Hot Button

It is a gray morning on the verge of the Resurrection. It threatens to rain. I know far more than I ever needed to know about the Schiavo family, thanks to the Times this morning, and the relations and recriminations that have led to this sad and sorry place.

I know about the weight loss, and the basement in the Schindler home where the couple lived just after they were married, and the thud in the night when Terry’s heart stopped beating, and the nursing classes that Michael took to help care for her in the first years of her confinement, and the failure to treat the urinary tract infection, and the confrontation over the settlement money, and despite the amount, I have no idea who or how the bills have been paid to maintain her in that bed, or the state resources expended in the parade of attorney’s and judges and satellite trucks.

I read the morning’s e-mail after I finished the article. A friend wrote me about the media spectacle, and the way Washington had handled it. He reminded me of the hot button that Terry Schiavo’s death is hitting all over the country, in the Red States.

My aunt had a stroke years ago, and the heroic measures taken to save her life were breathtaking. I saw the bill, and in then-dollars the amount was still incomprehensible large. Medicine is an amazing thing. The intervention left her in a state not radically different than Terry’s. The New York Times was brought to her every day, and her maintenance was thankfully covered by her health plan and the proceeds of the sale of her house. Mostly, anyway, and the amount spent for the last ten years of her life would have financed a health network for several African villages.

Not that it would have been spent that way, had there been a different outcome. Her stroke occurred before the days of living wills and previously unknown rights to life and death were found in a Constitution that had no need to state them. So let me set the red herring of resource allocation aside for a moment.

That is why there is no middle ground in this debate. Intervention in this case is either one thing or another thing, and no compromise on strongly held views is possible. Murder is murder, unless it is not.

That is the crux of the matter, and it is no debate. There are two views across a gaping chasm. If the end of Terry Schiavo’s life is murder, then our society has become lost in a relativist nightmare.

So the answer to that question is the pivot. Life is a relativist matter, played out in our lives of plenty against a sea of choices. There are other places and times where choice is limited to fight or flight, and Providence has provided us the luxury to have to do neither.

I am left in the wreckage of the secular age, and lack the conviction of absolutism. I come from a religious family pilgrimage that led from the Presbyterian Church through several incarnations to finally worship, if that is what it was, at the Unitarian Church .

The Unitarians of that era followed a doctrine of ”secular humanism,” before either word became epithets. It seemed to make sense, at the time. The Faiths were not at war, and Time Magazine ran a cover story on the death of God.

Our Sunday School was progressive, and one year we conducted a social examination of the Christian sects in the Detroit area. Our teenage group was taken to a Latter Day Saints service, and an interminable Greek Orthodox ceremony, with whirling censors and the thick rich smell of incense.

We attended a Catholic ceremony, and the Priest was kind enough to speak to us after the Host had been consumed and the sacramental wine had been consumed. I was taken by the depiction of the miracle. I gushed with about the strength of the symbolic moment, overwhelmed by the ancient and pervasive power of it.

The Priest looked at me gravely and explained that the Transubstantiation was not symbolic, but real. It might be a symbol at the Episcopal Church down the street, but here, in this holy place, the Lord’s actual flesh and blood sealed the compact between God and Man.

I thought about that hard for a while, and put it aside. I could not find it within me to believe in the miracle, and in time, I found the Unitarians too willing to accept whatever the social fashion of the moment demanded, and there were all manner of causes parading down the boulevard. I think it was the debate over the American War in Asia that tore me finally from Sunday services, since I believed that there cases in which the use of great violence was perfectly justified.

In fact, I was convinced that the measured relativism of the Johnson Administration’ carrots and sticks was preventing the resolution of the conflict and leading to greater slaughter.

But that is neither here, nor there, save as a place of reference. I am against abortion. I also do not believe that I have the right to compel others to my point of view. I am against euthanasia, and feel I have a more compelling interest in the most scrupulous standards for compliance with ethical norms.

I was interested by the practical exercise of those ethics on the Forrestal , on deployment in the Med. A young airman was performing periodic maintenance on one of the heavy armored hatches that protect the decks below the hangar bay, and through some mischance, his head was crushed. He was taken straightaway to sick bay, and the word spread through the ship that he had survived.

He was med-evaced the next day by helicopter to the Naval Hospital at Rota . Other doctors examined him, determining that there was no brain function and no hope of recovery. They turned off the machines and pronounced him dead.

I asked the flight surgeon later what had transpired. He told me that the Ships’ Doctor made the decision that the young man would not die on the ship. Others could make the determination, but it was not going to be on his watch in his space.

For him, it was a not a question of ethics, but timing.

I think, based on personal observation, that there is a spectrum in the quality of life. The resolution of the airman’s case appears rational to me. If his family had a different opinion, they were not consulted. I cannot place Terry Schiavo’s existence on the spectrum, though a battalion of physicians have. I don’t know what I would do, fifteen years along. I like to think I would have hope, and if I had the resources, the fortitude to stay the course.

But it is not my decision to make, nor my business to stand witness to something I understand only through the words others. In the case in which I do have clear and unambiguous authority, I have left written instructions that should I find myself in a circumstance similar to Terry’s, that they should let me go to my fate, forthwith.

I wish sometimes I had the comfort of certainty, the indomitable faith of purpose and righteousness, in the best sense of that magnificent word. The proponents of life have that, and as you note, so do our enemies. But I don’t, though on the relativist scale, I was certainly willing to die for Constitutional principle. Or preferably, make the adversary die for his.

It has been more than a week since the tube was removed from Terry’s abdomen, and it is entirely possible that she will die on Easter.

I was interested in the impact of the other story of the week, the latest shooting at the Reservation school at Red Lake . NRA Vice President Sandra S. Froman announced that it was the opinion of her organization that guns should be made available to teachers, presumably for defensive purposes.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

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