Thoughts on The Terri Shiavo Case

What a nightmare this Terri Shiavo case has become! It’s a sad commentary on the state of moral values in this country, that a matter so private and excruciating to a single family in Florida should become a political football and media circus of epic proportions. Powerful right-wing politicians, including Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, who slight-of-handed his brother to his first term in the White House, and ethics-violations plagued House Republican leader Tom Delay, have wrapped their fists around this case as if it was the staff of Moses. Just one more outstanding example of their ongoing attempt to redefine our country’s morality. Their definition of this being that as long as you stand behind the pulpit, shake your fist and shout the right words about the "big" cases, you have the public’s tacit permission to keep your other hand planted firmly in the cookie jar.

This is the extent of my "political" opinion on this issue: I have always found it so interesting that the people who shout the loudest and longest against abortion, euthanasia and the right to die, are also the ones who want to turn a blind eye to torture being used as a means to National Security, and stand firmly behind the use of the death penalty. And they never seem to see the hypocrisy of their views. Either you value human life above all else, or you don’t. Valuing some narrowly defined lives as sacred, and others as expendable ("All animals are created equal…but some are more equal than others…) is a shameful and indefensible code.

My problem is, I have a hard time looking at the Shiavo case purely as a political circus. There are so many aspects of this situation that strike me as just being immeasurably sad. The state of medical knowledge in the world today has placed a horrendous burden on the shoulders of the human race. We know how to prolong life way beyond our ability to deal with it. Medical science now has the capacity to put people into a prolonged state of being neither alive nor dead, and humanity does not have the emotional or moral fortitude to know what to DO with these people that have been consigned to this limbo. We have been given just enough "power" over life and death to make ourselves miserable. How many of us have been, or will be, in the position where doctors will come to us and say that our loved one’s life is, for all intents and purposes, over; and now if we would just sign here, they will take away the "artificial" means of keeping her alive and "allow" her to die? I was involved in this very harrowing scenario ten years ago when my sister died.

In early 1995, my oldest sister, who had been suffering with Rheumatoid Arthritis for a decade or more, began the decline that led to her death in May of that year. I spent the last nine weeks of her life back home in Illinois, trying to help her family deal with the ever-worsening, ever more frustrating and desperate situation. I finally began a journal to keep myself sane through the experience. I had waited until it was almost too late to write down my feelings…she died three days after I penned the first sentence in that blue spiral notebook. But I wrote this the day she died. I think it sums up my feelings about the Shiavo case:

4:30 pm 5/17: So now we are given no more hope. The decisions have all boiled down to whether we should help her die—take her off all "heroic" medications. I just want to cry out—"WHY???" Why did this have to drag on for two long months… Her last days stretched into months; her last hours into weeks; her last minutes into hours. It seems like nothing but pure torture. Who is it that wants to see how long we can all suffer? I don’t understand. I’ll NEVER understand…

…I suppose modern medicine saves or prolongs lives that otherwise would not endure. But how many more deaths does it make completely unbearable? How many families suffer the torture of having to make decisions that we would never have to make if it wasn’t for medicine which prolongs life at any cost? I hate it. I hate it. And if ever the decision is mine to make for another human at any point, I will never allow it to come to this… Don’t we suffer enough when a loved one dies? Do we have to have decisions of such magnitude thrust upon us to make the situation that much more horrible?"

A little more than five hours later, the decisions had been made, the "heroic" meds had been turned off, and my sister was gone. Five hours that felt like a lifetime. Filled with agony that was almost too much for any of us to bear.

And so, I look at this Terri Shiavo battle thathas been going on for more than a decade and I can only think, What kind of people are these, that they can stand to wage this horrific tug of war for fifteen years? Why in the name of God can’t one side bend to the will of the other just to end the pain? I don’t think there’s a good guy and a bad guy in this. Both sides have prolonged the fight beyond all reason. Each side trying to heap blame and accusations on the other. And all the judges, congressmen, governors, and presidents that have waded into the fray, appear as monstrously inhuman as the family--both sides--is beginning to look.

Blame? Blame medical science, which can repair someone to the point that she must be plugged to some kind of artificial umbilicus to keep her alive, but has not the heart nor the humanity to judge whether it should. They plug a body into that artificial support, and then point to it and say to the family, "This person is not really alive. Deal with it." Put the pen and clipboard into a tear-stained hand, and then get out of the line of fire. Unspeakably cruel. Again, I ask, "Who is it that wants to see how long we can all suffer?"