Matters of life and death

I walked into the hospital room and looked at Dad.

Always thin, he was becoming gaunt. He turned and looked at me, gave me a little smile. But he couldn't quite place who I was.

For me, it was the most heartbreaking moment of his battle with cancer, at least up until that point. I had already started to come to terms with the idea that he was going to die, but I knew then that I was dead to him already.

It's a memory that can still hurt in a way that few others do.

And that was 33 years ago.

Personal stories

Like millions of Americans, my personal experience is what I recall when confronted with the sad, painful story of Terri Schiavo.

Unlike Schiavo, Dad was sick for just over a year and he was at the mercy of a disease that was eating him alive. Like Schiavo, he became in the end "vegetative" as the melanoma spread into his brain and destroyed it.

One of the mysteries of death is that as common and inevitable as it is, we all experience it differently. Oh, we may share stages of grief and certain rituals, but we should never say to someone else, "I know how you feel" or "I know what you're going through."

Because the easily demonstrable fact is that we can't know any such things.

So, none of us can say with any degree of certainty that we know what Terri Schiavo's husband or parents or siblings have been going through. We can't experience that for them.

But we can remember how we reacted when confronted with death, sometimes in situations that bear at least a little resemblance to Schiavo's.

In my situation, we were fortunate that the doctors treating my father let my mother know just how sick he was becoming. That the only effective treatment would be palliative - to relieve pain and keep him comfortable as death approached.

And, the doctors assured us, that we could do as well at home as they could in the hospital - if that was what we wanted.

So, the next day, Mom loaded Dad into the station wagon and drove him the 70 miles home. Got him into his own bed and became a nurse.

I left college, not knowing how long I'd be away but knowing the doctors figured Dad only had a couple of weeks to live. As it turned out, it was only one week. A week in which he couldn't swallow, was completely unaware of his surroundings.

Then one night, his breathing slowed, faltered, became intermittent. And, surrounded by people who loved him, he died.

Do we get it?

As I said, many of us share similar stories.

We were lucky in many ways. That Dad didn't suffer physically as far as we could tell. That his illness was not prolonged. And that there was no dispute in the family - religious or otherwise - over the course of his treatment.

But that experience, and others since, have left me with a strong sense of how important it is for families to consider ahead of time how they will react to catastrophic illness or injury, to talk openly about it, and for them to be the decisionmakers when such situations arise.

For many of us, religious faith, self-interest and a desire not to be an emotional or financial burden to our families lead us to say, "Don't keep me alive by artificial means when there is no hope for recovery."

While many of us will remember the Schiavo odyssey for a long time, we'll eventually lose the details. The number of court appeals. How often the feeding tube went in and out.

We'll probably remember the pain - unnecessarily exacerbated by a lack of written instructions from Terri Schiavo herself.