Oh, cool.

I hope the link works. State guardians laud Schiavo for fulfilling Terri's wish to die. If it doesn't, you can create an account to the Sentinel on the spot, they won't pester you. I've said it before and I'll say it again and again - until you have stood in front of a doctor and heard that your spouse is beyond hope and you are holding the guardianship, you can't know what it's like. He turned his life upside down to try to help her, he was an absolutely fierce advocate for her care, he accepted the reality of her condition and tried to get on with his life while still fulfilling his responsibilities as her guardian and husband, and was vilified by so many Good Christians it made me want to throw up. I was lucky - my husband's family was totally supportive and never second guessed me at all. Had my SiL not been a nurse with the ability to research and size up the situation herself, it might have been totally different, and I could have been dragged through the court system with challenges to provide a feeding tube to a massively brain damaged and incapacitated dying man (but for weeks or maybe months, not years - the cancer would have won no matter what, and no legal system can change reality). The Shiavos were in hell, she was caught in a state that barely can be called life, between life and death, and he was stuck in a media and Internet and "Good Christian" driven shitstorm of hate and venom, in which, let's remember, Our President and his henchmen jumped in with both feet because they totally misread the situation. Like Iraq. Like Social Security. Like .... It was all politics to them, and I truly wonder about anyone who can't step back and see that now.

BTW, the Catholic Church on the local, we actually know what's going on level was never anything but loving and supportive in every way. Nobody ever, ever, ever suggested I wasn't doing the right thing at any step of the way. I did the funeral pre-arrangements because one of our priests gently nagged me to go do it every time he came to visit, because he was concerned that I'd throw away thousands of dollars I couldn't afford. That's the kind of grassroots support I really had. The Vatican's (and it wasn't the Pope, it was some bureaucrat's) "statement" was based on thirdhand and biased info, and I'm quite sure that it wouldn't have been the party line if they were there and could talk to her doctors. Because the Catholic Church supports life, but isn't scared shitless of death, and this poor girl was dead in all but primitive brainstem activity. There is a huge and definitely forgotten/misrepresented difference between her situation and caring for the "brain damaged" - this wasn't brain damage. This was a very flukey form of brain death, all but the most primitive, basic functions were gone.

It's a really interesting theological/philosophical point - do we keep a body alive on tubes because it is "alive" only in that the brain function governing respiration has kept going on its own somehow? Is that "alive" enough to put whatever is left of that person through a mindless captive state of tubes in, tubes out, as long as the lungs keep breathing? Do our souls live in our lungs?

We don't have to ignore science to respect life - it's not about being a fundie, it's about balancing science with human dignity. There was nothing at all dignified about keeping that poor woman in a bed to let her parents pretend she was still going to recover. And, at least publicly, they did keep spouting the story that she was going to recover. Even after the autopsy revealed to anybody with even casual medical knowledge that there was NO WAY IN HELL she was ever going to even improve from the state she was in, those people still claimed she could get better. It was macabre and horrible.

The Florida State Guardianship Association deserves huge applause for having the collective backbone to give Michael Schiavo the award - and I know why they did it. Because every damn one of those guardians know how hard this is, and looked at him and thought, "There, but for the grace of God...." I know I did.