I don’t feel at all easy about commenting on the Schiavo case. It is a

horrible moral conundrum — a whole concatenation of such, in fact. Parents

vs. spouse, judges playing God, federalism, right to life, cruel and

unusual.. Oh, Lord.

I wish I could share the clear conviction of some of my colleagues, but I

just can’t. I know my wife pretty well, and she knows me pretty well, and

we both have a lot of sympathy for Michael Schiavo. It strikes me as a bit

glib to just thump the table and say: “He wants his wife to die!” I don’t

find it hard to imagine circumstances in which I would want my wife to die,

too; nor circumstances in which my wife would, I hope, do everything she

could to have me die.

We all bring personal baggage to this kind of issue, as witness Linda Stasi in this morning’s New York Post I myself have never had a loved one in that situation. I did grow up among

medical chatter, though. My mother was a professional nurse — an

exceptionally dedicated and conscientious one, from all I have seen since.

I spent several hundred hours of my childhood sitting in rooms with Mum and

her colleagues (a high proportion of whom, by the way, were Catholic women

from the Republic of Ireland — that’s how the nursing profession in England

was structured) listening to their nurse talk. A recurrent theme was some

patient in a terminal condition being kept alive on tubes and drips by, as

these nurses would say, some damn fool doctor. (The nurse-doctor

relationship is a very fascinating one.) “Let the poor thing die!” one of

the nurses would say, to sympathetic nods of agreement all round.

People who deal with the human frame and its ailments every working day

develop an understanding of the rightness and natural-ness of death that

isn’t often vouchsafed to the rest of us. I don’t know the fine details of

the Schiavo case. Knowing nothing of Michael Schiavo’s motives, I am

willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he just wants

his wife to be at peace rather than linger indefinitely in her present

wretched state. There is nothing ipso fact ignoble or shameful about that.

The guy might be operating from some ulterior motive, I suppose, but does

anyone have actual evidence of this? Judging from the few quotes of his

that I have read and heard, he doesn’t seem like a bad sort.

I haven’t heard much from medical professionals about this case. If anyone

from the doctoring or nursing professions has any thoughts, I’d be very

interested to hear them. Is the medical sensibility I described above still

operative, 40 years later?