personal ambitions, his relationships were generally shallow. Apart from Péter, with whom he always shared a tight bond, and a couple of long-time friends, he did not allow anyone to get close to him.

Péter believes that it was due to his intellect. “He was a borderline genius,” he says.

Dani was an extraordinarily fast thinker and a great synthesizer of information, skills that made him outstanding in his profession. He had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and he found pleasure in abstract ideas. He was an avid reader who thoroughly enjoyed classical literature and philosophy.

“But that’s the thing with geniuses,” says Péter. “They have so much on their mind that it makes their head explode. The idea of not fulfilling their potential drives them crazy. What it translates to is having a beautiful mind, and an uncontrollable soul.”

Indeed, one of the main characteristics of Dani was his hurried speech. He was always playing catch-up with his thoughts: if an idea popped into his head, it was impossible to stop him. His court hearings would often turn comedic, as he tried to spit out every argument he had in mind, basking in the audience’s attention and entertaining them (in truth, mainly just himself) with jokes and witty sidebars. He once gave an interview in Hungarian so rambling that editors had to put subtitles on the screen, in Hungarian, to make it comprehensible.

He was stubborn and short-tempered, lacking the patience and respectfulness he would later teach the country lessons about. He always had strong convictions and the arguments to back them up. To him, all disagreements were personal. Raising his voice and putting a sharp end to a polite discussion was a recurring phenomenon.

“He wasn’t just a little careless — he had zero empathy towards others,” says Péter.

That did not mean that Dani was a bad person. He cared deeply about the people around him in peculiar ways.

He was a generous gift-giver. He was fond of shared experiences, taking his friend group to see theatre plays every month. Every once in a while, he would call Péter saying: “Pack your bags, I’ve just booked flights for tomorrow. We’re going to London to see Fulham play.” When going on treacherous trips in the Himalayas, he would only tell stories about the dangers he faced in hindsight, despite being fully aware of them in advance, to make sure his friends and family did not worry about him.

But for most people, Dani refused to open up, and his demeanor was easy to find unpleasant.

He lived for the finer things in life. He loved expensive watches but barely knew anything about them. He had a taste for whisky, a habit he only picked up when he found a posh liquor store around the corner of his office.

He was vain and snobbish. When he was negotiating with a big client for his law firm, he immediately started dreaming about the nice suits he would buy, and how they would make women fall head over heels for him. When he was regularly invited to TV shows, his colleagues were convinced that he enjoyed being a talking head more than being a lawyer.

His shallowness revealed itself most prominently in his romantic relationships. He loved women’s attention, of which he would get plenty. As a handsome, athletic man with his own successful law firm, he was the whole deal. His female clients would often be nervously giggling around him. Some even asked him out.

He had a long history of short-term girlfriends, but Péter believes that his brother didn’t enjoy being a womanizer.

“He simply couldn’t convey his emotions,” he says. “Even if something beautiful was in the making, he could never be as ecstatic as the other half expected him to be. He would break up with everyone in a couple months, just before things could turn serious.”

Dani’s private life was a paradox. He wanted to be loved and cared for. He wished for true connections in both friendships and relationships, but he could not open the door for either of them. He did not have children and always had ambivalent emotions towards building a family.

Instead, he buried himself in his work at the Dániel Karsai Law Firm.

Dani started the company in his thirties, and within a decade, it grew into a full-scale operation with clerks, interns, and assistants turning the gears in the machine spearheaded by him.

The office was known for a great sense of community and a light atmosphere, partly because of Dani’s eccentric nature. He was constantly shouting from one room to the other, cracking horrible puns, and discussing soccer games with anyone who was too slow to escape the situation.

The Dániel Karsai Law Firm remained a busy legal hub throughout Dani’s illness, led by his former partner at the firm, Evelyn Frank.

Evelyn now sits at Dani’s desk in his room; a spacious, wooden-floored space with shiny IKEA furniture and a tiny balcony in the back corner of the office, from where his soul seemingly never left. Framed pictures and a plethora of memorabilia keep his presence felt, and the name of the firm continues to pay tribute to him.

Evelyn is a professional. She has a firm handshake, wears a sleek, black top and smart glasses. She speaks in full sentences and recalls stories to the minute details while still maintaining a respectful distance. Talking about Dani, she gets emotional, but always pulls it together before she tears up. While Dani was considered young to be leading a law firm, Evelyn inherited this role even sooner, years before entering her thirties.

Dani, the son of a famous historian, came from a vastly different background from Evelyn, but their shared ambition made them a perfect team.

She grew up in a working-class family in a tiny village in rural Hungary. She wanted to become a lawyer, but even making it to Budapest felt out of reach. While she was in her senior year in high school, her parents worked at a hotel in Austria to be able to finance her education.

Evelyn got into the best law school in Hungary, graduating with high marks and landing a job at a government ministry, which she could only stomach for two weeks. The day after she quit, a friend of hers also left her job — at the Dániel Karsai Law Firm. As they were speaking on the phone, the friend passed the line.

“I heard you left your job. Would you like to work for me as a clerk?” said Dani in his trademark, straightforward manner. In a few weeks, Evelyn became his colleague. In a few months, she became his friend. In a few years, she became one of the few people to whom he actually listened.

They shared an honest and fully platonic relationship. Evelyn saw through the walls Dani built around himself.

“He was crude but never rude,” she says. “Deep down, he was a kid, longing for love. He just didn’t have the devices to build these connections.”

Dani was content with the life he had, but by the time he turned 44, he realized that something was missing. Some of his friends suppose that the spiritual experiences he shares on his trips to Nepal motivate him to change, maybe it is his love of symbolism, and the age of 44 seems like a perfect milestone, perhaps the decades of nudging by his loved ones finally reach a breaking point.

Either way, he finally understands that he needs to go beyond the surface level.

In 2021, Dani hires a coach to help him work on his personality, who immediately figures out his shortcomings. Thus begins a period of self-reflection, marking a new chapter in his life, in which he finally finds peace with himself and opens up to the world.

He only finds out later that around the same time, another journey has begun for him: the one with ALS.

It is July 2021. Dani is reading in the shade of a walnut tree when he feels an inexplicably sharp pain striking through his head. It is a momentary, numbing sensation, like when you hit the nerve in your elbow and it sends a shiver down your spine.

He has never felt anything like it before, but he is not too concerned. After all, it is a hot, summer afternoon, a slow-paced Saturday in a village just north of Lake Balaton, the riviera of landlocked Hungary. He is spending the weekend with Péter and his family in their vacation house, a place where he goes when he needs a break from noisy Budapest.

After that day, Dani’s body starts sending him signals that something is wrong. At first, these are minor incidents, like unexpectedly dropping a spoon at lunch. Later, a pain in his elbow becomes a running gag between him and his friends, joking about how it might be a side-effect of Dani breaking too many wooden boards with his arms in ju-jitsu classes. Another day, he tells Evelyn with a defeated look that he could only do 15 push-ups in one go, instead of his usual 50.

For months, these tiny signs do not add up to anything greater, and Dani has no reason to worry. Despite the quietly developing symptoms of early-stage ALS, he still manages to pass his brown belt exam in ju-jitsu.

But even more importantly, he is becoming his best self, enjoying life to an extent he never knew. He finally understands his weaknesses and follows his coach’s guidance to overcome the greatest obstacle he has ever faced: himself.

It is like a late, but rapid, coming-of-age story. The Dani who avoided eye contact, talked when he should have listened, and downplayed other people’s emotional issues by saying “get over it,” is becoming a thing of the past.

These changes even earn him a coveted reward.

It is the end of a workday at the law firm in January 2022. Other than Dani, only Evelyn and Erik, one of Dani’s youngest friends and colleagues, a 24-year-old intern with whom he shares an older/younger brother dynamic, are still hovering around.

Dani closes his laptop, leaves his room and sits down on a stool in the corner of the office with a cheeky smile — an unmistakable sign that he has news to share.

With the enthusiasm of a teenager after his first kiss, Dani tells them that he has a girlfriend and that he is in love.

While they are usually kept up-to-date on Dani’s personal life, neither Evelyn nor Erik has ever seen him like this, unable to wipe the smile off his face, showing pictures and telling stories about his girlfriend. The man who would struggle to comprehend the value of a relationship is sitting there like any other person who has ever fallen for someone.

In fact, Dani wonders if having a family might not be such a bad idea. But ALS is not waiting for such miracles to unfold.

By the summer of 2022, Dani’s suspicion about his health continues to grow. Although he still completes a ju-jitsu training camp, his hands are getting shaky, and his walk loses its forceful nature.

His friends and family are getting nervous, too. The office is preparing for “the worst,” which is what they think a Parkinson’s diagnosis would be.

Dani embarks on a hiking journey to Norway, a frosty escape from the heatwave in Budapest, but his trip comes to an abrupt end. A couple of years before, his body could easily tackle freezing temperatures and hazardous mountain peaks, but this time, his hands are failing to hold him, and the cold is shutting his body off.

He immediately travels back to Hungary. He tells his girlfriend that he has a conference to attend in the countryside, but in reality, he goes for a multiple-day screening with his brother, Péter, alongside him.

At the end of the examinations, his neurologist and a resident enter the room where the brothers are waiting, making plans to stop for lunch and a quick dip at Lake Balaton on their way back to Budapest. They are in a cheerful mood. When the doctor begins the summary of the test results, Dani continuously interrupts him with puns and cynical jokes.

“Can you explain it to me in Hungarian?” says Dani sarcastically after the doctor finishes his assessment in medical jargon.

“You’re a healthy young man,” says the doctor.

Dani sighs with relief. His mind is already getting ready for a swim and some fried fish. But the neurologist continues.

“…hence I was reluctant to trust my hypothesis. But given your results and the progression of your symptoms, we might just be looking at ALS.”

The words hit like a thud. Dani isn’t even sure he heard them correctly. The doctor continues.

He plainly explains how the illness is going to progress, and that Dani has two to five years to live from its onset.

Medical science knows surprisingly little about ALS, including uncertainty about what causes it. There are many theories: Dani’s neurologist suggests that a sudden electric discharge in the brain could have triggered the disease.

Dani remembers that fateful afternoon under the walnut tree and does the math. 

At worst, he has a year left. At best, he won’t even make it to 50. 

“The fish is shit, huh?” says Dani, looking at Péter across the table with a blank stare.

Having an appetite, let alone a good mood, is a tall order an hour after receiving a terminal diagnosis.

It isn’t much easier for Péter either. He tries to reason with his brother.

“Let’s look into it,” he says. “It cannot be this simple; there must be a solution. Let’s just go home, get some sleep, then we’ll sit down and talk about it.”

For months, they are stuck in the same mindset as they were at that lakeside lunch. Péter, in denial. Dani, spiraling into depression.

Dani and his girlfriend celebrate their first anniversary the day after the diagnosis. He kept her in the dark about the screenings, so he intends to steer clear of talking about the diagnosis, at least for that one evening.

But no matter how beautiful she looks in the dress he bought her, no matter how appetizing the tiny bites and the foreign wine look, the reality of his death sentence looms over the table.

He is nervous, and the more stressed he grows, the clumsier his hands become. He spills the wine on himself. He playfully asks her to feed him bites of his food, and she plays along.

“What would you do if I could not move anymore?” he asks, with fear slowly replacing joy in his voice.

“I would make the most of that opportunity,” she says with a suggestive smile.

“That will soon be the case,” Dani responds coldly. “Not tomorrow, not the day after, but soon enough.”

She realizes that the role-playing game was never a game. In a distant tone, Dani breaks the news to her. Day by day, he repeats the same sentences to everyone else around him: “I have ALS. I am going to die.”

Looking in the mirror, Dani is still a healthy young man, just like the doctor said. But each time he watches the shock on his loved ones’ faces, the more his new reality settles in.

He starts paying attention to the small details that he had ignored for a long time, and his frustration grows exponentially. One night, he cannot unbutton his shirt with his crooked fingers, so he cuts off the buttons with a knife, one by one. On many nights, he and his girlfriend try to have sex, only to find ALS, like a chaperone, pulling them apart.

Facing his own death, he feels helpless. He holds it together for a while, but then everything that was once important in his life becomes marginalized.

Dani spends the months following the diagnosis not leaving his apartment, abandoning his duties at the firm and taking out his frustration on his girlfriend, who tries to navigate the fine line between love and pity for a dying man.

In the meantime, Péter cannot accept that his brother is terminally ill. He is convinced that there is a way to fight it — perhaps gene therapy or trial medicine. He searches every corner of the world for a glimpse of hope.

He, too, is left alone with his thoughts. He is on a 6-month work placement in Milan, Italy, from where he only travels home once every other weekend to see his wife, Kitti, and their children. They don’t know how to break the news to the kids that Uncle Dani, who always played soccer, taught them ju-jitsu moves, and read books to them, soon won’t be able to do any of those things.

At the end of 2022, three months after Dani’s diagnosis, it finally hits Péter. His last hope, a long thread of emails with the Mayo Clinic, ends with no answers.

It is around this time that Dani finds peace with his illness. He’s been seeking help and starts taking antidepressants. 

It is the winter solstice, December 21, 2022. He wakes up, and just like that, Dani is back. He is suddenly kind, witty and approachable again. He returns to the firm the next day, making sure not to miss the Christmas party. He makes a speech and gives each of his colleagues a silly book to read, like every year before.

However, by the time Dani is finally himself again mentally, he is a shadow of himself physically.

His colleagues have to help him more and more every day. Initially, they hold his hands while climbing the stairs. Then, they start taking a taxi home with him. Soon, they have to turn the keys in his front door and cut his food into bite-sized pieces.

Evelyn and Erik stay around in the office with Dani, with the two getting ready to help him get home safely. He stumbles out of his room, looking to sit down on the stool in the corner, eventually ending up collapsing onto it with little control over his legs. 

Sobbing, he tells the pair that he and his girlfriend broke up.

Not only did he lose the potential for the one thing he never had —  a long-term, loving relationship — he also knows that for a dying man like him, it is the last time he will feel love and attraction in its traditional sense.

“Who would want to date me now? Look at me. I’m a cripple!” he exclaims with tears rushing down his face. He cannot sugarcoat his anger. He misses physical touch. He’s losing his once irresistible looks.

Sex fades from Dani’s life. It’s a devastating blow for someone who has always been a bachelor, shamelessly enjoying life’s primal delights.

It is a taboo he is not afraid of breaking even in the public sphere. When a women’s magazine interviews him a year later, he says: “Women are still interested in me, but I only evoke their motherly instincts. I don’t blame them.” 

He continues: “Sure, there are times in life when you can’t share your bed with anyone. Then you can sort out your sexual tensions yourself.”

He then raises his clawed hands as high as he can, about an inch, and says: “For me, this was one of the most humiliating moments — realizing that I could not even help myself anymore.”

By 2023, Dani starts to focus on the journey ahead.

His worst-kept secret finally comes true: he is surrounded by so much love he can barely comprehend.

He becomes the focal point of a newfound family, comprising his brother, his uncles, his closest friends and colleagues, and even some people whom he vaguely knew in the past but trusted sharing his diagnosis with, only to find them showing up next to him as his condition turns serious.

“The Dirty Dozen,” as the group calls itself, race each other to help Dani in any way necessary. Moving into his new, accessible apartment, he is practically not alone for a minute.

They start a shared spreadsheet to track who is looking after Dani each day, and the spaces fill up weeks in advance. Some people start deleting others, just to spend more time with him. Dani finally realizes that even though he was emotionally unavailable in the past, people have always been there for him. Now he actually lets them be there.

With his mind intact and his physical abilities less necessary for his work, Dani continues to take cases as a lawyer. He only gradually passes the baton to Evelyn. He is reading and re-reading the heaviest philosophical literature, trying to understand life and debate its meaning with his friends. He buys gifts for everyone and plans out how he’ll give them.

Dani becomes an open-hearted listener. He never takes his eyes off people, gazing interrogatively at his friends with his big, blue eyes, which remain the same even as his face loses its tone.

There are no taboos with a dying man. Talking to him makes everyone else’s problems seem trivial.  Dani is there to help. He comforts them and moves them out of their comfort zone at the same time.

And Dani inspires his friends. He rarely cries or complains. He sees his new reality as a second life — a new experience to enjoy.

Soon, he receives an accolade he never thought he could get from his bed: a black belt from his ju-jitsu dojo.

“His willpower puts samurai to shame, whether he is fighting on a tatami, in front of Strasbourg judges, or for his fellow humans,” says his master.

If there is one person from the Dirty Dozen who gets to know Dani inside out in this period, it is Ákos, his caregiver.

While Dani’s friends are tirelessly helping him, everyone knows that as his condition worsens, he needs a trained professional to look after him.

“Mid-stage ALS patient looking for a caretaker. He is 46 years old and weighs 150 pounds. It’s imperative to be able to lift the patient and to tolerate horrible puns,” reads the want ad they post in early 2023.

Only one person applies. Ákos comes over to Dani’s apartment for an interview with him and Péter, only to be welcomed by an awkward silence.

It is a new situation for everyone involved. Ákos has only worked in care homes before, while Dani and Péter have little idea how to hire a carer for a dying man.

“I’ve never had to deal with ALS before,” says Ákos, breaking the ice.

“Me neither,” Dani replies, smugly.

Péter asks if Ákos could lift Dani. Ákos says he’d need to try. Dani says there is no way he’d let him try. Ákos is confused. Dani grows agitated. Péter tries to talk sense into him.

Eventually, Ákos cracks a pun to ease the tension. Dani breaks out laughing. Péter puts his face in his hands and murmurs: “Fuck it. You’re hired.”

At first glance, Ákos is a complete outlier from the whisky-sipping Budapest intellectuals Dani surrounded himself with. He comes from Siklós, a town of less than 10,000 people in the south of Hungary. He’s a tall man in his mid-20s with a fuzzy beard, a tender handshake and an even more gentle character. He speaks with a soft voice, but with a sharp tongue. He has an honest manner, a simple choice of words, and his occasional swear words are not so occasional. He is fascinated by Japanese culture and video games, he has a series of colorful tattoos, and he fosters a fond relationship with anything containing nicotine or caffeine, even by Eastern European standards.

He is often asked how he fits into this upper-class circle, a question he deems irrelevant. “I asked Dani what he did for work. He said he was a lawyer. And I was like, yeah, cool. That was all about it,” he explains.

Ákos, wearing his piercings and a graphic baseball hat, and Péter, in the semi-formal attire of a finance man, make for an odd sight together, but the moment they open their mouths, everything falls into place.

The way they interact with each other is like two perfectly written characters from a sitcom. They bounce off each other’s thoughts. Their humor is quick, dry, and cynical, not letting up for a second even when they are discussing the most painful details of Dani’s illness. When they talk about him, they do it with utmost love, and the looks in their eyes alone tell just how tight the three grew, and the two remain.

Such a bond does not form by chance, though. Although the sympathy is there from day one, it takes conscious effort for trust to develop. From the moment Ákos is onboard, Dani and Péter make sure that he is involved in their everyday lives.

They take Ákos on a trip to their vacation house. Dani barely needs any help at the time — technically, there is no need for a caregiver to be there. But they make him feel wanted. He goes shopping with Péter, they have a barbecue and a few drinks. Dani and Péter never tell him to do his own thing. Ákos feels like he is not there to work, but to belong.

He immediately becomes part of the group of friends too, not missing a single pint of beer that they share. He also meets Péter’s children, who are in complete awe of the young man who is willing to fool around and play video games with them.

In exchange, Ákos makes it very clear: he took this job to hold Dani’s hand until his last breath. It is a promise he ends up keeping, literally.

While Dani’s friends spend days at his apartment keeping him company, feeding him, flipping the pages of his books, and waking up a dozen times at night to help him turn in his bed, as his illness progresses to a later, bedridden stage, Ákos becomes virtually indispensable.

For the final year of his life, whenever Dani has to go somewhere, it is always Ákos who accompanies him. As his speech gets less comprehensible, Ákos becomes his interpreter, the one who understands his words better than anyone else. He is Dani’s window to the world.

Dani barely expresses his gratitude, but there is a moment that tells Ákos just how thankful he is. 

Péter and his wife, Kitti, take Dani out of town and ask Ákos to look after the kids, which he happily says yes to. Once they return, Dani asks him how it went. Ákos, with a smirk on his face, tells him that they ate junk food and played video games the whole time, to which Dani replies with a peaceful smile.

“Good. That’s what uncles are made for.”

Nevertheless, Péter insists on keeping a more nuanced memory of Dani’s battle with ALS.

“It all sounds beautiful, but Dani’s favorite pastime activity was screwing us over,” he says.

“We were forever faced with the question: how do you argue with a dying man?”

While Dani does become a much more agreeable person in the final years of his life, a part of him never stops being stubborn and egotistical.

“One of our main conflicts was that he often looked at Ákos as a plough-horse, as if the sole purpose of his life was being there for him,” tells Péter.

Despite practically adopting Ákos as his brother, Dani often conflates the roles. He knows that because of his condition and the special bond they share, Ákos would never say no to him, and he blatantly abuses this.

When Péter or a friend joins them in the flat, Dani tells the other person not to help him, because that’s what Ákos is there for. Ákos has practically no days off for a year and a half, because each time he leaves, the temporary carers do not show up, or Dani comes up with requests that only Ákos can fulfill.

Dani is even more demanding than he himself realizes. One day, Péter reluctantly tells Ákos that Dani thinks that, recently, his caregiver “hasn’t been active enough.” Ákos knows that Péter is only telling him what Dani had said, but he lashes out.

“For two weeks, I was with Dani, day and night,” he yells. “I massaged him, I fed him, I turned him in his bed, I changed his diapers, I did his physiotherapy, I spoke to his doctors, I did his shopping, I cleaned his apartment and I washed his clothes.”

He takes a breath and continues: “If I am being paid to provide care, I am only going to act as such.” For weeks, he refuses to do anything beyond his competence, and he doesn’t even talk to Dani until he apologizes.

But for Péter, Ákos, and everyone else around, the most challenging and ambivalent period begins once Dani decides to launch his legal case for the right to die.

What they thought would be the most spiritual and private months of their lives, watching their terminally ill friend desperately hold onto the remains of himself and grieving him each day, turns into a collective effort to make his final wish come true.

Dani first comes up with the idea of taking the state to Strasbourg on the night of his 46th birthday, on 28 March 2023 — although phrasing it this way is an understatement.

In classic Dani fashion, he has already decided to take Hungary to court, and luckily, all his friends, most of whom are his colleagues, support the idea.

So he assembles a team, taking his most trusted colleagues from the firm, like Evelyn and Erik, and reaching out to peers whom he trusts, like Péter Stánicz, a young constitutional lawyer with considerable experience in patients’ rights, who ends up leading the group.

When Péter Stánicz first hears Dani’s idea, he thinks that “there is like a 0.1 percent chance that it would make it to the Court, let alone winning.” But Dani doesn’t take no for an answer.

The two spend months arguing about the application. Dani leans towards a more poetic, justice-based argument, while Péter sticks to medical facts and statistics to back their claim that the state is discriminating against ALS patients. For his last dance in Strasbourg, Dani finally gives in, and follows Péter’s lead.

For Péter Stánicz and the rest of the legal team, the boundaries between the personal and the professional fade completely. They take the case pro bono, continuing to work with other clients while simultaneously preparing for the most meaningful hearing of their lives.

Naturally, their judgment, too, shifts. By the time they submit the application, Evelyn feels like it has no weaknesses, and even Péter Stánicz is convinced that they have a good chance of winning.

As the ECHR takes in the case, and Dani shares his ominous post on Facebook, he rises to national fame in the span of mere hours.

Erik visits him that afternoon. When he arrives, Dani is waiting for him with a huge smile on his face.

“It reached a million people. One in ten in Hungary,” he says with faux modesty, having followed the statistics of his status update throughout the day.

But no matter how the unexpected public attention tickles his ego, there’s a spillover effect: he inadvertently brings his loved ones to the spotlight too.

His brother, Péter, never makes a fuss about having journalists around the house because he understands how important it is for Dani. But their friends know that deep inside, he loathes the idea.

Ákos is even more suspicious, refusing to appear even on a B-roll, let alone talking to a reporter. But since both Dani and Péter mention him every time, he receives so many queries that their press officer practically begs him to participate. He reluctantly agrees, making Dani happy, and his family proud, who show his clips to everyone back home.

Seeing the impact of his story gives Dani’s final year a new purpose: not only to be a good person in private, but a role model in public — something his narcissistic self always dreamed of.

All the love and support from Dani’s friends and every bit of public attention culminate in the Strasbourg hearing.

Dani, Péter and Ákos travel to France three days before the trial, with the latter boarding his first-ever flight and leaving scars on Péter’s legs as he claws his fingers into him during take-off.

Having arrived, their excitement quickly turns into nervousness, as they watch Dani lose his confidence and fall into a depressive episode, reminiscing over the life he once lived there. They try everything to drag him out of the hole, but the soccer game between Strasbourg and Marseille ends in an eventless draw, and the tasteless jokes they would always crack to shake Dani up do not land either. With less than 24 hours to go, they run out of ideas. Dani seems to have folded under pressure.

In the meantime, the legal team is anxiously preparing for their toughest case ever, and their stress is only amplified by the cameras of the documentary team and the Hungarian TV channels that follow them.

Péter Stánicz is particularly restless. He shows up in leisure clothes to have a comfortable flight, only to be forced to give an interview before boarding, then have his time wasted by the filmmakers putting microphones on everyone as they are about to have a final meeting before the hearing.

Evelyn has no easier time. She is the only one who knows about Dani’s dark days, so she continuously has to make up excuses why he wouldn’t see his team until the morning they meet at the chamber.

But the stars align again. Dani wakes up on the right side of the bed, ready to win at the ECHR one last time.

He has been having lessons with a speech therapist every day, just to be able to nail his monologue.

He does it better than ever before.

Evelyn is in awe at seeing Dani in his full maturity. Two years ago, the first time she was on Dani’s team at the court, she sat in the very same seat, right next to him. Back then, she was handing him cue cards one by one, which Dani would theatrically perform in his old, eccentric manner.

This time, she is sitting next to a frail man, helping him scroll through his iPad, crossing her fingers under the desk for everything to go well. With ALS forcing him to speak more slowly and wisely, Dani gives the most powerful speech of his career.

After the hearing, they have long months to wait for the decision. They return to Hungary with high hopes, and Dani is emboldened to keep trying his limits. They soon submit their referendum initiative, then Dani devotes most of his time to writing his autobiographical theatre play.

In a year, his life takes a 180-degree turn. While he spent the final months of 2022 battling depression, at the end of 2023, he truly feels like the person of the year, even without the votes of the people.

However, this honeymoon phase is short-lived.

“There is a pipe coming out of the large intestine, with a cap on its end. You twist and open that first, then you insert the syringe with about two ounces of food inside. Before you inject it, there is a safety valve that you have to prop open. So you do that, then squeeze his lunch through. You then take a mortar and pestle to grind his medicine. You scoop that out with a spoon into a cup of water, ingest it into the syringe, then you go in again. Once that’s done, you follow it up with another tube of water, just to clean the pipe.”

Going into the new year, feeding his friend through a stomach tube becomes a daily routine for Erik. While for the majority of 2023, his tasks were usually as simple as helping Dani get to the toilet or sit up in his bed, his mentor is now helpless on his own.

To make matters worse, Dani’s inevitable physical decline is accelerated by a near-fatal accident.

Not long before Dani’s 47th birthday in March, Ákos is taking a day off, which means that a temporary carer is filling in for him.

Dani has a sore throat, to which the caregiver thinks giving a spoonful of honey would be a good idea, despite him not being able to swallow for months. It goes straight down his lungs, causing him acute pneumonia, and weeks spent in a hospital bed.

His friends show up in his ward one by one, convinced that it is the last time they will see him.

He makes it out. Soon, he even finishes writing the script for his theatre play. But it seems as if his ALS has skipped several stages forward. 

In the coming months, Dani’s health declines rapidly. He is losing every bit of his integrity and he can barely speak more than a few words anymore. Even worse, he is frequently having breathing attacks, something no one but Ákos is qualified to deal with. In case of an emergency, Dani’s friends would no longer be able to help him, and with paramedics usually taking half an hour to arrive, Dani could die on their watch on any given day. 

On September 27, 2024, a warm Friday night in the peak of Indian summer, the Dirty Dozen gathers in Becketts, one of the many Irish pubs in the heart of Budapest. A dimly lit bar with wood inlays, national flags and soccer jerseys on the walls, it looks like the usual refuge for expats and rowdy Brits on stag parties.

For the group, this place with soccer games on the TV screens, Guinness on tap, and whiskey on the shelves feels like home. Dani used to have a reserved seat and an open tab. When a soccer tournament was on, he would go there straight from the office every day, leaving a decent Hungarian salary’s worth in the till by the final match of the competition.

But this time, he’s not there, and his friends are preparing for an uncomfortable but long overdue conversation. Taking care of Dani and spending nights away from their families, praying that he would live to see the morning, had worn them out both mentally and physically. Some developed high blood pressure. Someone else went temporarily blind from the stress.

Sitting at their usual table, they are going around in a circle to hear how they are all doing. Initially, they are reluctant to speak their mind, but the half-hearted answers soon turn painfully honest. By the end of the night, they give themselves a two-week deadline to find 24-7 medical care for Dani.

It’s an effort in vain. The following day, exactly six months after his 47th birthday, Dani dies with Péter and Ákos by his side. 

His death is both inevitable and devastating. But it is not shocking. Everyone is prepared for it. Dani, and those around him. 

For a while, it seemed this unlucky and untimely end to his physical life, though, might be trumped by a legacy that would live on long after he did. The right for others to suffer less than he did. The right to die.

On June 13, 2024, a gloomy, humid day in Budapest, the Dirty Dozen nervously arrive at Dani’s apartment one by one.

It is the day of his final Strasbourg verdict. The National Election Committee has already rejected his referendum initiative, meaning that the European Court of Human Rights holds Dani’s fate in its hands. If they find Hungarian laws to be unjust and discriminatory, he will have a chance to end his own life before it is reduced to purposeless suffering. If they find no violation, he will have to wait patiently until ALS suffocates him.

The 200 days since the Strasbourg hearing come down to what stands at the end of a single PDF document. The room is divided. Someone puts a bottle of champagne in the fridge. Others don’t even want to be there. Péter Stánicz and Evelyn, who are best-versed with the case, feel optimistic, but also know that they lost their sense of objectivity over the past months.

Dani appears stoic, almost light-hearted. He is ready for both outcomes. He sits in his wheelchair in the middle of the room as his friends, family and colleagues gather around him with their eyes glued to the screen. The place feels crammed, as if the hundreds of thousands across the country who are also nervously waiting for the decision are sitting there with Dani.

Evelyn connects her laptop to the TV, opens the ECHR’s website, and sets up her browser to refresh every 30 seconds. For a painstakingly long time, it only leads to two disappointed sighs each minute. Then suddenly, the page changes, and the verdict appears.

She scrolls to the conclusion at the bottom. From a lengthy explanation, two words stand out.

No violation.

Dániel Karsai died many times. 

First, when he got his ALS diagnosis, said goodbye to his old life, forced to reinvent himself in light of his new outlook. 

Second, when he lost his fight in Strasbourg for the right to die on his own terms. Even though he worked tirelessly to challenge the decision at the court’s appeals body, his legal team knew that they stood no chance. They were right. 

He died for a third time when a breathing attack sent him to an intensive care unit and, having opted out of life-sustaining care, doctors shut off his life support. 

He never pushed a red button. His dream, as he put it in his speech in Strasbourg, to leave with his head held high and a smile on his face, never came true. That died, too.

But in a way that would matter most to him, he manages to live on. Dániel Karsai wanted to build a lasting legacy and leave a better country behind. He accomplished both.

The Dirty Dozen is tighter than ever before. Péter’s family practically adopted Ákos and their kids look at him as the uncle who fills in for Dani. Becketts remains the group’s go-to place to see each other and watch matches. Even those who had no interest in soccer now follow Fulham and Vasas religiously. They all grew prone to making horrible puns, having been exposed to Dani’s humor in unhealthy amounts.

The fight for the right to die also continues. In 2025, Péter is still keeping the issue on the public agenda, and the law firm has held multiple conferences to keep the debate alive and influence lawmakers and healthcare legislators to reconsider the issue.

Most importantly, Hungary is changing. Dani’s fight found a soft spot in society, and soon, politicians too figured out how to capture the attention of an apathetic nation. The Orbán-era might be coming to an end next year, and it’s not impossible to imagine that Dani’s cause, too, will be revisited.

Brought back to life, in the only way he could be.

Iván L. Nagy is a Hungarian political journalist and podcaster. He's a recent graduate of Columbia Journalism School's MA program, where he worked on his narrative storytelling, including his project on Dániel Karsai's life. Prior to moving to the U.S., he was the host of Hungary's #1 news podcast at HVG, one of the few remaining independent news outlets in the country. He is an author for Visegrad Insight, Central Europe's leading English-language policy analysis platform.