People Are Never ‘Vegetables'

The Boston Herald

The videos of Terri Schiavo are stunning. Doctors say she is in a persistent vegetative state, a miserable sequence of words and inaccurate, too. "Vegetative: growing or developing as or like plants." What exactly does this mean? But the videos show a responsive Terri smiling at her mother, opening her eyes at a doctor's request, recognizing music, following a ball. Small things to people whose bodies work. But miraculous things when your husband and doctors and a state court have washed their hands of you.

Terri Schiavo is a 39-year-old brain-damaged woman temporarily saved from death by the Florida Legislature and Gov. Jeb Bush. In 1990 she allegedly had a heart attack due to a chemical imbalance and was deprived of oxygen for five minutes. (There is another theory that her husband was somehow to blame.) For 13 years she has lived in a health care facility, nourished by a feeding tube, unable to communicate or do anything for herself. Her husband, insisting she wouldn't want to live like this, petitioned the court to let her die. The court agreed and gave permission to have her feeding tube removed. Her parents objected, the Legislature got involved, Jeb Bush intervened. After six days without food, Terri Schiavo's feeding tube was reattached Wednesday. The story has attracted national attention.

Thirty-two years ago doctors told me that my mother was in "a persistent vegetative state." People insist that names like the Braves and the Redskins are demeaning. But nobody says a thing about critically injured people being compared to vegetables. 

The day my mother was operated on to relieve swelling in her brain, the result of a fall, a doctor said, "If your mother lives, and you better hope she doesn't, she will be a vegetable.”

My mother lived. She lay unconscious for weeks, was in rehab for months and in and out of hospitals for years. And when she died, 17 years after her fall, she was not the person she had been.

But she was never a vegetable. She was my mother, not the woman who dressed to the nines every day and wore a hat to church and sang "Second Hand Rose" at every party. She could hardly walk. And though she talked all the time, I never heard her sing again.

But she was not a plant. She was not, even when she was unconscious, machines pumping in breath and food, some soulless, non-human life form, dispensable and disposable.

Friends came to see her but most didn't come back. It was too hard, they told my father. She wasn't the person she used to be. 

Neither is Terri Schiavo. She's damaged goods and in this country damaged goods are thrown away and replaced or they are hidden because we're into perfection - strength, youth, beauty. And when these things are gone?  

Out with the old and in with the new.

Maybe Terri Schiavo wouldn't want to live the way she's living. Maybe her husband is right. But she didn't tell her parents this or her sister or anyone except her husband, who dates and will benefit from her life insurance.

Should Terri Schiavo have a feeding tube? Or should she be allowed to die?

Her husband doesn't have the answer. Neither do her parents or the courts or the state or anyone. Only she knows. And she can't say what she wants. And that's the tragedy.

What needs to be learned from Terri Schiavo is that everyone should have a living will. It's just a little piece of paper that says resuscitate or do not resuscitate. Do everything to save me, or let me go. Because the space between life and death is an unknown - to doctors, to clergy, to lawyers, to everyone. And the only person with a right to say, "Let me linger here,” or “Set me free,” is the one in that space, this life-death decision too big for anyone else to make.