"I think some of these zealous anti-Terri types have guilty consciences. Why else are they so hysterical?"
Okay. What I can offer here is not super helpful because my only experience with this is with a person who died of inoperable cancer.
My mother had nasalpharyngeal (sp?) cancer that could not be operated on. She did have chemo and other treatments, but nothing really worked.
For a lot of reasons, which I won't go into here, I KNOW that my father was, perhaps unconsciously, eager to be rid of her.
So when he talked my mother into signing a DNR paper at the hospital I was beside myself.
But I was alone. Everyone else thought I was wrong--"let her go" was all I heard.
Maybe they were right. She was in pain.
But on the other hand, she was receiving morphine. And I was bringing her first grandchild (an infant at the time) out to visit her, and her last Thanksgiving, she spent picking out clothes for him as a Christmas present. I still remember, to this day, looking into her blue eyes at Thanksgiving and saying, "I'll see you at Christmas," but she died on December 12.
Who is to say what the value of an extra day is?
In any case... it's darn hard enough to decide when to "let them go" when the person is on the edge of death.
Terri is not dying of inoperable cancer. She is not on the verge of death.
--Terri is not dying of inoperable cancer. She is not on the verge of death.--
This is the difference. My step-grandfather died from lung cancer after a long painful illness. This was in the days before hospice care, and also when it was hard to get enough pain medication for late stage cancer (as it can still be).
It would have been worth it to go into hospice for him, to ease the pain. One night he tried to commit suicide with a hand gun it hurt so bad, but my grandmother stopped him.
A dear friend of mine, one of those who would come by the office just to bs for awhile, developed ALS, and chose not to go on the respirator. He too chose the hospice route, which was a good way for him and his family to let him slip away, surrounded by the people he loved.
Terri, though, is merely a victim of a condition that many people fear, loath, would hate to be in.
And so, because she represents a personal nightmare, they concoct stories of suffering, or other reasons why she should be put down.
Her life does not have the quality ours has, this is true. But she is not suffering like a person dying. She is merely a memento of what we don't want to become.
And for some, that make it all the more reason why she needs to go.