The host lost her 17-year-old son Samy last February.
Television host Églantine Éméyé announced last February the death of her second autistic son with multiple disabilities, called Samy and aged 17. She returned this Wednesday to our antenna on the end of life of her child and on her mourning.
“He made a very particular disorder, a vascular disorder in the spinal cord”, she explains, “it has nothing to do with autism his death, I want to reassure the parents”, specifies t -she, adding that “it is not because one is autistic that one dies at 17”.
Founder of the association “A step towards life”which works for better support for autistic people in France, she explains that she is continuing this fight, “it is necessary for me, to also give meaning to all this”.
“He will never suffer once more”
She says she remembers “magnificent moments” with her son, “I knew him well enough to know the moments of happiness he might have, that I gave him, that others gave him”.
What she misses the most regarding Samy are “his way of expressing his happiness” and “his smell”, she says.
But she also underlines that, if she has always kept hope for better days for her son, “it was confirmed to me that in this state of disability, physically in any case, the body wears out, the body gets tired and this does not is not easy. I think a part of me clings to this idea that maybe he will never suffer once more”.
“There are solutions”
To families who have to take care of children with autism, “I want to tell them hang on, we will never let you down, we are many associations working, we continue the fight”, launches Églantine Emeye.
She calls on the State to create more places to accommodate these children with multiple disabilities, because with a disabled child “everything depends on you” as a parent.
“Autism is something that we have been slow to understand, there are as many autisms as autistic people, this makes the problem very complicated”, declares the host, “yet there are solutions but we don’t cannot today put them in place in a universal way”.
