Eluana Englaro, the 38-year-old Italian woman who spent 17 years in a permanent vegetative state, died shortly after 8pm last night in a clinic in the city of Udine, frustrating the efforts of Silvio Berlusconi to pass a law that would have kept her alive.
Eluana suffered disastrous brain damage in a car crash in 1992. Her father, Beppino, fought a bitterbattle to have what he said were his daughter’s wishes, not to endure a living death, respected. His voice wracked with emotion, he said last night: “I’ve done everything alone, I’ve brought it to this level alone, and I want to finish alone. I don’t want to talk to anyone. The only thing I ask ofmy true friends is not to come looking for me.” The news exploded in the Senate in Rome, which was in the process of debating a hurriedly cobbled-together law that would have made the termination of Eluana’s force-feeding illegal.
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18 January 1992: Eluana Englaro is seriously injured in a car crash and lapses into a coma.
1999: Her father, Beppino, insists it was his daughter’s wish to be allowed to die and takes his fight to the courts. Denied by the Court of Appeal.
April 2005: Supreme Court rules against Mr Englaro’s right-to-die appeal.
16 October 2007: The same court grants a retrial.
July 2008: Milan court rules that Ms Englaro’s coma is medically irreversible, and accepts she stated a preference for dying over being kept alive artificially.
November 2008: The Court of Cassation allows removal of feeding tubes, overruling the health ministry.
3 February 2009: Ms Englaro transferred to private facility in Udine where feeding tubes are removed.
9 February 2009: Eluana dies as politicians in Italian Senate debate her right to do so.
