Last night's thunderstorm left white petals scattered over the garden. The pear trees' blooms have come to their end, their snowy crowns now tattered remnants among the bright new leaves.

Terri Schiavo died this morning.

I've been distracted from writing while waiting and praying for a miracle of human compassion to save Terri. It didn't come. The courts turned her parents down again and again.

Terri lasted thirteen days without food and water. That's very close to the limit that a healthy person can go without these basic necessities. Her body was strong and healthy before her feeding tube was removed. If anyone had an illusion that she was hopelessly weak and would die quickly, the gruesome death watch should have shattered any such lies.

I don't think it did.

People have a remarkable capacity to believe what they want to believe. They can believe that a disabled person wouldn't want to live that way because they wouldn't want it. Their survival instinct is strong but misguided.

Until you actually are faced with that choice, you don't know if you would want to live that way or not. I don't like living with a serious chronic illness that leaves me dependent on a medical device to keep my heart beating, but I didn't choose death when I was told that I needed it to live. Few people do when they are actually faced with such life and death decisions when a reasonably comfortable life is still possible.

I understand why those who are truly dying may choose to refuse further medical aid. I have no wish to leave dying corpses uselessly hooked to medical machines when the person's soul is truly gone. Medicine has progressed to the point that people can be kept suspended between life and death by mechanically keeping their heart and lungs going.

Terri didn't need such help, only a feeding tube.

Terri lived for years without such extreme measures, responding to her parents' love for her when visited.

Was this the life she led before the injury to her brain? Obviously it was not. But was it a life so devoid of meaning that she would have surrendered it gladly?

Terri lasted thirteen days. She held on to the limit that any healthy person normally could. Can you say for sure there was no soul there fighting to stay alive?

Many will.

They'll go on with their lives.

Souls are slipping away daily like those fallen petals. We don't notice most of them leaving us or the means by which they go or the fate to which they go. We go on like the tattered petals still clinging to life, waiting to bear fruit until our time to drop away finally comes. We have our work to do. We're too busy to keep up with all the tragedies around us. Who was Terri Schiavo to us?

Terri was who you could be should you suffer a serious injury or illness that left you brain-damaged and thus nonproductive. Our society likes its heroic stories about people who battle back from such medical disasters to go on to greatness. We can bask in the reflected glory of the winners, but we don't like standing in the shadow of death of those who won't recover.

The conditioned response now is, it is better to let them die. There was a time where it was both the responsibility and the appropriate loving response to care for stricken relatives. We recognized our mutual mortality and held to the agreement to help each other when our frailty finally overwhelmed youthful strength. Husbands and wives knew that we would age and need each other's help before the final passing from life.

We have become such individualists that we often don't honor our responsibilities to each other any more. We deny infants the right to life if we don't wish to carry them through a normal pregnancy. We abandon mates and children if we feel it is in our best interests. We warehouse elderly relatives where they'll receive good care. We assume that the disabled are somehow cared for, somehow able to carry on with rehabilitation therapies to restore them to moderately impaired lives. We forge ahead with our lives, confident that we'll never be helpless and dependent on anyone until our death comes quickly enough that we will be in control to the very end.

That lie helps us to avoid the truth. We will die someday, and we will likely undergo a period of failing health and strength when we will have to depend on others for things that we once routinely did for ourselves.

Most of us will never face a crippling injury like Terri did. Most of us will never need that degree of assistance so early in life. We try to think of the success stories, of intelligent people confined to wheelchairs like Christopher Reeve.

Let those in a living death of serious brain injury go to a merciful end, we say for those like Terri who won't make an impressive recovery. But was she in a living death any more than the rest of us? We're all going to die eventually. Why don't we all just starve to death?

Because most of us aren't at the point where we can't get food and water or at least persuade someone to get it for us. Terri had a family willing to continue to care for her. Her husband, who had constructively divorced her years ago, could have let them do it. It was in his best interests for her to die so he could go on with his life.

Just like it is in the best interests for women to abort their babies if the pregnancy is inconvenient for them.

Just like it is in the best interests for the family to let Grandpa or Grandma die if caring for them is too much of a burden.

Just like it is in the best interests of the parents to let a severely disabled infant die rather than bring it home from the hospital after thousands of dollars of care with only a burdensome life of disability ahead.

Just like it was in the best interests of a husband to starve his disabled wife for thirteen days until she died.