First, they proved that Terri Schiavo was in a permenant vegatative state. The proved that her brain damage was so severe that she was not aware of her surroundings. Terri Shiavos body was being kept alive, but Terri Shiavo had left us long ago. A fact that her husband acknowledged and respected.

Life is what we do with it. We each make our lives what we want them to be. We have the ability to experience the world around us, and utilize what we find to alter our existance by first finding ways to provide the basic neccessities for ourselves, and then working on seeking the pleasures in life. Our entire existance is about the experiences we have and sharing them with others around us; others to come. We explore, learn, apply, act.

There are people in the world who are differently abled in manners that cause some people to call them disabled, pity them, or rate them as worthless. However, people without hands create masterpiece paintings. Scientists divulge their brilliance without the ability to speak. There are endless examples of how people that do not function in the fashion that we count as normal do the same things we do not realize we do. Adapt to our bodies, learn how to use it, and how to make it serve our purposes. The body is not life. It is a tool, a vehicle. Sometimes we get a Ferrari, sometimes we get a Gremlin. The point is that the body is something that we can adapt to as long as the mind is functioning.

Which, just so we are clear, does not mean that we must be Geniuses. It is the mind, and the freeing of it that have allowed us to live the way we do with our technological advances, medical advances. Even the feeding tube that has stirred this controversy is the product of the mind.

My ability to think and then act on the ideas that come to mind is what life is about. I can think and reach rational conclusions, (at least ones that seem rational at the time) and them do my best to make them happen. Terri Schiavo was not capable of doing this. They have proven that her mind was gone. Her body was being kept alive by means of a feeding tube.

I only hope that if I am ever in the same situation I have someone as kind as Michael Schiavo to notice that I do not demonstrate the characteristics of someone who is alive. I hope that someone as kind as her husband is able to discern between life and death, and notice that I am not alive.