Long ago, we would visit a hospital where one of the patients (clients, they called them) was hydrocephalic. The little boy had been given a shunt and could wheel around on his own in a wheelchair. His prognosis was not good and we are sure he didn't last long. He couldn't have. The critical ingredient of his survival was gone.
His parents had dropped him off, then slipped out the door, changed their addresses, and disappeared forever. This poor kid had nobody, save a few decent nurses to even smile back at him. Yet, plucky, he kept his grin and would follow us all around on every visit, would panic each evening when we left. His parents were able to slam the door shut, so were spared his pleading to be held or having to return his warm smiles. They had decided to MoveOn.
Withdrawing love is a spiritual form of dehydration, lethal as well.
Well said, well said.
If certain tales and trails are to be believed, Deborah Bushnell of the Felos Law Firm masterminded the strategy to deprive Terri of love and sensory stimulation along with all rehabilitation. Except for a few Potemkin exhibitions, they put her in physical and emotional solitary confinement. She was displayed with stuffed animals and flowers at her death; but in life, for years, they had taken those all away. In the last five years of her life, she was never once permitted to feel the sunshine on her cheek. There was no medical reason for that; it was sheer meanness.
Legally this strategy was brilliant: without rehab Terri could never get better; without love and sunlight and music and human company, she would get worse and worse, so their arguments to euthanize her would look better and better. Even if they lost their case to pull her feeding tube, she'd waste away and die for George and Mikey.
Morally, it's straight from Hell.
"Withdrawing love is a spiritual form of dehydration"
Yes it is..how sad for that young boy.