The woman arrived at the hospital unconscious and unresponsive. She had been helicoptered in from a small nearby town where she lived with her mother. The mother had left the woman at home while the mother attended church nearby. The daughter knew to call the mother in case of an emergency – the daughter was, after all, in her late forties, though she lived with profound learning and developmental disabilities.

The mother had returned home after church and found the daughter unconscious but still breathing on the dining room floor. Medical personnel had come quickly and had gotten the woman to a local hospital in good time, but there was nothing to be done at that medical facility except transport the woman to a larger hospital in a last-ditch effort to save her life.

So here she was, in an intensive care unit, hooked up to all kinds of gadgets and machines designed to keep her – "alive."

In years past, she would have been thought of as "alive" because her heart was still beating, though not on its own. In this day and time, the woman was given two extensive neurological tests to determine the probable level of brain function she would have IF she were ever to wake up. She failed the tests, and it became my job as the chaplain to help the mother and other family members decide what to do.

Scenarios such as this play themselves out in hospitals all over this country every day. It is a commonplace for chaplains and doctors and nurses to walk with families through the emotional, moral, and ethical forests of questions surrounding these events. It is never easy, and in my experience, it doesn’t get any easier.

One hope I have for people in these situations is that they are able to make these most private of decisions in private – not in a crowded waiting room, not in front of a camera, but in a secluded place away from the prying eyes of the public. Terry Schaivo did not have that luxury, though she would never have known it. Her family was torn apart by the media frenzy accompanying her last days, in large part because she had never said definitively while she was conscious what her wishes would have been in the situation she ended up in.

With no hard evidence of Terry’s wishes, the family tussled over what she MIGHT have wanted. For years they were of the same mind, apparently. Everyone pulled together to try to make her comfortable and to give her all the things that might bring her back to a semblance of her former self. Her husband even got a nursing degree so he could make the best possible care decisions for his former companion who was now judged to be in a "persistent vegetative state" by all the medical authorities with access to her and her records.

It is said that Time heals all wounds. But sometimes time works against us. We will all, in time, die. No one gets out of here alive. I don’t know anyone whose body has gotten better and better and better over eighty or a hundred years, though some of you look pretty good. – Rather, our aches and pains teach us to celebrate a good day when we have one.

So to wait for a miracle cure after fifteen years of minimal brain function seems futile. Miracles of course do happen all around us. New life does come, but not in this way, not supernaturally. Death is the much more natural course.

When word began to leak that Terry Schiavo’s husband was ready to let her go, to let nature take its course, all hell broke loose. The religious right saw an opportunity to rally its troops around a "right to life" issue; the religious and secular left responded in typically strident "right to die" mode. The folks on the right preached that we should do everything possible to extend every possible moment of life, at least for those with the money to afford it. If you can’t afford it, there is something inherently wrong with you anyway. Those on the left, on the other hand, those fiercely independent types, respond that no one should ever tell anyone else what to do – if I don’t feel so good today, I should have the right to kill myself no matter if I’m not in my right mind or no matter if I’m being pressured by society and the culture to feel less than valuable that particular day.

This was one of Ms. Schaivo’s issues. She bought into a cultural value of body shape that says the larger we are, the less we’re worth. She starved herself to try to fit into the picture that free market advertisers portray as the only one that’s acceptable – Twiggy, Kate Moss, the Olsen Twins, all those Victoria’s Secret and Sports Illustrated models.

Terry’s quest for a size 6 led her to a seizure and the consequent death of large areas of her brain. The picture of herself she wanted to show the world – thin, happy, acceptable to her community – was not the one finally splashed across the tabloids and the evening news. She will be remembered now, finally, for her tilted head, her vacant eyes, and her perpetually drooping mouth. I would rather remember her vibrant, healthy, and enjoying the gift that was her life.

As I sat in a hospital consultation room with the mother and the family of the woman who was brought in in a vegetative state, I learned that the mother had never felt comfortable discussing death with her daughter. Now, in this particular case, perhaps she was right – the daughter had been barely functional in society, but very loving and a joy for the whole family to be around and know. Part of the reason this was so was that she was so innocent. Every moment was new for her - she had been unable to assimilate the idea that what’s happening now won’t last forever, that things end, that people die, that we all die. Perhaps she was the sort of person who simply could not comprehend what it means to fill out a health care directive, a living will, or a power of attorney. And because she couldn’t, and because we had nothing in writing, the mother and the family had to make difficult decisions on their own with no help from the woman whose life had ended on the dining room floor and whose death was being extended now by the impersonal bells and whistles of an institutional intensive care unit.

Terry Schiavo didn’t deserve the treatment she received at the hands of the media and the public. Had she not been adopted as the cause du jour of so many with time on their hands and an axe to grind, she might have been afforded what we all wish in the end – a quiet death surrounded by family and friends. As it was, in the state she was in, she couldn’t hear the circus going on outside her hospice building or see the special reports on every cable news network about whether she was eating or drinking or breathing. Please! Let the poor woman alone. An international death watch should be reserved only for the Pope, if then.

We talked in the conference room for a long while about the kind of person the daughter had been, how she had never met a stranger, how she loved everybody she ever met. She didn’t keep things for herself but gave things away to people she thought might need them. It was in this atmosphere of love and respect and honor and remembrance that the mother finally said, "I can’t do this to my daughter anymore. Turn the machines off and let her go."

A nephew and a cousin went into the ICU room to witness the removal of the machines. The mother could not force herself to go, realizing that she had said goodbye in her mind when she had gone in for her daughter’s last neurological exam. She sat instead with her sister, talking about the wonderful days of watching her daughter grow up, drawing a picture of a close-knit, rural family that happened to have a developmentally challenged child to love and care for and who loved them back with all her heart. When the nephew came back and said the daughter’s heart had stopped, there were hugs and tears all around, but they knew they had done the right thing – that what had happened was horrible, and dreadful, and not fair, and yet natural. The daughter had not suffered. And the family had not forced her to go on without a real chance at life.

It is spring. The grass is green, the trees are leafing, the flowers are blooming. It is Earth Day today, a time to celebrate life, not to be consumed with death. These stories about Terry Schiavo and death should not make us lower our spirits but make us aware that we have responsibilities to those around us: to say what it is we want, to make the hard decisions and to have the difficult discussions about our wishes for our last days. And here’s the bottom line of this whole story - if we don’t tell anyone what our wishes are, then we are leaving our most intimate friends and families – the ones we love the most - to make the hardest decisions they could ever possibly make, without any guidance from the one to whom it may matter the most – ourselves.

If you already have a living will or a health care directive, after the service – if you’re comfortable - tell someone what it says so we can help look out for each other. If you haven’t filled out a health care directive and a power of attorney, I brought some with me today. Fill out the one that is right for wherever you live – I have the Illinois and Missouri forms with me now. Take them home, or better yet, fill one out before you leave. We’ll keep a copy here at church for you if you’d like, and you should make copies for anyone who may possibly be involved if you have to go a hospital. It is the only way to ensure that your wishes are complied with. It is the only way to ensure that your loved ones won’t be placed in the position of trying to remember if you ever mentioned what you’d like to have happen in an emergency or - God forbid – a tragedy of some kind.

Now once you’ve filled these papers out, once you’ve done what you can do to make a loss easier on your loved ones, quit thinking about death. Stop dwelling in the morbidity of what might happen. Live. Now. While you have the chance. Our days are short enough without robbing ourselves with worry and obsessing about our last one.

I have seen it written that in the absence of a health care directive, Terry Schiavo should have been kept alive. It was said that to let her die without food and water was a confirmation that we live in a "culture of death" rather than a culture that honors life. But a culture that worships life at any cost is an idolatrous culture. It’s a culture that hasn’t seen or recognized those situations when death might be preferable to life.

The universe does not demand that we suffer. The universe is our sustenance, and life here is a gift. We should not participate in the culture of death, nor should we idolize life at any cost and in any condition.

-- We should instead build a culture of compassion where life is lived abundantly.

-- We should instead build a culture of compassion where those who can’t fend for themselves are protected as long as life is viable.

-- We should instead build a culture of compassion where those who can’t make their own decisions are treated with love and respect and helped to live lives as whole as possible.

As for Terry Schiavo and others like her, a culture of compassion would dictate that when life is no longer possible in any real sense, we should act compassionately and allow an end to suffering.

A culture of compassion recognizes that those of us who can make our own choices should do so – that we have a responsibility to decide and to make choices and to let our loved ones know what we choose. And we also have a responsibility to protect those who cannot decide or make choices for themselves.

Fill out a living will today. Let your wishes be known. Give the gift of life to your loved ones. Then, give the gift of life to yourself – live, as fully as possible. Act compassionately toward yourself and toward others. Accept and revel in the gift that is this day. Happy Earth Day to you and yours.