Legacy Matters
Michael Schiavo says, "I kept my promise" on the tombstone he erected for his wife Terri without notifying her parents.
I haven't opined on the Schiavo autopsy because I found nothing surprising in it. She was brain-damaged, but that we knew. We don't know what caused her initial collapse and probably never will.
She essentially died of thirst because a Florida court refused to allow any further feeding by tube or liquids to a profoundly disabled woman.
The autopsy did not answer the moral question of what to do when a person has left no clear directions. Who decides who must die and what are the criteria?
The moral question becomes more troubling when a persistently vegetative person may be "minimally conscious", a new state endorsed by the Journal of Neurology, when in fact there is more "there" there than we recognized.
Joan Didion has done the most complete and fair-handed summary
in The Case of Theresa Schiavo with troubling questions for everyone on every side of this awful case.
What I find bizarre is the engraving on the tombstone.
"Departed from this earth, February 25, 1990," the date of her initial collapse. The date of her death is "At Peace, March 25, 2005"