March 19, 2005 - We are born. We grow up. We grow older. And then we die. That is the way life works. Birth and death come one each to each customer. Between those signal events we live – at least that is what we hope we do. I visited a friend in the hospital. He was lying in the bed unable to move his body below chest. The cancer he was enduring had attacked his spinal cord and Arnold knew that his appointment with the dark angel was soon. With a book propped on the over-the-bed table he was able to read. The television was tuned to his beloved White Sox. We talked about some pending cases. I asked his advice on how to handle some of the puzzles they presented. Arnold turned the conversation to the subject I was avoiding – his impending journey.

“You know we live in our heads”, he said. “Life is consciousness. So long as I can read and watch the ball game I am alive. So long as I can think and talk to you I am alive. When that goes it will be time for me to go.” He said it with a smile on his lips. It was time for me to go. My leave taking was awkward. He knew and I knew that it was our last conference. I mumbled and stumbled and Arnold set me at ease. “Say goodbye to your mother for me”, he said. They had been friends since they sat next to each other in the first grade. My mother and I attended his funeral the next week.

I’ve seen quite a change in death during my lifetime. When I was a kid it was simple. Your heart stopped beating and you quit breathing and you were dead. The doctor checked for a pulse, held a mirror to your nose and pronounced you dead. It is not that simple anymore. In the last seven decades medical science has learned to thrust back death until the old definitions don’t apply anymore. We have had to redefine death to fit our ability to restart a heart and fill reluctant lungs. Terri Schiavo is forcing us to take a hard look at how we define life.

For 15 years that once alive young woman has been suspended above the threshold of death’s door. Those vital minutes between when her heart stopped and she ceased to breath killed those portions of her brain that let her have thoughts, feel emotion, and direct her body to move. Her body is curled into a cruel parody of the position in which she lay in her mother’s womb. Fueled only by the artificial nutrients flowing through a plastic tube implanted through her naval and leading to an artificial hole punched in her stomach her body and the portion of her brain that continues to drive the automatic functions of her existence are sustained. That is not life.

That existence has become a golden cost free opportunity for cynical politicians to posture and proclaim their reverence for life by compelling her to remain hanging there. It is a golden opportunity to curry favor by exploiting the pain of her parents and family who grieve but are unable to mourn the daughter they lost fifteen years ago. Providing medical care and life sustaining medicines demonstrates reverence for life but care and medicines cost money. Those same politicians who rushed to the cameras and microphones to proclaim that they would fight for Terri Schaivo’s life voted to severely cut the budget allocation for Medicaid devaluing the lives of those who depend upon it.

So Terri Schiavo, neither alive nor dead, has become a symbol for politicians to use and the conservative Republican judge who heard the evidence and decided the case gets death threats in the name of life. It is truly a matter of life and death.