HOW IMPORTANT IS LIFE

I briefly made a comment in the last bit of writing that I did about the plight of Terri Schiavo, who is a young woman in a vegetative state in a hospital in Florida. The leaders of this country are trying to make a law to allow her feeding tube to be reinserted before she starves to death. After years of legal challenges, her feeding tube was removed and she will die if she does not have the tube put back in within the next few days. I have been intrigued by the emotions that have been generated by this young woman, and while I feel bad for her and her family I cannot see what all of the time and money that is being expended is going to accomplish.
There are a few basic facts not in question. One she is not going to get better, two, her family wants her to live, three, her husband wants her dead. Now I think that he had something to do with what has happened to his wife, but if they cannot prove he harmed her than that is our law, but she is not more important than the children I wrote about the Jessica Lunsford, rape and killing at the hands of a convicted and released pedophile, so why will they expend the same type of time and energy to save children like her. This is also a country where you can kill an unborn child easier than you can get a special order hamburger at a drive thru restaurant. So if life is so precious that Congress is in special session and the President is waiting to sign that legislation, why can we not get them to spend a little of that political capitol on child protection legislation.
From what we have seen this case is being used by the supporters of right to die as a cause celebre’ as well as the right to live supporter’s who want to keep her alive, because of the sanctity of life. Now I wish that things could turn out well for this poor young lady, but we need to be practical as well. She is not going to get better no matter what they do to her and she is using resources that someone else might need, but cannot afford because of all that we spend on critical long term care patients.
Does anyone have any question as to why we cannot keep up with health care costs in this country. We daily spend millions and millions of dollars on people who are not going to get better and would probably prefer not to be kept in this type of situation if they had made the decision before they ended up as mere things in a long term coma or vegetative state. They remind us all the time to make living wills, but the truth is that a lot of people do not take care of this and are then caught in the type of dilemma that Terri and her family are now in and where the legal system is not really helping out much.
This weekend will see the spending of all of this time and money for Terri Schiavo and the best outcome that can happen is that she will have a feeding tube reinserted and live out more of her life “staring” at the ceiling, not getting better, not communicating with anyone, merely existing. Is that really a life or is that a hellish prison?
I know this on a personal level as my wonderful Father was in a coma after suffering a stroke which caused bleeding into the brain on a scale to cause irrepairable damage and the choices are given to you not in a calm, thinking way, but in a hurried, frantic way. I knew that my Father had always been a man who lived life everyday, no matter how bad he hurt, or how sick he was, he got up, went to work and took care of his family. Even in his disability retirement, he would force himself to get out and take care of the lawn or work in his garden, because life is about doing, not being. I convinced my Mother to have the life support turned off because I loved my Father and knew this is what he would have wanted. There were people who got to see, from the organ donations of the organs that were able to be used, as well as a few others who used his parts to extend and make their lives better. I hurt, but I knew that as our family held each other we did the right thing and he would be at home in Heaven with his God had intended.
Please think about what you would want your family to do if this ever happened to you or them and then make sure that this is known in a legal document for a later time.
Daniel Carvel Kepler