The Late Great Johnny Ace Thursday, March 31, 2005

According to the National Review's blog, CNN is saying the pope has been given last rites. When I was a kid, my mother and I stood on Queens Boulevard with a zillion other people waiting for his motorcade to drive by; it was around that time I told her my goal in life was to be the first American pontiff. And an astronaut too--I had seen Star Wars around the same time.

The day after Wrong Turn Jr. was born, Mrs. WTJ tried to get him to feed and he turned blue. I was standing in the hallway with my parents--we figured we'd give her some privacy--then all of a sudden every doctor in sight rushed into the room. A couple seconds later they wheeled out a little glass box with my son in it. He spent a long week in intensive care, getting schlepped from one little box to another and covered with sensors and wires everywhere he went. When he wasn't turning blue he had problems with his heart. The Six Million Dollar Baby.

Mrs. WTJ stayed with him, in a little isolation room in a corner of the ward. She slept on a cot and washed herself in the sink. To use the bathroom you had to walk through something like decompression doors. I came by every day and watched while other people did things to him: Mrs. WTJ learning to feed him, and nurses doing hospital things. I felt as powerless as he looked.

Like the song says, someone saved my life tonight. Not long before the birth, I had read a compelling review of JPII's Crossing the Threshold of Hope, a book I had sort of sneered at when it first hit stores and became a gazillion seller. I didn't want to be part of the crowds on Queens Boulevard anymore. But times change, attitudes change, and so I got a copy.

I wish I'd written about it at the time, because it's already fading from my mind. But the core message is simple and unforgettable: a discourse on Christ's admonition: Be not afraid! Why the hell not, in a world where two-day-old babies can turn blue and suffocate and their fathers can't do anything to help them? Because we are never alone. We are never forsaken. And if we remember that, evil and death have no hold over us.

There are no atheists in foxholes, but sometimes when the shells are bursting all around you even the believers forget the basics. He was always there to remind us. And now he leaves us, but not alone: never alone.

He saved the world, and he saved a billion souls with his own gentle but unyielding spirit. Stalin asked about another pope: Where are his legions? I'll tell ya, buddy: waiting in the rain on Queens Boulevard, and a thousand streets around the globe.

Pax forever. And an early goodbye.

@ 8:20:00 PM, ,

That's My Fun Day Monday, March 28, 2005

With all the Schiavo mishegais, I forgot to write about Easter. It felt off-kilter this year: A bunch of situations came together just so, and I missed mass on Friday. Without it you can't really understand what the Easter service means, particularly in aesthetic terms. There's something about walking into a church on Good Friday evening, with the lights off and the whole place stony and somber, and seeing the altar bare, the tabernacle open and empty. Aesthetics, but it says everything you need to know about the day and its significance.

Without that memory near in mind, seeing the church splendidly decked for Easter doesn't carry the same punch. Still, it was good to go; even better to have Wrong Turn Jr. enjoying his first holiday mass. (Mrs. WTJ, very generously, looked after him during the service, which involved taking him for lots of strolls in the foyer. During one of these the he was adopted as a mascot by the guys who collect the offerings.)

More later. Gawd bless.

@ 10:15:00 AM, ,

The Lady Vanishes III Sunday, March 27, 2005

To my cheerfully combative commenter: I would argue that all of your substantive questions are covered either in the Steyn column or the other stuff I've posted. (e.g., her husband gave up the right to speak for her as her husband when he took up with another woman.) As for the arguments from inconsistency, and hypocrisy: Even if they're true, which I don't acknowledge, so what? What does it matter next to somebody's life? And what does it matter next to the facts of the case: Somebody with a big conflict of interest is claiming, after years and years of inaction, that this woman has to die--and the courts trampled procedure and good sense to accommodate him?

@ 5:56:00 PM, ,

On the Mark

People have complained about my blockquotes, but here's the biggest and blockiest of them all. By Mr. Steyn.


A couple of decades back, north of the border, it was discovered that some overzealous types in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been surreptitiously burning down the barns of Quebec separatists. The prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, shrugged off the controversy and blithely remarked that, if people were so upset by the Mounties illegally burning down barns, perhaps he'd make the burning of barns by Mounties legal. As the columnist George Jonas commented:

"It seemed not to occur to him that it isn't wrong to burn down barns because it's illegal, but it's illegal to burn down barns because it's wrong. Like other statist politicians, Mr. Trudeau . . . either didn't see, or resented, that right and wrong are only reflected by the laws, not determined by them."

That's how I feel about the Terri Schiavo case. I'm neither a Floridian nor a lawyer, and, for all I know, it may be legal under Florida law for the state to order her to be starved to death. But it is still wrong.

This is not a criminal, not a murderer, not a person whose life should be in the gift of the state. So I find it repulsive, and indeed decadent, to have her continued existence framed in terms of "plaintiffs" and "petitions" and "en banc review" and "de novo" and all the other legalese. Mrs. Schiavo has been in her present condition for 15 years. Whoever she once was, this is who she is now -- and, after a decade and a half, there is no compelling reason to kill her. Any legal system with a decent respect for the status quo -- something too many American judges are increasingly disdainful of -- would recognize that her present life, in all its limitations, is now a well-established fact, and it is the most grotesque judicial overreaching for any court at this late stage to decide enough is enough. It would be one thing had a doctor decided to reach for the morphine and "put her out of her misery" after a week in her diminished state; after 15 years, for the courts to treat her like a Death Row killer who's exhausted her appeals is simply vile.

There seems to be a genuine dispute about her condition -- between those on her husband's side, who say she has "no consciousness," and those on her parents' side, who say she is capable of basic, childlike reactions. If the latter are correct, ending her life is an act of murder. If the former are correct, what difference does it make? If she feels nothing -- if there's no there there -- she has no misery to be put out of. That being so, why not err in favor of the non-irreversible option?

The here's-your-shroud-and-what's-your-hurry crowd say, ah, yes, but you uptight conservatives are always boring on about the sanctity of marriage, and this is what her husband wants, and he's legally the next of kin.

Michael Schiavo is living in a common-law relationship with another woman, by whom he has fathered children. I make no judgment on that. Who of us can say how we would react in his circumstances? Maybe I'd pull my hat down over my face and slink off to the cathouse on the other side of town once a week. Maybe I'd embark on a discreet companionship with a lonely widow. But if I take on a new wife (in all but name) and make a new family, I would think it not unreasonable to forfeit any right of life or death over my previous wife.

Michael Schiavo took a vow to be faithful in sickness and in health, forsaking all others till death do them part. He's forsaken his wife and been unfaithful to her: She is, de facto, his ex-wife, yet, de jure, he appears to have the right to order her execution. This is preposterous. Suppose his current common-law partner were to fall victim to a disabling accident. Would he also be able to have her terminated? Can he exercise his spousal rights polygamously? The legal deference to Mr. Schiavo's position, to his rights overriding her parents', is at odds with reality.

As for the worthlessness of Terri Schiavo's existence, some years back I was discussing the death of a distinguished songwriter with one of his old colleagues. My then girlfriend, in her mid-20s, was getting twitchy to head for dinner and said airily, "Oh, well, he had a good life. He was 87." "That's easy for you to say," said his old pal. "I'm 86." To say nobody would want to live in an iron lung or a wheelchair or a neck brace or with third-degree burns over 80 percent of your body is likewise easy for you to say.

We all have friends who are passionate about some activity -- They say, "I live to ski," or dance, or play the cello. Then something happens and they can't. The ones I've known fall into two broad camps: There are those who give up and consider what's left of their lives a waste of time; and there are those who say they've learned to appreciate simple pleasures, like the morning sun through the spring blossom dappling their room each morning. Most of us roll our eyes and think, "What a loser, mooning on about the blossom. He used to be a Hollywood vice president, for Pete's sake."

But that's easy for us to say. We can't know which camp we'd fall into until it happens to us. And it behooves us to maintain a certain modesty about presuming to speak for others -- even those we know well. Example: "Driving down there, I remember distinctly thinking that Chris would rather not live than be in this condition." That's Barbara Johnson recalling the 1995 accident of her son Christopher Reeve. Her instinct was to pull the plug; his was to live.

As to arguments about "Congressional overreaching" and "states' rights," which is more likely? That Congress will use this precedent to pass bills keeping you -- yes, you, Joe Schmoe of 37 Elm Street -- alive till your 118th birthday. Or that the various third parties who intrude between patient and doctor in the American system -- next of kin, HMOs, insurers -- will see the Schiavo case as an important benchmark in what's already a drift toward a culture of convenience euthanasia. Here's a thought: Where do you go to get a living-will kit saying that in the event of a hideous accident I don't want to be put to death by a Florida judge or the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals? And, if you had such a living will, would any U.S. court recognize it?

@ 7:03:00 AM, ,