To die or not to die...

I've been feeling really conflicted on this whole Terri Schiavo (sp?) issue. If you haven't been keeping up with the news, she is the woman in Florida who has been in a vegetative state for more than a decade due to brain damage inflicted by an injury or something. The courts mandated that her feeding/hydration tube be removed last Friday, and despite the desperate efforts of her family, this ruling still stands. Today is her fourth day without hydration or nutrition. Her husband, who has apparently been living with and fathered children with some other woman for several years, insists that this order is exactly what Terri would want. He says she had told him in prior conversations that she would not want to be kept alive artificially. However, she never put those wishes into a legal document; hence the dilemma.

On the one hand, I imagine what I would want were I in her shoes -- not that she probably wears shoes these days. I absolutely do not want to be kept alive by machines and to cause such an emotional and financial burden on my family. I have no doubt that there is something much better waiting for me after I'm done with this body. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not in a partcularly big hurry to get to it just yet. However, if something tragic were to happen to me and I could no longer communicate with the world or experience life in any meaninful sort of way, what's the point of sticking around??? Just let me go, for crying out loud!

On the other hand, I can certainly see her family's side of things as well. I can't make up my mind, though, if their motives are truly loving or selfish in nature. Of course, not being able to climb into the minds of others, I'll never know for sure. I know they don't want to lose her, but in a sense haven't they already lost her? I know it sounds incredibly inhumane to allow her to starve/dehydrate until she passes on, and yet I wonder if she even has any awareness of what is happening to her body. From what little detail I've heard, the multi-judge panel that made the ruling was shown by medical experts that she had no conscious awareness of anything, and yet her family says she regularly exhibits emotion, such as laughter and sadness.

If you listen to any of the radio pundits, such as Boortz or Michael Savage, you hear the above arguments plus some others much more political in nature. Is this act a step across the line of personal liberty? Is the court ruling the first pebble in an eventual landslide into such evil atrocities as those perpetrated by the Nazis -- first sterilizing those who were mentally unstable, then euthanizing societal untouchables, and finally exterminating an entire race of people?

I can't quite get my brain around those questions. All I keep coming back to is my gut. And it says, "Let her go."