Up to now, I haven’t wanted to even mention the words “Terri Schiavo” on this site, for a number of reasons.
First, because this story has received so much attention in both the regular media and the blogosphere, I suspected that most of my readers were sick of hearing about it and were coming to Simple Tricks in search of something a little more frivolous. (One of my three loyal readers essentially said as much in a recent comment.)

Secondly, my own views on this matter have been shaped by deeply personal experiences with death, lingering illness and quality-of-life issues, and I didn’t see how I could comment on Schiavo without dredging up a bunch of stuff that I frankly don’t want to share with the whole InterWeb. Let’s just say that my opinion is a lot less hypothetical or philosophical than many of those you’ve been reading.

Finally, this situation has been the sort of hot-button issue that is sure to spark a fight, regardless of how reasonable you may think your own position. I haven’t had the stomach to argue about it, in large part because of Reason #2 above.
But now that the poor woman has moved on to whatever awaits her, I would like to make a few remarks. I hope this isn’t a mistake on my part. Let me be absolutely clear that I am not looking for a fight. I just want to say some things that have occurred to me over the past few weeks. If you’re sick to death of this subject or can’t discuss it without getting all huffy, then I invite you to skip this entry and come back another time.

To begin, my condolences to Michael Schiavo and Terri’s parents. I’m sure all three of them are exhausted at this point and want nothing more than to return to some kind of normal existence, if only they could remember what that is. I’ve been there, I know how it feels, and I wish them luck at finding their way back as soon as possible.

But while I have the utmost sympathy for the family of Terri Schiavo — and I include her husband in that grouping, despite those who would write him off as a heartless bastard — I feel nothing but contempt for all those who stuck their noses into a situation that should’ve been nobody’s business except the family’s and, unfortunately in this case, the court’s. I’m referring to opportunistic politicians who tried to use Terri’s case to score points with specific constituents and lobbyists, to ghoulish journalists who made damn sure that we were all as tired of seeing her sad, vacant face as her family was of fighting over it, and to ruthless activists who wanted to exploit a woman who’d already lost every shred of factory-issued dignity a human being gets.

It makes me sad that an event that should’ve been intimate and peaceful and nobody’s business save for those directly involved became instead a media circus that played out in front of the whole damn world. It makes me angry that Michael Schiavo has been labelled by some as a murderer for making the toughest choice a husband could ever have to make. It makes me equally angry that Terri Schiavo’s parents have been made out by some to be misguided or even delusional because they couldn’t accept their daughter’s hopeless condition or their son-in-law’s decision. And it makes me downright wild-eyed-furious that some so-called “Christian” extremists have become so single-minded in their quest to establish a “culture of life” that they have threatened Michael Schiavo and his siblings with death. That’s just plain screwy.
The whole situation has been screwy. Circumstances that deserved the utmost compassion and empathy from the commmunity have instead generated anger and hatred in the community. Would Terri have wanted that? Did Michael or Terri’s parents? We’ll never know, because the actual people at the heart of this case have become almost invisible, replaced by big, translucent holograms of the people the zealots on both sides of the scuffle want them to be. Like Hitchcock’s famous “MacGuffin” devices, the actual Terri, Michael and Mr. and Mrs. Schindler were inconsequential in and of themselves; they served only to move the plot forward.

And now that the plot has concluded we’re left with a whole lot of unaswered, possibly unanswerable questions:
Why Terri? Why not one of the thousands of other people who exist at the intersection of death and lingering twilight? Why would people who ordinarily rail against government intrusion in the lives of individuals be so eager to exert federal influence on this one case? How can the president who never stayed one single execution during his days as a governor say with a straight face that we ought to err on the side of life? Why is it that people willingly put their cats and dogs to sleep rather than letting them suffer, but the thought of doing that to a human makes everyone crazy? Is the suffering of human beings somehow different from the suffering of any other kind of creature? And in the case of someone who isn’t technically suffering because they’re too brain-damaged to be aware of their condition (like Terri), then what do we do to ease the emotional suffering of those around the patient? Can we and should we do anything?

How do we define “life,” anyhow? In my mind, there’s a lot more to life than just a heartbeat, but many of those who push for this “culture of life” seem unable or unwilling to talk about that. For them, simple biological function seems to be the overriding concern whereas quality of life is secondary or even irrelevant. I simply can’t go along with such absolutist thinking. Is it more humane to keep a person alive but in pain, or, in Terri’s case, alive, insensate, and causing pain to those around her? And for that matter, how do we define pain? A human being can be in deep torment without experiencing a single twinge of physical pain. Again, I know, because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen loved ones who weren’t at all uncomfortable in a physical sense but who, because of their medical conditions, were living in their own personal hells. We pity or even disapprove of those who commit suicide because they’re depressed, tut-tutting about what a shame it was that they couldn’t find any hope in their lives. But what do you do when there literally is no hope, when your condition isn’t just a phantom of your own mind but is an inevitable, inescapable, biological fact? An absolute, in other words, and one that is never going to improve. Doesn’t that change the paradigm?

I know that for many people these questions are answerable only in religious terms. To them, suicide and euthanasia are sins that are unjustifiable under any circumstances, and that suffering is a necessary part of life. That’s fine for them, but I find it deeply disturbing whenever anyone starts talking about imposing their morals and their standards on anyone else, especially when we’re talking about matters of life and death, matters that hinge on deeply personal convictions and experiences. That is, essentially, what the president means when we calls for founding a culture of life: establishing a particular moral order, willingly accepted by some, imposed upon others. That’s exactly what our Revolutionary War was fought to escape, so obviously that’s not a real great idea. And yet… I can see a certain logic in the view that we need to have a set paradigm for approaching some issues, otherwise we risk social chaos. But what is that paradigm to be? How do we decide the “official” morality of a nation that includes hundreds of different faiths, and people of no faith at all?
There are no easy solutions, and perhaps no solutions at all, to something like Terri Schiavo’s situation. And that’s why I refuse to condemn either her husband or her parents. Because there are no winners in this case.

Two final thoughts: first, I don’t question Michael Schiavo’s decision to let his wife die, but I am troubled by the method of her death. Slow starvation and dehydration? Surely we’re more compassionate than that in this country? I say if we’re going to have the balls, as a society, to allow people to “pull the plug” then we ought to have the balls to go all the way and speed the dying on their way with a quick and humane injection. It wouldn’t be murder under those circumstances — it would be the proper, compassionate way to handle it. Anything less than that is trying to have it both ways, and that’s more of an injustice in my book than the initial decision to end a life.

(I have similar feelings about the death penalty. If we, as a society, are going to agree that some people should be put to death, then we need to have the courage of our convictions and do it speedily and decisively, with no more of this nonsense of letting convicts live on Death Row for twenty years. If we don’t have the heart to go through with executions in a timely fashion — following a reasonable period to allow for a reasonable number of appeals, naturally — then we have no business executing people at all.)

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I find it very disturbing that our media and our politicians have been so focused on the story of one woman and one family, while issues that affect our entire society — like, say yesterday’s report that our nation’s intelligence-gathering abilities are pretty much useless in their current form and we really have no idea of what’s going on in the world when it comes to nuclear weapons — are relegated to page two. Where are our priorities, people?