Conundrum

Catherine Johnson, a frequent commenter on Roger Simon's blog has an eloquent and persuasive post on the Terri Schiavo case. The videos I've seen of Ms. Schiavo certainly don't look like what I would call a Persistent Vegetative State. The NYTimes piece reassuring us that death by starvation/dehydration is "not a horrific thing" only begs the question of whether she is, in fact, in a PVS, in which case a doctor says she would feel nothing anyway. The problem is that neither he nor anyone else can be certain of that.

My brother's oldest son died in a snowmobile accident recently. As shocking and sad as that was, I think having him live on as Terri Schiavo has, and the difficulty of knowing what to do, would have been worse. I believe that we each have an immortal soul, and that mortality is an anomaly in our larger existence. My own life has never been so precious to me as to want to cling to it in such a situation, but I also recognize that someone like Terri Schiavo may have a vibrant mental life that she is unable to express.