Brain on the left is a healthy brain, brain on the right is Schiavo's brain.
Posted on 03/26/2007 9:18:14 PM PDT by JohnSullivan
On the night of Terri's funeral, I posted a few observations and a lot of pictures of what I had seen in the days of Lent, the Triduum, and the First Sunday of Easter. They are here: http://www.endlesswonder.com/terrischiavo.html
Many times I have wanted to go in and update or even expand upon what was there, but I decided to just leave it as a memory frozen in time of one of the most disgraceful moments in our history when just about everyone let us down, and worst of all, Terri's death
There was once a day when I would think of Sean Hannity and envision the fun-loving Rush echo-chamber and his sidekick Flipper - something like Andy once was to Conan, who would bring on Marty to close the show with a respectable performance. That all changed in Easter, 2005, and the night of Terri Schiavo's funeral, I was there, being most gracious with Father Frank Pavone who is the epitomization of the "respect life" tradition that celebrates our Catholic belief that Christ was never greedy in allowing some small spinters of the Cross to be shared by us, even if it causes us nothing but misery and pain in this short life which is but a grain of sand in the seeming eternity of the beach, and infinitely more than that.
In Terri Schiavo we had a case of the culture of death and the culture of life going head-to-head in the centers of civil reason, our Courts.
It was ultimately a test of where our nation is as a culture. Do we give equal weight to our society's value for our spirits, our minds, and then our bodies? Do we give any credibility to the idea that we even have spirits at all separate from our minds, and that a balanced life is truly one where we place our spirit over our mind, and then our mind over body? We have often heard the term "mind over body" but we rarely hear the term "spirit over mind." The culture of death suffers one completely fatal conclusion, and that is that even if there is a spirit, it is crafted by the electrical neurons darting about from here to there between our ears. In short, we give someone's spiritual value the credit due to the condition of a mind. This is, of course, why it is so easy to kill the unborn, because under such thought, an underdeveloped mind and body is akin to an underdeveloped spirit - so nothing but flesh not far removed from the trimmings from fingernails is removed from the process. It is hard to prove spirituality, for as wise men have long said, "if you understand, no explaination is necessary. If you don't, no explaination is possible."
But the value of Terri Schindler-Schiavo was seen by the culture of death - and many others as well by the condition of her mind and body. What she lacked in the thought process of her deteriorating mind and body was never any reason to dismiss the value of the soul within her, and our responsibility to have mercy on her existence until her natural death. Now mind you, my Catholic Church has a lot of self-contradictory proclaimations in this regard. We limit some Sacraments to an "age of reason," and this includes Baptism, fortunately in all too many cases in some regions, when we should be so eager to baptize souls into Christ that some way should be found to baptize embryos in the womb. Why then? Because it is there, at our moment of conception, when we are truly created as the image of God. Who says God has a spherical shape not unlike the newly fertilized egg? Why, I do. I can't prove it, but look at the outer boundaries of the Universe, or the shape of stars and planets or electrons ... God does have a fascination for spheres. From then on out, as we develop for the rest of our lives under constantly changing cell structures that end only when we die and those cells return to dust, we are quick to judge on other things, such as a "birth defect," or a pimpled face, or a crooked nose, or a skin color or even skin condition. We forget where we become and soon become part of the animal kingdom, with one exception.
In Pinellas County, Florida if any dog or cat were to be starved of food and water for two weeks until death, someone would be going to jail for a serious felony. But when it came to Terri, she was even less than a dog, and that is infuriating to me to this day.
Again, it all goes to our basic disrespect for our spirits, something I believe the dogs and cats just don't have. Some people believed that by killing Terri they could kill not only her mind and body - as if time wouldn't do that soon enough anyway - but they could also kill her soul. I have often wanted to know what Michael Schiavo's motives may have been. He may have feared that Terri would wake up to announce some startling reveletion, but more likely he calculated the costs of "rehabilitation," not seeing any hope that she would ever die before his own finances would be ruined. His parents offered the "out" to that excuse - to just take her home and assume all responsibilities for her care. In the end, there really isn't any good reason that Terri is dead today. I asked him many times to keep his "Concubine" (now his wife) and give up Terri - save her life by divorcing her. Yet he insisted that Terri's wishes were to die in the abstract conceptual theory that she would ever be helpless to live.
Now here's where it gets interesting, and I would love someday to discuss specific calls between a dying Pope John Paul II, his aides, the Bishop of St. Petersburg, and more importantly Monsignor Thaddeus Malinowski, a retired 3-Star General of the Army Chaplain Corps who was Elvis Presley's chaplain at one point and Terri's personal chaplain for the last 5 years of Terri's life. The issue was that Terri's human rights were being violated, and that means that her freedom of religious expression was being violated specifically. In short, Terri Schindler-Schiavo, from one of the most staunchly Catholic families I have ever met, could not have requested to be killed in this situation, because it would be contrary to her own personal religious beliefs. Therefore, Michael, by stating that Terri had wished death and the loss of all hope to stay around and exist perhaps only to be loved and to love back in a pure, spiritual way, was an outright liar. The Pope called Michael Schiavo out on this, Monsignor Malinowski and Father Pavone did as well, but in what could be an entirely separate article, Bishop Robert N. Lynch of the Diocese of St. Petersburg would have none of it - he simply would not get involved in an issue that many politicians would, sometimes at their own peril.
But inasmuchas Bishop Lynch disappointed me by flying off to Indonesia during this local travesty, issuing a simple order to Michael and the Schindlers to "just get along," the politicians in Tallahassee disappointed me even more by weighing the life of one woman who couldn't even think against their own political fortunes. Governor Jeb Bush even admitted before the cameras with this legal counsel behind him that he had the Executive authority to rescue Terri, and claim his equal place in the separation of powers that gave Judge Greer no authentic authority over his powers as Governor, especially with the legislative precedent behind him. But, he decided I suppose it was more important to work on more important projects, such as funding beach replenishment projects to pump sand off the ocean bottom onto our local beaches to dazzle the tourists. By the way, half of that sand, millions of dollars later, is already gone. And by the way, so is Jeb Bush, and good riddance.
But I would take him any day over the politicians who drafted the Palm Sunday "Terri's Law" in the U.S. Congress, and I blame George W. Bush to this day for signing it. Once it became specific to a named individual - in direct contrast to the norm of producing equal justice in the eyes of the law for any individual without regard to race, sex, national origin, or whether he or she is named Terri or not, this law was nothing but Conservative political grandstanding, and for that reason alone I voted out every Republican that voted for the law, which was dead on arrival. And now, because of this political weakness in Washington, the next person in Terri's shoes will require their own law specially drafted with their own name on it. Nothing has been accomplished.
I have asked her parents both before and after Terri's death many of the "what if" questions, and each and every time such questions were shrugged off. "We just want to take Terri home - to love her "as is" - without any guarantees of long life or medical improvement."
Oh, how I wish that were the Fairy Tale ending to what Easter has now become for me - an annual reminder of what happens in a society that puts the body over the mind, as experienced by our entertainment, culture, and social problems, and the mind over the soul.
bump
Welcome to FR. I see you just signed up. Glad to see you feel so at home as to post your very first thread topic. Can't imagine why you chose this one unless you're cold and wanted to start a fire. LOL
The courts and her husband did the right thing. She had zero chance of ever waking up and it would have been pointless and cruel to keep her body alive any longer. There are thousands of similar cases a day where doctors and families decide that it is time for someone to be allowed to go with God. In most of those cases the patient is in much better shape than she was. I don't understand why this particular case and not some of the others because the pet cause of Jesse Jackson and so many others.
LOL , this will get REAL interesting .
No doubt about that. BTW, I see you're new here too. Welcome.
Brain on the left is a healthy brain, brain on the right is Schiavo's brain.
Thanks . I've lurked for a long time and remember the Terri wars . Talk about nasty ....
And what is your opinion?
It'd say there is a good chance this thread was started to incite a forum war.
She was awake.
"She was awake."
In 1989.
I don't know, Dude. She was awake in the footage that I saw of her too...
She wasn't getting any rehab/treatment, however. The money for her treatment was being spent on MS's new "family".
Can't we just let her and her memory rest in peace? She's with God now. I'm willing to believe that if God had wanted her alive still, there would have been nothing that could have taken her from life.
Continue to ignore the facts, ie the truth. Terri was not in a coma, or pvs or brain dead. No one in such states can respond the way Terri did. I cared for enough people like that and I ought to know.
You would know? 8 out of 9 neurologists classified her as being in a PVS. Are you claiming to know more than these docs?
I agree 100%.
She was a dead woman in a barely alive body.
And everyone went nuts on this subject and ascribed everything possible to the case.
She is free now, let her go.
Other doctors declared her NOT to be in PVS.
How many such patients did YOU care for?
I'll trust the doctors who actually saw her over somebody who only saw carefully selected TV footage and saw what they wanted to see. The woman had been in a coma for 15 years. Top specialists looked at what was left of her brain and determined that there was a zero percent chance she could ever wake up. It was humane to let her go and it probably should have been done much sooner. Modern medicine may allow us to keep a body alive when the soul has long since departed but that doesn't make it right or humane to do so.
I've cared for only one who was in a coma, and I recall seeing on the news reports of his death, as the family pulled the plug.
The autopsy saw conditions consistant with a PVS. And according to the autopsy, the visual centers of Terri's brain were dead. How can she really respond visually to her parents if the eye centers are dead? Her brain was only half the weight of a normal brain of somebody of her age.
That she was in a coma was a LIE and it was obvious in footage of her.
It was not Easter -- it was a whole other week plus a day more. The lesson that Easter was Psalm 22 -- Verse 15 seemed especially poignant that day. Matthew 25:40 is a good one too.
Private laws are nothing new for the Republic.
I'm glad it was passed though. It offered little basis to actually overturn Greer's decision, but it offered me a scary insight into the psychology of the judiciary. That one opinion I read -- the judge saw an opportunity to slam the conservatives -- Terri's fate was secondary, I'm sure... I'm sure I lost more sleep over Terri's case than any judge did. He seemed to be almost requiring clear and convincing evidence that Terri wanted to live rather than the other way around.
Of course after years of neglect and dehydration, it was half the size. I just saw an episode of HOUSE based on a true story where surgeons removed the entire left hemisphere of a man's brain, to improve his quality of life. He too was not in a coma and woke after surgery too speak and move.
It was bizarre.
People can literally function with HALF a brain, my argument to yours in the last post.
Yes, those threads were very nasty.
I tend to agree with you. I really wish this whole issue would go away on FR. A decision had to be made. They could have kept this woman who had no brain activity alive indefinitely at an exorbitant cost. That just isn't wise, nor is it dignified to allow someone to lie in this state indefinitely. Can all of you Schaivo activists understand that this woman is gone and you need to allow her to rest in peace?
I'd say, "you're right". Unfortunately there are those who will be more than willing to jump in, feet first, and start it up all over again. And so it goes...
Amen, trussell, amen.
The family obviously cherry picked footage which doesn't help anything.
JohnSullivan joined up today and posted this thread. This person then disappeared without making any further comments. If this person's attempt was to start a flame war, I do hope that intelligent FReepers aren't going to fall for it. I realize that some have already done so, but perhaps if they know they've been played by a newbie, they'll decide to just let it go.
This is an MRI of a patient who recieved a hemispherectomy. Note that all his brain functions (The half that is still there). Note that only the outer portion of Schiavos brain was normal, the inside portion was not. That portion of Schiavo's brain that was black controlled many key things, including motor function and sense.
Terri was severely handicapped. She was not in a coma, in PVS or braindead. She responded to those around her.
You can continue propagating the LIES about her and we can continue to counter them.
Thank you.
This was beaten to death two years ago. It tore FR apart. Everything that could be said was said - on both sides. Don't reopen old wounds. Let it go.
These people are like the Energizer bunny.
Are you speaking metaphorically? If not, then your statement taken literally is non-sense. If she were not alive they wouldn't have have felt the compulsion to starve her to death. It reminds me of Harry Blackumn's idiotic and oxymoronic phrase, "potential life".
The right to life is not metaphorical. It is actual.
Cordially,
I know. Ungh.
I dunno; I distincly recall seeing a picture of her on the cross posted right on this very forum.
Yes, that was posted here, although I don't have the thread bookmarked.
However, I still have that photo saved on my HD. It was named "forsaken.jpg".
*eye roll*
And I was on here when it was beaten to death, as you say (I'm sure you didn't intend the pun), and haven't commented on the subject for months until recently.
I think it's more than appropriate to talk about it during the anniversary of Terri's forced starvation and dehydration. The Right to Life and losing it was and is a serious matter, unlike the loss of the ability to view pornography, or disrespect another's religion.
Furthermore, I suggest you also address a poster on the other side of this argument, with the same comment.
I know you didn't post the thread. I just selected your post.
I supported the family against the husband. My posts are a matter of record.
However, this topic tore Free Republic apart. I just don't want to see that whole thing re-awakened.
I hope this is an early April Fools Day joke by you. :)
The Terribots were claiming she was being crucified.
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