‘Deséenme un buen viaje’ by Gina Montaner

In 2022, about to turn 79 and suffering from what seemed to be Parkinson’s, the Cuban-Spanish writer Carlos Alberto Montaner asked his daughter Gina to help him seek an assisted death in Spain. Since 1970, when they arrived in Madrid as political exiles from Cuba, the Montaner family had considered Spain their second home. In March 2021, Spain had decriminalized assisted dying; as a naturalized citizen, Carlos could thus access legal euthanasia there. When Carlos asked Gina for help, both father and daughter were in Miami, Florida, working for various news companies. Gina’s younger brother was unable to leave his job in LA, but Carlos, Gina, and Linda (Gina’s mother) moved back to Spain. Married to Carlos for over 60 years, Linda was reticent about the wishes of her partner. Therefore, the responsibility of shouldering her father’s cause fell to Gina. In her memoir Deséenme un buen viaje (Wish me a good journey), Gina chronicles the two great struggles of her father’s life: his commitment to promoting democratization in Cuba, related through flashbacks that give historical depth to the book, and his bureaucratic saga to die in Spain, which forms the main narrative arc. Gina describes the procedural hurdles and tolls of following the new euthanasia law: first, Carlos must register a living will at a hospital where the attendant does not seem well informed; then Carlos’s primary doctor declares herself a conscientious objector; a neurologist is willing to assist, after diagnosing Carlos not with Parkinson’s but with PSP (Progressive Supranuclear Palsy), an even more aggressive neurodegenerative disease; after multiple consultations, that neurologist deems Carlos’s suffering to be ‘not unbearable’; Carlos appeals to an oversight commission, but then has to restart the whole process with a different doctor, this time feeling pressure to overly dramatize his condition, while his illness has stiffened his facial musculature. On June 29, 2023, more than 8 months after returning to Madrid, Carlos had a legal assisted death at his home, surrounded by his spouse, son, and daughter. His last words became the title of Gina’s memoir.

As a personal account of the intricacies of the new Spanish euthanasia law, Deséenme un buen viaje is already a valuable cultural object. Add to that the fact that both the memoir’s author and its subject are well known and respected journalists, and one can start to gauge its vast reach. Gina Montaner has been interviewed in radio and TV programs about the purpose of her memoir, framing it as the story of two journeys – her life in exile with her parents and her father’s struggle for the right to die. In the book, Gina mentions it was her father who first suggested she should write a book about what they had lived. In interviews, Gina acknowledges the role played by Cristóbal Pera, her editor, who wanted the book to be, not ‘a manual of euthanasia’, but something more intimate. In conversation with RNE, Gina underscores the difficulties her father faced to access euthanasia, adding that many die before the legal process is completed. The book is a multifaceted memoir that reveals more than Carlos’s lucidity and steadfastness; several reviewers noted how it also displays the resilience of the women in Carlos’s life, who became his caregivers, to great emotional and physical strain. As Gina tells Diario Las Americas, writing and recording the audio for her book had a healing effect; plus, returning to Spain gave her the opportunity to finally lay roots, after a life of identifying as the daughter of political exiles. Another dimension of the book is the involvement of the Derecho a Morir Dignamente (DMD) foundation, which guided Gina and Carlos through all the bureaucracy and, after Carlos’s death, supported and divulged the memoir. As recounted in the book, when Gina helped Carlos file his living will as instructed by DMD, she noticed the date, January 12 – the anniversary of Ramón Sampedro’s death. Sampedro had an assisted suicide in 1998, after unsuccessfully pleading with various courts for legal euthanasia – always supported by the DMD foundation, as chronicled in his memoir Cartas desde el infierno. Thus, Montaner’s and Sampedro’s memoirs bookend the long legal path to assisted dying in Spain.