The End

I know this subject has been run long and hard. Still I found this excerpt from Anna Quindlen's column in Newsweek (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7305204/site/newsweek/page/2/) to be very touching.

Last week my father and I received this short e-mail from my sister, a public-school teacher in San Francisco:

i'm telling you both this now
if i am ever in a 'persistent vegetative state' please let me die
do not have a feeding tube put in me
and in no uncertain terms: do not let the united states government get involved.
xoxo

No public official is going to tell me how to xoxo my sister. No church, no court. The Schiavo case has asked us to look at our own definition of life, not at some formless notion cobbled out of the Bible, medical textbooks and impersonal sentiment. My sister's throaty laugh, her prodigious knowledge of history, her garrulous nature: that's the true picture of her, the one with the light in her eyes. She's counting on me to make certain that image is not replaced by something empty and depleted. She's counting on me to safeguard her dignity and her humanity, which are one and the same.

Many of us feel the way she does. Once the feeding tube was removed, polls showed that the majority of Americans believed Terri Schiavo should be allowed to die. That's probably because they've been there. They are the true judges and lawmakers and priests. They've been at the bedside, watching someone they love in agony as cancer nipped at the spine, as the chest rose and fell with the cruel mimicry of the respirator, as the music of personality dwindled to a single note and then fell silent. They know life when they see it, and they know it when it is gone.