Just one last thing — personal, anecdotal, and utterly irrelevant to the rights & wrongs.

As I intimated in an earlier post, at the back of my head while reading this Schiavo stuff has been the voice of my late Mom, a kind and loving person who was also the epitome of a dedicated professional nurse, the nurse you should pray to have at your hospital bed in a crisis, saying: “Let the poor thing die!” — As I actually heard her say many times about similar cases.

Well, at lunchtime Rosie and I got discussing the case. “For heaven’s sake,” said Rosie, “Why won’t they let that poor woman die?”

So perhaps it’s true: we marry our Moms.