With any luck at all, by the time this is in print, Terry Schiavo will have gone peacefully to her just reward. The right to lifers and the death-with-dignity advocates will have folded up their placards, taken the tape off their mouths and returned to their own families as Schiavo’s parents finally suggested they do.
Senators, representatives, judges, lawyers, expert medical professionals, evangelists and relatives of severely injured people who recovered will stop appearing on CNN, and Larry King will go back to interviewing celebrities with more uplifting stories to tell.
We will all be so grateful.
If there has been an upside to all this legal and political manipulation it’s that many families will privately discuss what they do or do not want their next of kin to allow to be done to them.
I made a living will decades ago primarily to save my children from going through an expensive and time consuming probate as they had to do when their father died. I had it updated a few years ago, making sure it contained a durable power of attorney for healthcare, naming the daughter who lives with me, and my younger sister as alternate. I’ve also talked with all my relatives about my wish to be left without heroic intervention by doctors, who now have more ways to keep us alive than ways to keep us in possession of our faculties.
Now, I am not an ideologue when it comes to any of these issues: right to life, right to die. I just don’t think any of the rules apply in all cases. I am sure that the date of my departure is already written somewhere and when that day arrives, I’m out of here. That is as long as doctors and lawyers and judges and politicians don’t get to meddling with me. Who’s to say when a life is worth living? From where I sit now, I think I could deal with some physical disability or pain but not when the EEG shows no brain waves. I see no point in keeping my body alive if there’s no longer anybody home upstairs.
The thornier issue is what I might have to decide if it was one of my children lying there unable to talk.
I know the maternal instinct to urge doctors to do everything possible to return them to conscious life would probably cloud my rational judgment. It’s one thing for someone who has been roaming the planet for almost 70 years to refuse heroics but quite another for a young mother with children still to raise. They are the ones who should be signing advanced directives. But they seldom do.
We had a long discussion about the Schiavo case over dinner a few nights ago with the Montana branch of my family. All of us agreed the case was so complex nobody could possibly know what that poor young woman’s wishes were 15 years ago.
My daughter said the media was to blame for attracting all the “crazies” to demonstrate on behalf of Schiavo and put pressure on Gov. Jeb Bush, the Florida justices, et al., to “err on the side of life.”
I’m a journalist and I agree with her.
For TV producers to show those pitiful pictures of Schiavo ad nauseum is to deny the poor woman her constitutional right to privacy, let alone dignity. How could she ever have wanted to be exposed in that way? What possible good could come of reporters digging up lurid details of her life, insinuations of a troubled marriage, of abuse, of her husband’s possible motives for wanting to end her suffering? If in fact she was feeling anything at all. How could her husband or her parents allow their once “close relationship” to deteriorate into the legal wrangling that breeds mistrust?
During our discussion, I reminded my daughter that two of her father’s relatives had been kept alive in a persistent vegetative state following massive strokes. In both cases, the decision to prolong life was prompted by guilt, a sad attempt at atonement that helped no one and caused permanent rifts in the family.
If we can take anything from the media circus surrounding Schiavo’s tragedy, it’s the importance of talking frankly with our dearest friends and kin. Not only telling what you want done for yourself but asking what they want if they should be incapacitated by an accident or a stroke.
It could be the only way to keep Jerry Falwell and Pat Boone from championing your right to life on national television. Smile, you’re on Candid Camera.