Awakened by Euthanasia?

There’s a disarming chill to seeing one portrait of the late Noelia Castillo that made the rounds once the 25-year-old gang assault victim and suicide attempter became the youngest Spaniard to be euthanized, legally, three weeks ago. Smiling coyly at the camera, her bulging eyes windows into a gentle soul, she appears to dwell in a timeless realm beyond pain and pleasure; her pallor shines a mystical glow, at once ghostly and angelic. Right-to-die advocates touting her ‘victory’ following a two-year lawsuit may be eased by her serene stare. Yet precisely in lieu of the ache and frailty that earned her passage to the afterlife, Noelia here exudes grit and vitality and resolve to overcome and sublimate. Her glare even seems to harbor clues of the life-and-death mystery, a lesson or epiphany she couldn’t have uttered in her earthly torment.

The bill that rendered Noelia’s assisted suicide legal passed in 2021; Spain is very much in the opening salvos of an open-ended bioethical experiment familiar to the Netherlands, Belgium, or Canada. Among other insidious lessons, the country is learning that euthanasia’s victims—or ‘beneficiaries’—can become, once dead, the cause célèbre of both sides of the fraught issue. Noelia will be firmly cast into that role until another case gives the next measure of the law’s excesses.

Hers is an outlier, not only in age but in substance: out of Spain’s 1,120-odd euthanasia requests granted in five years—under half of the total—most were made by patients over 50, suffering from severe tumors or other terminal neurological diseases. Noelia’s pain was acute, and chronic, but singularly entangled in depression and the man-made contingencies that caused it. Her father lived as a careless drunk before becoming the main obstacle to the judicial and social steamroller bound for his daughter’s life, delaying the syringe by two years through a tireless struggle in court. Noelia had spent time in foster homes amidst taunting youths, her family either too poor or distant to care. The gang assault came as a tipping point at age 21. One family source blames Maghrebi migrants who entered the country as unaccompanied minors, a group whose numbers have spiked across Spain in the last decade. Noelia failed to report it, but not out of repressed memory: less than four days later, she jumped off a fifth floor, the resulting neck-down impairment leading to a disability assessment of 74%.