Letter to the Editor from McDonough, GA

Published: March 10, 2005

To the Editor:

My first clear memory as a child occurred at age three upon my mother’s lap as the two of us tossed a softball to a severely brain-damaged young man of eighteen named John. He had sustained his injuries in an auto accident, and my mother religiously cared for him three days a week while his mother attended to her other eight children. Like Terri Schiavo, he was completely dependent upon others to eat, breathe and thereby live. But did his life, spent in bed or wheelchair, constitute purpose or make any contribution to society?

Go forward to 2005, some 35 years later, and I am a visiting hospice nurse caring for those who, in my profession, we classify as “circling” death. It is a tough line of work, and one could argue that those I care for have no purpose either. How very wrong we are to think we have the knowledge to decide such things! Purpose is perceived, and I have seen families fall in love again after long separations, dying patients reunite with the Catholic Church and our wonderful priests, a widowed parishioner who faithfully brings Communion to hospice homes. Personally, I have gained humility, explosive compassion and purpose of life at the foot of a deathbed.

It is not uncommon for hospice patients to spiral downward to a point where giving them either food or fluids would hasten their deaths and cause them undo pain. I deal with that through deep prayer and a sort of “handing over” the situation to God. Hospice workers are constantly providing comfort measures of mouth swabbing and cool cloths to the head along with gentle reassurance to families, until the point that God decides to receive them.

But Terri Schiavo is by no means a hospice patient and would not even meet the most basic criteria for hospice as defined by our federal government. She is totally dependent upon others for care, and if I had to name her purpose for being alive, the list would go on forever, but here are the important few: because her loving parents and God created her in the likeness and image of a living Jesus, because her caregivers are receiving a great opportunity to serve God through her suffering, and most significantly, because we are not God and do not hold the heavenly powers to extinguish her life.

I encourage all Catholics to pray for her very dear life. If this euthanasia occurs, then I pray she will have someone swabbing her mouth and giving comfort until her last breath.

Lindy Berg, R.N., McDonough