I was just reading Pete’s blog, about a houseplant that refuses to die, and thinking about the Terri Schiavo case. Not that the two are analogous, but they do drive the mind in a common direction: death. That crossing common to all life.

All is change; all yields its place and goes. – Euripides

I wonder about death, and I have some fear. Not of leaving the body and departing into Heaven, to sing in the choir invisible. But what if there’s some spark of awareness that remains with the body in the grave, conscious of the arms locked against the cushions, the padding of the inner lid sagging against the nose….

OK, eternal claustrophobia is bad enough, though probably not rational or justified metaphysically. I don’t really believe in such a consciousness. Death ends it, where the confines of the body are concerned. But between the full sun of life and the complete night of death, there is a ladder of shadows that we cannot comprehend. God knows.

So when I see someone like Terri Schiavo, and what she’s enduring, I feel a great, dark pity. She is somewhere on that ladder, in the half-light in between, imprisoned in a damaged vessel.

What if she is alert in there, aware of her life, family, love … but with communications off-line … the lights are on but the mail can’t get through. I mean she’s not brain dead, right? She responds to people. Maybe she loves them, knows she is loved. And maybe that’s enough, love being the best there is of human life. And besides, it’s not like her treatment is medically heroic or even substantial; it’s just food and fluids. If God wanted her home, she’d be home, don’t you think?

There is a test to know whether your task in life is finished. If you’re alive, it isn’t.

I wouldn’t want to go through it, to be trapped just outside the world, smiling and blinking and helpless to produce a word for the world, a complaint of pain, a yawp of joy. But I can’t say I’d be in a hurry to leave, either. Not if I knew I was loved, and Terri Schiavo’s parents have made a good case that she is loved and knows it.

Where there is love and life there is hope.