Posted on 03/27/2005 2:17:48 PM PST by EveningStar
Just over a year ago, when my wife, Tule, died after a short, terrible battle with advanced breast cancer, everyone said it was a mercy, and probably for the best.
Gently, with kindness and compassion, they assured me that this beautiful, talented, spirited woman would not have wanted to go on living that way, lying helpless in bed, the cancer that had so rapidly spread to her brain robbing her of the ability to speak or to move, her body wasting, the light in her lovely eyes fading, fading, fading away. And in my mind I knew that they probably were right.
But in my heart, even a year later, and no matter what her physical condition, I'd still give anything just to hear her breathe again.
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
(Can anybody help me with this bugmenot plug-in for Mozilla? I can't get it to work and now I have to actually go to bugmenot.com to go to the article.)
The husband in this debacle will go down in history as the biggest fool, jerk, and ape in modern history.
Hello! Terri doesn't have cancer. Terri is or was healthy until last Friday.
Read the entire article.
I also lived through my husband's cancer death, and it hurt me to no end when people stated "he is in no pain, you wouldn't want him back to suffer, now would you?"
I angrily replied "yes, I would want him back so that I could have more time to shower love upon him"
Those kind of statements were HORRIBLE to listen to.
morphine drip to accelerate her death (decreases respirations)
I'm not about to register. If there's anything more important than the opening then it should have been in the excerpt.
I can only excerpt so much but I will show you the closing of the article:
And yet, knowing a person's end-of-life wishes doesn't necessarily make the dying any easier on the people left behind. As much as we might like to think so, the fact is that our lives do not belong to us alone. Our lives also belong at least in part to the people who love us - and as we ponder our final wishes, it seems only fair to take that into account.
Again, I don't know what to do about the Schiavo case. I never had to make that kind of life or death decision.
But if I had had the opportunity to choose for Tule, to decide whether to embrace death or keep it at bay, even if only temporarily, I suspect I would have thought with my head but acted with my heart.
Maybe it would have been selfish. But for as long as possible without her suffering, I would have chosen life, and hope – and the soft, comforting, living sound of breathing in the night.
Michael Schiavo and OJ Simpson. Here's hoping neither has any peace as long as they are on this earth.
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