Terror Alert Status: Terror Alert Level

Thursday, Mar. 24, 2005 - 6:44 pm

My thoughts on the Terri Schiavo issue
I'm usually pretty irreverent, rude and obnoxious, and when it comes to this case, i could be, especially when it comes to certain aspects of what a travesty of a political circus it has all become, but I won't.


maybe my perspective is coloured by the years i spent watching my parents die of cancer and all of that, but almost as bad as the fucking politicians are the goddamn kool-aid drinkers who think that their so-called "Pro-Life" opinion makes them experts or qualifies them any more than the people involved in this case to make idiotic proclamations


in a debate with someone elsewhere, someone volunteered this load of tripe:



[QUOTE]I am going to state right now for all of you kids, and I will later everyone i ever meet, If I am EVER in a state of PVS (the real thing not the media spin on it), if I ever in a state of "unresponsivenes", if I do not make flicker my eyes, respond to pain or verbal stiminui or any other method of determinging my life status, keep me alive. If I do not have any arms or legs and I am in such a state, keep me alive. If I require the most basic "life support" such as food and water to be 'pumped' into me, keep me alive.

No one is to kill me. I value life too much for someone else to end it for me...even if YOU selfish people wouldn't be happy in such situations. Do not interpret or have "apathy" if I am ever in such a 'bad' situation.

Simply, I ask, read news articles to me, play me viddos and movies for me to hear. Bring your friends and family in...not to see me "suffer" but for me to see that you're happy and having fun in your life, just like I am. "Fun" is subjective and you should never forget it.[/QUOTE]

in reply, i posted this:
"even if YOU selfish people..."


asking that people stop by and even bring others around in order to venerate your living corpse sounds more selfish... being unable to let go is selfish


I spent eight years watching my dad and then my mom get sick and die from cancer, but instead of having my memory colored more by the time i spent watching them decline and die, it was their wish that i should be happy remembering them as they were, and even if i may have ever failed or disappointed them in any other way, at least i've always honored that.


I've done volunteer work in a hospice, and i spent a fair amount of time in those 8 years caring for my mom and dad before they passed, i've seen the pain of the dying and i've seen the suffering of their families, even after their loved ones had slipped far enough beyond the reach of pain and thought while still being technically "alive."


Do you even know what it's like to have someone you care about become little more than a breathing, blinking shell where a mind and soul used to make their presence loud and clear? How long could you bear witness to it? and Really, outside of your rhetoric, how long could you bear to put the people you love through seeing you in such a state?


To value life means more than to simply thrust the rude reflexive/mechanical semblance of life on a body because you are either too narcissistic to accept your own death or because you cannot see clear to let go of someone else. To value life is to also know when to let it pass.

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