The news of the month seems to concern the recently deceased Terri Schiavo. Not that the affair was all that unique in the scheme of life, or that the issues involved were all that complex; it was the political sideshow that truly played to my nightmares.

OK. This is not going to be all that easy…

I lost my father about seven years ago. He had suffered for many years with the diabetes that gradually reduced his health to a state that he found all but unbearable. He eventually became so ill that he could be maintained only in a nursing facility. Unbeknownst to us, the doctors had discovered (on his admission chest film) inoperable and advanced cancer of his lungs. My father had apparently ordered his doctors to keep his condition a secret from us. We found out about it only through a chance remark by a staff physician.

My sister and I decided to keep his secret, and told no one, not even my mother. We didn’t even tell my father we knew. Over the course of a few months, we saw a vital, strong, and independent man reduced to a state of constant pain, fear, and hopelessness. Still we kept his secret. That was what he wanted, and we loved him enough to respect his wish. Actually, we loved him far more than that, but the space afforded this column is not nearly long enough for that subject…

After his foot became gangrenous, he was moved to a hospital, where he became absolutely indifferent to medical care. He simply wished to be left alone. On one occasion when I was alone with him, he looked up at me and sighed, saying, “ Joel, I can’t fight anymore.”

I heard the words, but not their implication. I didn’t want to understand what he was telling me. I mumbled something inane about the doctors getting him through this leg infection, and changed the subject. In running it over in my mind that evening at home I realized what he was trying to say to me, and called my sister. She told me that he had said something along those lines to her as well. We agreed to speak to the doctors the next day, and get their input.

The surgeon wanted to amputate his leg. The oncologist wanted to put him through a course of radiation treatments to try for some “palliative relief.” On the way out of the hospital, we ran into our old family physician, the one my family had all used for over thirty years, the doctor my sister had worked for as a medical assistant before she married. We asked him what he thought we should do, what he thought of the treatment options we had been offered:

“Leave him alone.”

The very thing my father had been saying to the nurses and doctors for weeks. The old doctor told us exactly what was in store for him if the aggressive treatments the hospital staff had suggested were allowed to be put into effect. He explained to us that my father’s internal organs were shutting down, that his body was trying to ease him out of the mess he was in, and that in this case doing nothing was the best thing we could do for him. Even if he managed to survive the amputation, there was the issue of two lungs filled with inoperable malignancy to be dealt with. The next day we signed a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order.

My sister and I were at his side when he died, fighting for every breath, his big heart refusing to cooperate with his despair, fighting despite himself. He was kept comfortable through morphine and IV fluids. We sent the nurses and doctors away and sat on the edge of his bed with him. We held his hands whispered gently to him that it was OK to go, that we’d be all right, that we’d take care of our mother, his wife of over fifty years.

I recall my thoughts as I stared at the man who had been my truest and best friend, the man who never once in my life said “I told you so,” who, when I was reduced to driving a cab during a particularly bad recession, paid my rent and offered me money. When I thanked him and promised to pay him back, he told me to forget it; if the money ran out he offered to “go broke together.” That was the measure of the man I was letting die before my eyes.

I knew that all I’d have to do was to go out to the nurse’s station and tell them to get him on a ventilator, cut him open and shove in a central line, and his body would last some indeterminate time longer. It would have been done immediately. I recall the agony I felt over the decision we had made, how torn I was.

Eventually his breathing ceased and a few moments later, his heart stopped. I remember thinking how glad I was that we had done what we had, or rather not done what we might have. As we left the hospital room, my sister stroked for the last time the ravaged leg and foot she had cleaned and bandaged countless times over the years, and, taking a deep breath looked out the window and said: “Now he can walk.” There were no tears; they came later, to each of us, in our own way, in our own time.

To Tom Delay, George Bush, and the rest of the craven hypocrites who tried to use the agony of Michael and Terri Schiavo for political advantage and distraction, how DARE you. How dare you interfere in the most sacred and holy of unions in the Bible you profess so stridently to revere. A wife or husband leaves his or her family and cleaves to their mate. It does say that, doesn’t it?

I try to imagine, at the point of my father’s death, federal marshals storming into the room and forcibly removing my father’s ravaged body to become a ward of the state, forcing us to accept their authority over the God-given right and responsibility that children owe to their parents. Telling us that our testimony regarding my father’s wishes was not sufficient to their needs.

They’d have had to kill me first…

And then deal with my sister…

George Bush flew immediately back to Washington from that absurd “ranch” he hides out in to sign the embarrassing “Schiavo” legislation passed by a power drunk Republican party and all but ignored by a spineless and irrelevant gaggle of what used to be Democrats. He did so to “err on the side of life,” to create a “culture of life.”

Jackass.

He could not bring himself to fly back to the capital in 2001 after receiving the now infamous “Bin Laden determined to attack in US” memo and briefing. I suppose that the 3000 that died on 9/11 didn’t qualify as “life.” I guess some fifty-year-old freelance artist who now has advanced colon cancer because he couldn’t afford insurance and the colonoscopies that would have made for an early diagnosis and saved his life doesn’t meet the criteria for membership in his “culture of life.” Did he even once err on the side of life when he refused to commute the death sentences of any of those executed in Texas while he was governor? Was there not one case in which there was a shadow of a doubt in his mind?

Does the party currently in power maintain that the cuts in Medicaid so fervently sought by Republicans in both houses of Congress, the very program that had sustained Ms. Schiavo for so many years, are part of their promotion of a culture of life?

Maybe they only rise to the defense of “life” when “life” is a mass of undifferentiated cells or the hopelessly brain damaged. Or when they think it plays to their evangelical base. Or when it serves to draw attention away from charges of ethical misconduct. So much for their "Culture of Life.”

Polls have consistently shown that Americans are uncomfortable with the actions of the far right in the Schiavo case, and now the silence of the Bush Brothers, Tom DeLay, and Neocons in general has become total.

Well… Almost total…

This from Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a Christian conservative group:

"This adds to the urgency of addressing a runaway judiciary, It shows just how much power the courts have usurped from the legislative and executive branches, that they now hold within their hands the power of life and death."

A runaway Judiciary. Interesting…

I thought that was what the Judiciary did, interpret the Constitution, function as an equal branch of government, check the powers of the other two branches, and yes, deal with matters of life and death.

What might Tony have in mind, particularly, to address this “problem?” Perhaps we should simply eliminate that separate but equal branch of the federal government. Let’s amend the Constitution to that end! Let’s make it retroactive to 2000, and throw out the SCOTAS decision to scrap the Florida recount and rid ourselves of this pestilential administration! Let’s simply ignore all judicial law that we disagree with!

Ah, none of this is going to get through. I’m a liberal. I’m irrelevant. Perhaps a quote from St. Ronald will prove persuasive. He is speaking in support of his Bork nomination:

"But now liberal special-interest groups seek to politicize the court system, to exercise a chilling effect on judges, to intimidate them into making decisions, not on the basis of the law or the merits of the case, but on the basis of a litmus test or a response to political pressure."

Ironic, no?

Thanks to all my Megillah friends, as always I welcome your comments.