Noelia's eyes

PalmaNoelia Castillo gave an interview to the program Y ahora Sonsoles on Antena 3 four days before her euthanasia. The presenter, Sonsoles Onega, with a theatrical, affected and condescending tone, insisted again and again on the scrupulousness of the treatment of the material. Excusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta...The reporter Bea Osa had achieved a very valuable journalistic scoop from an informative, human, and social point of view. Material of this caliber deserved to be broadcast in the style of great reports: sober, direct, raw, and letting the protagonist say everything she considered opportune. We could all hear what reasons had led a 25-year-old woman to decide she wanted to die. That she be assisted in her suicide. She had to endure almost two years of delays from a father who tried to block her decision, legitimized by each of the competent authorities, until reaching the Court of Strasbourg.

However, Onega and her team decided to adulterate the material and monetize it in the purest Mediaset style of Vasile, only that they did it with entertainment, a pact circus, and, of course, they did not dress it up with a solemnity under which there was only yellow journalism.

Noelia's testimony did not need a tear-jerking background music, a looping shot of her painfully climbing stairs, nor did it deserve to be dissected into four-sentence fragments for a panel of talk show hosts to analyze from a conflict perspective what had no possible analysis. At least in these terms of spectacle. Dying was her decision, protected by a rights-guaranteeing law.

Noelia's large, inert eyes, staring into the void, said as much or more than her words. She knew perfectly well what she wanted and why. Due to the unbearable physical and psychological pain of an unhappy life, marked by suffering and misfortune. If there is a failure here, it is not the one pointed out by conservatives who, from a position of privilege and lack of empathy, argue that only God has the right to take a life. The failure is that of those who did not know how to care for her, love her, and protect her; first, her parents and family; and later, the institutions and social services that were supposed to watch over her. The failure is, ultimately, social and collective. Of course, no parent should have to see their daughter die, but, as she pointed out, who had thought about her pain before.