Who authorizes a death: the Augé case, the ninety-six-year-old father who litigated for two years, and the question no one put to the court (Part 1)

The two men in this story share a surname and were not on speaking terms. One is fifty-five, lives alone in Barcelona, carries the sequelae of a succession of strokes and heart attacks that damaged his movement and his speech, holds a recognized disability of seventy-five per cent, and in 2024 asked for help to die; he also asked, expressly, that his family not be informed. The other is ninety-six, is his father, found out anyway, and has spent the last two years of an already very long life litigating to prevent it. Catalonia's Guarantee and Evaluation Commission had approved the request. A court of first instance held that the father had no standing to contest the decision of an adult son; the High Court of Justice of Catalonia restored that standing; the Supreme Court, sitting in plenary session, confirmed it in June for those who can show a particularly close bond with the applicant, over dissents warning that letting a family block an approved procedure prolongs the very suffering the statute meant to shorten. And on August 26 the father withdrew. Not because he was persuaded: because he is ill and exhausted, and at ninety-six two years are a portion of whatever remains that can no longer be spent. The case ends with no ruling on the merits. It ends from fatigue.

Let it be said at the outset, and without the least mental reservation, that this man's suffering is real and that no consideration of principle licenses anyone to treat it as a case study. He has said publicly that he does not want to suffer more than he has already suffered, and whoever reads that sentence from the comfort of an obedient body and a tongue that answers has no right whatever to condescension. The loss of speech, for a being constituted by speaking, is an amputation of a different order from any other: it does not disable a function, it disables appearing. The one who cannot say himself is sealed inside a body that others interpret without him. Everything that follows in this study begins there and never leaves it: the man who asks to die is not mistaken about his pain, and anyone who doubts it has not understood the problem. The question this newspaper proposes to examine is a different one, and prior: what, precisely, has the legal and social order around him offered — and what has it denied him without ever putting it up for discussion?

Begin with the name every headline uses, because the name already contains an argument that is never defended. This is called a dignified death. The adjective is a marvel of rhetorical efficiency: no one can oppose dignity, and whoever dissents is automatically placed on the side of the undignified death, which is to say of cruelty. But observe what the phrase presupposes. If this death is dignified because it is this one, others are not; and if a life can reach a state in which its continuation is described as undignified, then dignity has become a graduated property, contingent on the condition of the body, on functional autonomy, on the perceived quality of an existence. There is the displacement, and it is of a magnitude no commission evaluates. For centuries dignity meant precisely the opposite: what a human being possesses by being what he is rather than by what he can do, and which for that very reason neither rises with health nor falls with deterioration, is not lost with speech nor recovered through rehabilitation. It was the underivable property of man, the final ground for his having no price. Turned into a variable, it grounds nothing: if suffering erodes it, then whoever suffers least has most of it, and we have readmitted through the service entrance the idea that there are first- and second-class existences. No one meant to say that. The word says it on its own, every morning, on every front page.

Now to the central paradox of the file, which is almost didactic in its clarity and yet appears in none of the coverage. The entire architecture of the law rests on autonomy: it is his life, his decision, his body. And yet, in order to exercise that sovereign autonomy, this man required a commission of strangers — physicians and jurists who had never met him — to examine his file and authorize it. Let the reader pause on the verb, because the verb gives away the whole edifice. A strictly private decision requires no permit; no one applies for authorization to move cities, change trades, or marry unwisely. If a permit is needed here it is because everyone involved knows, however loudly public discourse denies it, that this act is not private: it is a public act, performed by third parties, with means society pays for, in institutions society sustains, under legal cover society grants. This is not the exercise of an individual liberty but the creation of a faculty to kill without reproach, delegated to professionals and submitted to administrative control. Calling it autonomy is a structural euphemism. Autonomy is not filed in triplicate.

From that paradox follows the second, which is the father's. If the matter were genuinely private, the question of a parent's standing to appeal would be absurd, and the first court resolved it that way with impeccable internal logic. But the Supreme Court, in plenary session and over dissents, had to acknowledge that there exist third parties with a particularly close bond to the person asking to die, who therefore cannot be treated as strangers. Note the exertion involved: the law found itself obliged to invent a procedural category — particularly close bond — to name what until the day before yesterday required no name because it was called, simply, father. That a plenary session of the Supreme Court was needed to determine whether a father is someone with respect to his son's death is not a juridical curiosity. It is the notarized record of a civilization that dismantled its bonds and then attempts to rebuild them, one at a time and at enormous cost, in the form of admissibility requirements. And observe the final irony, which is bitter: the same man who asked that his family not be informed obtained from the system a procedure in which his family was a party for two years. Neither the solitude he wanted nor the communion his father intended. A lawsuit.

There is also a contextual fact almost no one has stressed, and it orders the discussion more clearly than any partisan declaration: since the law came into force in 2021, one thousand six hundred and sixty-eight people have died by this procedure, and only two cases have reached the courts through a relative's opposition — this one and that of a woman of twenty-five. Litigation, in other words, is the rarest exception, and the vast remainder proceeds in administrative silence. Defenders of the law will say, with formal justice, that the system operates without conflict. But the statement admits of an exactly inverse reading, and it is the one this newspaper holds: in ninety-nine point nine per cent of cases there was no one to object. No one appealed, no one opposed, no one — beyond the professionals processing the file — judged that this death concerned them enough to take the trouble. Conflict is scarce not because the bonds are healthy but because, for the most part, they no longer exist. The two litigated cases are not the system's failure. They are the only two places where somebody was still watching.

And here we reach the core of what strikes us as genuinely grave, which is not legislative but practical and daily. A man living alone, his speech damaged, his mobility broken, his family relations in ruins, makes a request. The institutional apparatus moves with remarkable diligence to answer the question of who may authorize his death and who has standing to contest it: two years of filings, a high court, a plenary session of the Supreme Court, separate opinions, doctrine settled, and a recommendation to Parliament that in future such matters be resolved faster. No one litigated — because no court on earth can order it — over who was going to sit with him in the afternoons, who would carry the speech rehabilitation through the years it demands, who would make him feel that his life was still required by somebody. Society has deployed a formidable juridical machine to determine the conditions of an exit, and nothing equivalent to make staying habitable. When a suffering man is offered a door efficiently and companionship slowly — or not at all — the outcome does not measure his autonomy. It measures our offer. And a choice made between an available option and a nonexistent one is not properly a choice. It is a consequence.

Let it be entirely clear what we are not saying, because in this matter caricature is the standard resource of both trenches. We do not say this man acted frivolously, nor that his pain is overstated, nor that his father is a hero without shadow — litigating for two years against the express will of a son he did not speak to has its own unresolved tragedy, one no court could heal. We do not propose condemning anyone to suffer in order to sustain a thesis: the relief of pain is a grave duty, proportionate sedation is medicine and not homicide, and the therapeutic obstinacy that artificially prolongs an agony is an abuse the most demanding medical tradition always rejected. What we hold is that between those two things — abandoning the sufferer and suppressing the sufferer — lies a path almost nobody has funded, one that demands presence, time, palliative care, speech therapy, adapted housing and willing people, and that costs incomparably more than an administrative stamp. And we hold too that dignity is not a property illness can spend; that if it were, none of us would hold it securely past the next diagnosis; and that an order which begins to grade it has opened a question whose answer it no longer controls.

The file, as we said, closes from exhaustion. A father of ninety-six stops writing to the court because his strength is gone, and with that, rather than with an argument, the outcome of a life is settled. It is an ending that portrays the age better than any essay: the deepest question a society can put to itself — what we owe the one who suffers, and how far the right to dispose of a life extends — has been resolved neither by deliberation, nor by conviction, nor by anyone's conversion, but by physical endurance. In the second part of this study we will examine what the Supreme Court's plenary established and what it left open, the doctrine of the close bond and its foreseeable consequences, the real state of palliative care in the countries that have legislated in this direction, and the statistical drift observable where such laws have been longest in force. For today it is enough to set down the question that was never put in the courtroom, and that no accelerated procedure will ever put: not whether this man had a right to die, but how he came to be so alone.

Editor's note: the pain described here is real and common, and it is rarely only physical. Anyone living through it — or accompanying someone who is — should know that palliative care units, home care teams and patient associations exist in nearly every country, and that asking for help in time changes the prognosis of what can be borne.

Legal Notice: This critical analysis is published under Art. 28 (news of general interest) and Art. 10 (right of quotation) of Law 11.723 on Intellectual Property of the Argentine Republic. The original work and its title belong to their respective author and publisher, both cited on this page.