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Posted by holly lu conant rees
on April 1, 2005, 11:31 am
68.53.7.8
"I can't stand to watch it any more". These were the words from my son, Samuel, whose preferred lifestyle features round the clock TV, with occasional breaks for the internet, Tetris & Playstation 2. He's logged an inordinate number of hours in front of the gruesome melodrama offered by professional wrestling, COPS, and oddly enough, Crisis of the Week movies on Lifetime, any of which exhaust me after about 5 minutes.
So what overdone, sensationalist, stress-inducing programming finally drove him away from his beloved Magnavox? The long dying of Terri Schiavo.
Perhaps I should point out here that Samuel, 22, has a rare genetic condition, which has resulted in assorted disabilities, and multitudinous encounters with what we call "health care." And his Aunt Ann was discharged to a nursing home from an ICU after a traumatic brain injury and two strokes, in a persistent vegetative state (by the way, she—recovered? was rehabilitated?–to the point where she not only recognized but conversed with family members, having about the quickest wit in concocting a dirty joke that I've ever encountered). I probably should mention also that his grandfather, at 83, living in a body severely compromised by decades of alcoholism, poorly treated mental illness and medical emergencies, is "kept alive" by a feeding tube because he can't recall why swallowing matters.
Or maybe all of these descriptors and qualifiers are irrelevant. Maybe, at the deepest level, the distress permeating my household is about a human seeing another human condemned to death because people with power don't see "that sort of life" as one worth living.
If's it about "letting nature take its course," then not one of us should swallow an antibiotic, since not so many years ago, nature decreed that most infections culminated in death. If it's about diminished capacity and decreased quality of life, then we should all sign off round about age 22. If it's about "I don't want to live like that," than write out your own set of wishes so that your life is not subject to someone else's convenience or profit.
With his limited though emphatic vocabulary, my son managed to use the word "damn" about 12 times in a sentence about Terri Schiavo's husband, doctors, attorneys and judges. This is no matter of legal hair-splitting, or debate about how many angels can waltz on a pinhead. He sees, plain and simple, a woman being killed because she doesn't meet someone's standards for a life worth living. Perhaps that's the influence of WWE's hero/villain mentality. But maybe it's his innate sense of justice–a perspective questioning how dare we decide that a fellow human should no longer be alive.
Don't dismiss these queries as irrelevant. You or someone you love could become Aunt Ann, Grampa Roger, Terri Schiavo in a flash of neurological malfunction, a moment of oxygen deprivation, a train wreck or car accident. Honor the horrific and oh so public death which Terri Schiavo is enduring by thinking through your wishes for when the end of your life arrives. Write your thoughts down. Talk to your parents. Tell your best friend. And above all, understand that the value of life is not defined by the configuration of an EEG or any definition of "normal". Don't let someone else decide that death is preferable to your particular life.
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