The "Right" and the Wrong: On Dying

Schiavo
Originally uploaded by scribecalledsteff.

This photo led off CNN's homepage today. I'll direct your attention to the placard in the back and the quote on it, "Auschwitz--Pinellas Park Region."

There are a great number of things about this case that upset me, but that placard is at the top of the list.

How dare they compare a husband who doesn't want to see his wife lying in a persistently vegetative state to a systematic slaughtering of hundreds and thousands of Jews?

And this is what so irks me about the far too-vocal religious right in the United States right now. As long as it somehow props up their moral pretenses, they don't care what they argue.

The reality is, this woman's been in a coma for more than 14 years. She is, as they say, a "vegetable." She has no ability to speak or act. It's arguable that she can even think.

The problem here is that her mother and her family have an inability to accept reality--that their daughter, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. We all know the miraculous happens sometimes, but Miss Schiavo's odds are stacked against her.

More importantly, there's the issue of the sacred wedded trust. Her husband claims she has said she would never want to be kept on life-sustaining machines. She wanted nature to take its course. Who are we to question that?

After eight years of waiting for her to snap out of it, her husband Michael petitioned the courts to remove her feeding tube. That was 1998. In 2000, the courts ruled in his favour. A year later, the tube was removed. Two days later, a court ruled it should be reinserted. Another judge ruled in 2003 that the tube once again should be removed. Again, stays and appeals derailed that decision. And here we are.

For whom is this life sacred? For her mother? Obviously. As painful as it is, though, Mary Schindler, her mother, has to let go. For Terri, this life has long since lost its sanctity. Some lives are not meant to be lived, and I would think that a life imprisoned behind four walls and surrounded by wires and monitors is probably something none of us would embrace.

Is it so ludicrous to imagine a woman of 26 years telling her husband late at night that if time ever came for her to be kept alive on a feeding tube that he should do the hard thing and end it? I know it's how I'd feel.

I was one of those kids who loved Ayn Rand in college, and though my naivete on her philosophies has long since left me, I still hold on to one quote of hers: "Man's greatest failure is his inability to realize that avoiding death does not equal living life."

Schiavo is avoiding death, and not on her wishes, but it's not the wishmakers who have to endure that vacuous existence. Schiavo hasn't really been alive since 1990. If death is what she has wanted, then just imagine this living hell of hers.

The ironic thing about this all is it's precisely the religious right who believe in an afterlife, yet they're so insistent on hanging onto this lifetime. And people like Schiavo get to pay the price. Poor damned woman.