What is it like to request the end of your own life? Beyond 93 Letters follows the heavy-hearted journey of Ting-ying, who, after earning her PhD, is diagnosed with a brain tumour. After four years of ineffective treatments and relentless pain, she ultimately sends a plea for help to Dignitas, the Swiss organisation that provides assisted dying.

Across 40 minutes, the film expands beyond the topic of euthanasia to explore its surrounding dimensions – family, intimate relationships, legislation, the medical environment, and the application process – all observed with nuance by directors Lin Yu-en and Liu Yen-mei.

Despite her full compliance with treatment and regular medication, Ting-ying could not fall asleep without pharmacological help. However, the same medication that kept her body at rest also condemned her to live with constant seizures, vomiting, and headaches. For nearly two years, Ting-ying continued writing to Dignitas, articulating her wish for an assisted death, often receiving discouraging replies and endless requests for evidence. She had to demonstrate that, even under heavy medication, her mind remained lucid and capable of making autonomous decisions. Each long-awaited reply extended her pain and despair a little further. And yet, she never yielded to self-pity nor anger. More than anyone, she longed to preserve her dignity. Illness, to her, was a fact to confront, not a defeat to endure; it never corroded her will.

Beyond herself, three of Ting-ying’s closest loved ones – her father, brother, and partner – each devoted their full strength to helping her fulfil her final wish, even when it meant a permanent farewell. It was a form of love grounded in mutual understanding – in respect.

We often assume that caring for a terminally ill patient inevitably drains the caregiver’s spirit, that even the closest of kin will eventually show fatigue or resentment. Yet none of them did. Her father was ready to sell the family property to settle the mounting medical debt and the cost of assisted death. Her brother resigned from his cherished railway job to care for her full-time, grinding pills, handling legal paperwork, and running between hospitals and notaries. Her boyfriend still drove to take her out on dates, remembering to fix her fringe before photos, to wear the patterns she liked, and to capture her from the angles she preferred.

Their love was never hollow. Out of respect, they learned to compress a lifetime of tenderness into borrowed time, offering her fragments of normalcy between the intervals of pain. They knew that the freedom she sought was not negotiable, and that love, in its truest form, sometimes means letting go.

Once again, the documentary sketches the portrait of a real family with disarming honesty, using unembellished images to show how love, when placed before the unyielding will to live, or to die with dignity, becomes something fragile and immense. It is not sentimental nor heroic, but simply human. Through Ting-ying and those around her, we see that love is not possession or persuasion, but respect, the courage to accompany someone to the very end.

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Written by Jane Wei

Featured image courtesy of Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival

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