The Highway.com

Over the past few weeks, many have asked if I intended to write something on the Terry Shaivo story. Sure there are a lot of things I could comment on. I could easily use up all the available space for my site on the countless ethical and legal quagmires exposed by the way she had lived and died. I could write a piece on God’s role. I could eulogize somebody I never knew. I could defend either side of the family that fought bitterly for her . . . for albeit vastly different reasons. I could write on the media circus that robbed all dignity from everyone involved, along with the countless armchair moralists and politicians who decided to turn it into a personal crusade. I could easily write on the role of the doctors, lawyers, and judges who, in playing God, set up a situation where John Wayne Gacy received a far more humane end than an innocent woman starved slowly to death.

I have plenty of humble opinions.

My Two Cents

(April 12, 2005)

The ramification of the dilemma reaches all of us personally, and I took the time to discuss what I felt, my desires given similar circumstances, with those closest to me. I made sure I understood their wishes, and maybe this was the only good thing that could have been extrapolated from a nightmare of moral paradoxes. But for every right there was an equally compelling wrong. Though I could understand and feel for all personally involved, every time I tried to find a semblance of sanity I only found dead ends. My thoughts went to Michael Shaivo, who believed he was doing the right thing and getting trashed daily for it, but what if in the limbo of her silent, mute existence Terry changed her mind? My prayers went to the Schindlers, who believed they were doing the right thing and prayed for a miracle to bring back their daughter, but at what cost, at whose expense? Did their wishes supercede Terry’s?  Was it right to involve all of us?  Was the drooling, incapacitated vegetable we all saw the legacy she wanted to leave? My heart went to Terry, the one person who needed to speak but couldn’t, but isn’t it ironic that the very thing that put her in her condition was forcefully imposed on her as the means of her death? I even feel for the judges who had to choose one side over another, but am increasingly concerned about the precedent now set. When the dust settles, where will the new line be drawn? While I can understand the importance of making our desires clear to our loved ones if faced with similar circumstances, I can only feel ashamed that we let it all spiral out of control, allowed what should be painfully intimate, private, to become a public spectacle.

My answer . . . a resounding no.

Why add my two cents?

I refuse to trivialize a tragedy with another in a long list of opinions passed off as the definitive answer for something that has none. I refuse to pretend I have the right answer, the quick and easy thousand word solution, when frankly I don’t. I refuse to become what I detest, a society that lives vicariously off the carrion our irresponsible news media feeds us to fill a 24-hour slot. I refuse to turn something so painful for all the immediate participants into small talk at the water cooler, a coffee clutch, or an internet chat. I refuse to turn fifteen years of agony for Terry Shaivo, her husband and family, into fifteen minutes of fame. Just because I can write something, does not mean I should. There is a thing called responsibility, and I don’t want to add to a culture that thinks it is entitled to watch every train wreck or jam up a normally reasonable commute home to see a totaled mini van on the side of the road. I see that as no different from the Colosseum filled with gleeful Romans watching two gladiators turn each other into a mangled mess, their lives hinging on the direction of a bored, fickle, overindulged, disinterested thumb.

Some things are better left unsaid.