This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Loving Our Neighbor

Lucette Lagnado writes about keeping her mother alive after a stroke, and how tough it was to hold on to her mother's humanity in the face of a dehumanizing culture.

I made it a priority each morning to comb her hair and put a silk bow in it. I would hold up a mirror and point out how lovely she looked.

The bow was large, and pink, and it gave my mother an oddly festive look, as if she were on her way to a party. Even in her 60s, Edith was pretty, with the large brown eyes of a doll on a shelf, and the effect of this motionless woman sitting there impeccably coiffed was arresting. That piece of pink silk worked wonders--mostly in changing the discourse. She became known in and out of the hospital as "The Lady With the Bow." Nurses bestowed on her extra doses of Tender Loving Care. Doctors spent extra minutes by her bedside, moved by her beauty.

That is when I realized that the stroke had not robbed Edith of her charm. Or her fundamental humanity.

I glimpse the same charm and the same humanity in Terri Schiavo--though the advocates of the culture of death have sought to rob her of both.

Their most powerful weapon has been language. Think of the recurrent phrase "persistent vegetative state" that we've heard to describe Terri. What it conjures, of course, is a turnip, say, or a piece of broccoli. If Terri is a vegetable, she can't possibly be human. She can't feel, or think, or care what we do to her.

She is not even really alive, or so we've been told by the legion of camera-loving bioethicists. If we believe them, we need not worry about the effects of withholding food or water. We can persuade ourselves that hers is a merciful death. A vegetable doesn't feel hunger pangs, does it? . . .

In the wake of the Terri Schiavo ordeal, we are now treated to published accounts of children recalling how they denied their own parents nutrition. "Defining deviancy down" was the phrase coined by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan to describe a society that had lost its moral compass and lowered its capacity for outrage. The phrase seems perfect to describe the middle- and upper-middle-class children who have surfaced to boast of how they ended their parents' lives--as if it had been somehow an act of valor. It is also a chillingly apt description of a society that, in the name of the law, forces a young woman to die of thirst and to starve even as we watch.

With all due respect to the lawyers, the husband, the courts and the neurologists, I prefer to heed the lessons I learned observing my mother in her pink bow. She, who enjoyed and reveled in the smallest act of kindness--a sweet word, a gentle embrace, the feel of sudsy shampoo on her hair--would have been bewildered by the barbaric show we have been witnessing in the hospice in Florida.