Don't Kick the Bag!

Narinari still hasn't handed over the disk of photos for KGK Camp. (He says there are 200 photos.) But there's something else I want to comment on anyway. The Terry Schiavo case has moved me ever since I looked at the videos quite by chance. When I first read about the legal case I pictured a fetuslike unconscious ball - something like Karen Quinlan - only kept breathing by a machine. What I saw was a woman who was alive and responsive. She was profoundly brain damaged BUT she WAS conscious, certainly as conscious as the profoundly retarded adults I cared for when I worked at Valley View.

Today John sent me an editorial by Peggy Noonan that really expressed my feelings. I quote in part:

"There is a passionate, highly motivated and sincere group of voters and activists who care deeply about whether Terri Schiavo is allowed to live. Their reasoning, ultimately, is this: Be on the side of life. They remind me of what Winston Churchill said once when he became home secretary in charge of England's prisons. He was seated at dinner with a jabbery lady who said that if she were ever given a life sentence she'd rather die than serve it. He reared back. No, he said, always choose life! "Death's the only thing you can't get out of!"

......

"Just so. Life is full of surprise and lightning-like lurches. The person in a coma today wakes up tomorrow and says, "Is that you, mom?" Life is unknowable. Always give it a chance to shake your soul and upend reality.

"At the heart of the case at this point is a question: Is Terri Schiavo brain-dead? That is, is remedy, healing, physiologically impossible?

No. Oddly enough anyone who sees the film and tape of her can see that her brain tells her lungs to breathe, that she can open her eyes, that she seems to respond at times and to some degree to her family. She can laugh. (I heard it this morning on the news. It's a childlike chuckle.) In the language of computers she appears not to be a broken hard drive but a computer in deep hibernation. She looks like one of those coma cases that wind up in the news because the patient, for no clear reason, snaps to and returns to life and says, "Is it 1983? Is there still McDonald's? Can I have a burger?"

"Again, life is mysterious. Medicine is full of happenings and events that leave brilliant doctors scratching their heads.

"But in the end, it comes down to this: Why kill her? What is gained? What is good about it? Ronald Reagan used to say, in the early days of the abortion debate, when people would argue that the fetus may not really be a person, he'd say, "Well, if you come across a paper bag in the gutter and it seems something's in it and you don't know if it's alive, you don't kick it, do you?" No, you don't. "