MATTERS OF LIFE.(The Talk of the Town)(Terri Schiavo)

Last week, Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo, known to cable-news viewers and talk-radio listeners as Terri, was as ubiquitous as Elian Gonzalez and Laci Peterson once were. Yet she was also hidden, obscured behind layers of political and religious posturing, legal maneuvering, emotional projection, and media exploitation that swaddled her like strips of linen around a mummy.

Terri Schiavo was born on December 3, 1963, near Philadelphia, the first of three children of Robert and Mary Schindler. As a teen-ager, she was obese--at eighteen, she weighed two hundred and fifty pounds--but with diligence she lost a hundred pounds, and by the time she married Michael Schiavo, in 1984, she was an attractive and vivacious young woman. By the end of the decade, she had moved with her husband to Florida, was undergoing fertility treatments, and had slimmed down further, to a hundred and ten pounds. On February 25, 1990, Terri suffered cardiac arrest, leading to severe brain damage. The cause was a drastically reduced level of potassium in her bloodstream, a condition frequently associated with bulimia. Her death that day was forestalled by heroic measures, including a tracheotomy and ventilation. But when, after a few weeks, she emerged from a coma, it was only to enter a "persistent vegetative state," with no evidence or hope of improvement--a diagnosis that, in the fifteen years since, has been confirmed, with something close to unanimity, by many neurologists on many occasions on behalf of many courts. The principal internal organs of Terri's body, including her brain stem, which controls such involuntary actions as heartbeat, digestion, respiration, and the bodily sleep cycle, continued to function as long as liquid nourishment was provided through a tube threaded into her stomach through a hole in her abdomen. The exception was her cerebral cortex, which is the seat of language, of the processing of sense impressions, of thought, of awareness of one's surroundings and one's inner state--in short, of consciousness. Her EKG flatlined. The body lived; the mind died. "At this point," the Florida Supreme Court wrote six months ago, "much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone and has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid. Medicine cannot cure this condition. Unless an act of God, a true miracle, were to recreate her brain, Theresa will always remain in an unconscious, reflexive state."

Terri Schiavo's life, as distinct from the life of her unsentient organs, ended fifteen years ago. But that did not prevent her from becoming the star of an unusually morbid kind of reality TV show. The show was made possible by two factors. The first was a bitter struggle between Terri's husband, Michael Schiavo, who wanted to allow her body to die in accordance with what he said, and what an unbroken series of court decisions has affirmed, was her own expressed wish, and her parents and siblings, who wanted to keep her body alive at all costs. The second factor was a set of video snippets, provided by the Schindler family and broadcast incessantly by the three cable news networks--CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC--which are themselves entangled in a desperate struggle for dominance. Sometimes the snippets are identified by the year of their taping (2001 and 2002); sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are accompanied by inflammatory captions (fighting for her life); sometimes the captions are merely dramatic (schiavo saga). They show Terri's blinking eyes seeming to follow a balloon waved in front of her; or her mouth agape in a rictus that could be interpreted as a smile; or her face turned toward her mother's, with her head thrown back, Pieta-like. As neurologists who have examined her have explained, the ...