Let Terri live…

A federal judge has refused to save Terri’s life. Now all we can do is pray.

My friend April Hala had a relative just like Terri. I share what April has to say to remind us to keep praying for Terri and the others just like her… Life is precious–let them hang on to it until God and only God takes them home.

I daresay no one reading this knows that I had a relative just like (or nearly like) Terri Schiavo. My aunt was in basically a vegetative state (as far as modern newscasters are concerned) for nigh on three years. The story of how she came to be there is long and not even I remember every exact detail of what happened to put her there. For three years, she lay in a hospice-style nursing home. She was unable to breathe without a ventilator, unable to get up to go to the bathroom, unable to speak, and, for the last year or so, unable to eat. I personally believe she suffered some brain damage in (what the medical professionals call) the “respiratory crisis” post-surgery that put her on a ventilator. Though she was not perhaps as brain damaged as Terri, in Terri’s eyes, I see the emptiness, the loss of function that I saw in my aunt’s.

For all of her adult life, my aunt was a bitter person. Bitter deep inside at God and at “fate” for striking her with a disease that robbed her of the ability to walk and function as a non-handicapped person can. How often, before her crisis, in her tone of voice I heard, “I just wish I could die and get over with this miserable life,” but…that was only the angry, resentful darkness in her soul that would briefly flash out into the open sometimes. At the end of her life, lying day after day in a hospital bed you could see that the trauma, being stripped of the freedom to go and come as she liked, the freedom to feed herself, the freedom to take another breath on her own…that trauma had not made her want even more to die, but rather made her cling to the little bit of life she had left. The childlike joy of seeing her loved ones shone from her face. She would cling to your hand and cry when you had to leave. Being in a “vegetative” state did not make her want to die, it made her hold tenuously to the life she had left. It made her relish every little loving gesture, every little picture to hang on the drab walls of her room, it made her relish the life she was at least still being allowed to live.

Let Terri live…