Death should not be feared, but rather, celebrated.

By Arthur Caplan, Ph.D.
COMMENTARY
MSNBC contributor

Updated: 4:45 p.m. ET March 31, 2005

Terri Schiavo has now died. She died amid an incredible cacophony of arguments, pleadings, demands, threats, prayers and commentary. That she died angered many. How she died angered many others. The attention her death elicited from so many different sources angered still others. If in the wake of her passing it is possible to put some of that anger aside, perhaps we can all ask ourselves some hard questions about what has taken place here. What should each of us take away from the incredible events of the past few weeks?

First of all, no one in the United States should be without a durable power of attorney for medical decision-making. Everyone old enough to write down who they want to make medical decisions for them must do so. Every physician must ask every patient. Every hospital and nursing home must ask and record every person’s wishes. Every priest, minister, rabbi and other religious leader must remind their followers to let their loved ones know who speaks for them.

Start a dialogue
It is not enough to write your wishes down. You need to tell the person you have picked that you have chosen them and they need to consent. You need to remember to update your written wishes every few years. You need to make sure that copies of your wishes are in the hands of those most likely to come to the hospital if you are severely injured or become very sick.

Equally important are discussions about life and death. If this case has not already made you talk to your family, friends and loved ones about your views concerning medical care then do so. Now.

Not all will agree on what to do should they or someone they love become severely disabled or lose cognitive abilities. But we need to talk about these difficult matters openly, honestly, calmly and frankly.

Applesauce for Eve

Those old daddies cursed you and us in you,
damned for your curiosity: for your sin
was wanting knowledge. To try, to taste,
to take into the body, into the brain
and turn each thing, each sign, each factoid
round and round as new facets glint and white
fractures into colors and the image breaks
into crystal fragments that pierce the nerves
while the brain casts the chips into patterns.

Each experiment sticks a finger deep in the pie,
dares existence, blows a horn in the ear
of belief, lets the nasty and difficult brats
of real questions into the still air
of the desiccated parlor of stasis.
What we all know to be true, constant,
melts like frost landscapes on a window
in a jet of steam. How many last words
in how many dead languages would translate into,
But what happens if I, and Whoops!

We see Adam wagging his tail, good dog, good
dog, while you and the snake shimmy up the tree,
lab partners in a dance of will and hunger,
that thirst not of the flesh but of the brain.
Men always think women are wanting sex,
cock, snake, when it is the world she's after.
Then birth trauma for the first conceived kid
of the ego, I think therefore I am, I
kick the tree, who am I, why am I,
going, going to die, die, die.

You are indeed the mother of invention,
the first scientist. Your name means
life: finite, dynamic, swimming against
the current of time, tasting, testing,
eating knowledge like any other nutrient.
We are all the children of your bright hunger.
We are all products of that first experiment,
for if death was the worm in that apple,
the seeds were freedom and the flowering of choice.



Marge Piercy "The Art of Blessing the Day"

Warning

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other peoples gardens
And learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.





Jenny Joseph

Revolutionary Rhetoric and the Corruption of Convention

I had that same conversation again last night. My husband and I had friends over last night for dinner, we sat over a bountiful table with an extrordinary bottle of Merlot, the four of us satisfied and a little high. The couple with us, I should say, are not married. They have been dating seriously for about eight months and the "announcement" is expected at any time now. Morgan and I however, have been married now for twenty years and most of the couples in our aquaintance have been married even longer. So it was that the conversation turned to the dissection and analysis of a happy marriage.

"What is it like?" he says, "I mean, living with the same person for twenty years?"

Sigh... I took a big drink and jummped right in and you know, the water was freezing.

"Well," I said. "It's really a coin, it has two distinct sides to it at any given time. I mean, at times I am so in love with him I can't stand it. He's my perfect match, my best friend. I can't imagine life without him with me, I don't WANT to imagine life without him with me. Then, there are times that I just as passionately hate him. I want him out of my sight, I want to hurt him and make him suffer. There really is no faerie tale, life is in fact, just life. You put one foot in front of the other. We, of course wouldn't be here at the end of this time if it wasn't what we had wanted. Sometimes we went on for the children, getting over a speed bump so to speak, but when we came out on the other side we were more in love with eachother at the end than we were in the beginning. It has been without a doubt the most satisfying, glorious, intamate, nurturing, passionate experience of my life. It has also been the hardest, most gruelling, tiresome, annoying, chained up, locked in a cage feeling I've ever had."

Looking thoughtful he says, "Yeah. But you don't want to be single. Trust me, I've been single most of my life and it's incredibly lonely."

And here's where it gets sordid. Conventionaly sordid.
I don't want to be single either. I have seen my friends, male and female alike suffer in lots of ways and means because they no longer wanted to wake up and face their future alone. Repeating what I have said before, I love my husband. I don't want to ever be without him. There are times though, when I do, very much, want to have a boyfriend and "date". I realise that many of my christian conservative friends reading this will collectively sigh and maybe cross themselves. I will no doubt recieve numerous emails pertaing to the evils of adultery and fornication. The truth is, and I KNOW that many others feel it to, that for many of us marriage can be at times a life in a glass box. You can see vivid colors and exciting people out there and you yourself are inhibited from participating. The box can be safe and warm and comfortable, and we can love our box dearly. But you cannot deny that it hasn't crossed your mind even once that you would enjoy a deeper intamate relationship with another person who was not your spouse. There are times when I don't even want sex, necessarily, just intamacy with someone else. I want to broaden my life, I want to stretch my heart. A very good friend reminds me often that who we are as people is really the sum total of our experience with others. I think about that a lot when I meet new people. How will they make me different? How will they make me better, or worse? If life is a tapestry I want mine to have too many colors to count. Genuine intamacy is priceless.

For the young who want to

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don't have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.'s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else's mannerisms


is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you're certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.


Marge Piercy

The Muse is dead

Love most often times in our lives chooses to rear it's ugly head at the most inopportune times. Like the early light of dawn it always comes two hours too early and then has the nerve to glare at you full force untill you get up to notice that you're late. Of course reality is a brutal alarm clock that never seems to do the job, I'm always hitting the snooze button against my better judgement, but then, there it is.


"It has been two days since I confided in you my desire. As I am sure we will never speak of it again I am writing this with no thought of its being sent. I wish that I had the courage to send it and ask forgiveness later, but I cannot. I feel pretty confident at this point from things you've said, that I have become an unwelcome entanglement. Therefore, this letter is mine, these words are for me, because I have no hope now.
I am certain that you have been confused by my attentions and feel that I am using you for some malvolent purpose of my own. I understand what you have said and only know that I am, pulled, to you. I cannot explain it any clearer, even as I have thought about it a great deal. I simply desire you. My wanting seems at present to be overriding the rationale of choosing to just not think of you any longer. I could, I know, choose to not think of you...but it is not what I want. I want you. I want to go on wanting you for a long time. I know that to say something so unrealistic is rediculous and I can only speak for the depth of my feeling in my urge to go on. Speaking and thinking this way will most assuredly bring me a broken heart in the end. Smashed to pieces in rejection, but, there it is.
I believe it is possible to love deeply many people over the course of our lives. I am loving you, right now; I am wanting you, desiring you, the feel of your hands in my hair and on my skin, your lips on mine, your heart open to me.
Please forgive me. I'm sure you must think me a horrible woman and I am sorry to have put you in an awkward position.
I don't know any more what I am doing...


Passionately Yours."







"Your determined silence is heartbreaking and I find I am grieving in my soul even though my face is smiling.
I am sure I have made an error; on the other hand, I want in my relationships people who have the strength to take me as I am.
Have you lost your courage?"






"I had not expected to see you today; I was, to say the least, agitated. I assumed that you would be awkward and uncomfortable, but you were not. You were, actually, very reminiscent of the man that you were that first night. I love the way you look at me, at times.
You were happy today I think and I wanted very much to be the reason for it. Truthfully I know that I am not and I have continually to remind myself that none of it is for me. None of it is personal. I have invited you to ___________ but I am almost certain you will not be comming. You agreed readily and that made me happy, however, I think you are just being polite and will most likely decline at the last minute.
This course of action you have chosen confuses me. I wish we could just talk to eachother. I wish you would just tell me what you are thinking. The problem really, is that you are not thinking of me, at all.


I dreamt of you last night. I hope this passes quickly, and I hope I won't be hurt in the unfolding.


I miss you."





The Muse is dead. All Hail the Muse.

In Memory of Jessica Lunsford

I dreamt of a life and all the little things,

of bubble gum and bicycles and presents that Santa brings.

Cotton candy, the circus and the boy next door,

I dreamt of a life and a little bit more.

My first kiss and maybe a walk down the isle,

cartwheels and Disneyland and Daddy's smile.

I dreamt of a life...

But just for a while.







"This is Courage... to bear unflinchingly what heaven sends." Euripedes

A Gaggle of Girls

Okay, I admitt it. I love sex. I love what it does to my body. I love being taken out of my mind to a place that's all about the moment. I love to feel my heart race and my thighs tingle...
I was at Lowe's yesterday picking up some re-bar and it just so happened I had on a cute little pair of capris and heels. The weather has been wonderful lately so I have been hurrying summer along wearing strappy sandles and my toe rings. Anyway, I've noticed on days when I go into this store dressed, for lack of a better term, "like a girl" I seem to get all the help I could ever want from male employees wandering the isles. So it was yesterday. I was back in a part of the store usually left to the construction populus when around the corner he came, face to face with me. Wow. He was tall and broad and had a great-looking "Sir Walter Raleigh" beard. (I'm crazy about facial hair) He had intense blue eyes and little laugh lines dark hair that gave him dark lashes and a body that just wouldn't quit. My heart is racing right now as I'm typing...
So, yeah. Around the corner this smile meets me and he asks how I'm doing and if I can find what I need and then just starts making conversation. He asks if I've lived here long and what I think about all the rain. He asks if I'm married and have any children. And I, I admitt, I just stood there and reveled in the attention. I let myself feel the warmth of his smile I watched his body move as he walked and talked. I made very good eye contact and gazed at all the little details of his face. We talked for a while and he walked me over to where the re-bar was, picked up what I needed and carried it for me to the check out and then to my car. We stood there a second and he shook my hand and said to come back and have a nice day.
Getting in the car, I just sat for a moment thinking about it in my head. It was all perfectly innocent and sweet, and pleasureable. My body felt warm and my stomach has tiny butterflies. I could feel my pulse elevated. It was kind of like the feeling you get after being on a roler coaster. That's the sensation I get after good sex. I feel kind of tired and a little wobbly, my hair always looks great and I'm so relaxed.
This gets me to thinking about Monday night hanging out with my girlfriends. Once a month we all get together and have dinner and play BUNKO. The twelve of us have been getting together now for about ten years, give or take, and we talk. We talk about everything. Kids, husbands, marriage, divorce, women, sex, God, religion, our parents (most noteably our mother-in-laws). So, this last week we had the most interesting conversation about sex. It seems my friend Holli saw THE ANATOMY of SEX on the discovery channel the night before and it must have been an amazing show. Several couples agreed to take part in different experiments involving elctrodes and movie cips and one couple actually agreed to have sex in an MRI tube! How cool! Anyway, lots of facts were reported, like the head of a man's penis has four thousand nerve endings, but a woman's clitoris, being only a tenth of the size, has eight thousand! WHOOT!! Go God! And that the amount of blood flow to the vaginal area during orgasm is so strong (psi) that if she were to be stabbed or cut durring the event she would literaly bleed to death on the spot. So we got to talking and sharing and some of us taking notes and at the end of the evening the conclusion of all our dialog, besides the fact that the BRAIN is the biggest sexual organ, was simply...sex is cool.

I guess not every woman can be Elizabeth Bennet

Holli: "So Morgan, tell me, is it like living with Lucille Ball?"


Tilting his head and thinking a moment, he smiles.


Morgan: " Yeah, a little. It's more like Lucille Ball, Edith Bunker, Laura Petrie and Bette Middler all rolled into one... with a side of Wasabi."






I think I'm just going to take that as a compliment...

I was wondering...

"Who is't that to woman's beauty would submit, And yet refuse the fetters of their wit?"

Aphra Behn