Fetishizing Suffering

Now that the protracted struggle over the fate of Terri Schiavo is over (though I still think it’s likely that a dispute over funeral and burial arrangements will drive the two sides back into court), there’s something I’ve been thinking about since the whole thing started that I wanted to write about now.

As is the nature of blogging, someone’s already had similar thoughts and written about it. Amy Sullivan does a good job of addressing the issue that’s caused me discomfort throughout this whole affair.

Now that Terri Schiavo has died, I’d like to raise a question–not a political question, but a moral one. I’ve been bothered by the way religious leaders discussed her situation and the way that the Pope himself has framed his own slow, painful journey toward the end of life. In both cases, the loudest voices have seemed to promote a position that is not pro-life so much as very, very anti-death.

…As one of my friends put it this week, If all of these folks believe Terri Schiavo was a Christian, shouldn’t they want her to slip from this life to be embraced by the arms of God? I understand that this is a particular kind of religious belief, not shared by all, but it is a belief to which most of the leaders you’ve seen on tv over the past few weeks subscribe. And yet the implication of their fight has been that death is something to be held at bay using all available means, that any quality of life is better than what may come next.

Another A. Sullivan also jumped into discussion with this.

Isn’t the fundamental point about Christianity that our life on earth is but a blink in the eye of our real existence, which begins at death and lasts for eternity in God’s loving presence? Why is the Pope sending a signal that we should cling to life at all costs – and that this clinging represents some kind of moral achievement? Isn’t there a moment at which the proper Christian approach to death is to let it come and be glad? Or put it another way: if the Pope is this desperate to stay alive, what hope is there for the rest of us?

I definitely see where both of them are coming, but there’s another aspet to this that bothers me, particularly in a case like the Pope’s. It’s not so much the issue of postponing death, but the issue of needlessly prolonging suffering that puzzles me. What’s dressed up as a desire to protect and cling to life, looks to me like a bizarre fetishizing of suffering that I cannot wrap my brain around.

I guess it has to do with my take on suffering. I can’t stand to see needless, purposeless suffering. I don’t understand it, in the same way I don’t understand why someone who has a headache doesn’t just take a pain reliever. Sure, I understand that suffering can ennoble and educate, but it just isn’t always the case. Sometimes suffering just suffering; just sitting in shit because it’s there and you’re there, not because you have to or because there’s no other option. My attitude is “Why sit in shit if you don’t have to?” (And no, just because “shit happens” is not a good enough answer, at least not for me.) Sometimes you don’t end up nobler or wiser. Sometimes you just end up in shit.

I saw Terri Schiavo’s situation as suffering, whether she was in persistent vegetative state or “minmally conscious.” If she was in PVS, then keeping her body alive at that point was solely for the sake of her parents, and not her own because Terri wasn’t in there anymore; all that was lleft were reflexes. And if she was “minimally conscious” she was trapped in a body that she’d never again be able to use or control. That sounds like suffering to me, especially if she expressed—and witnesses say she did—a desire never to have such an existance.

The Pope has a feeding tube. He’s also an 84 year old man with a progressive, incurable disease—Parkinson’s—which will eventually rob him of all muscle control, and he’s losing his ability to swallow (as did Schiavo). Again, to me it seems like clinging to life shielding a sort of fetishizing of suffering.

As a Buddhist, I understand that suffering is simply a part of life. In fact, it’s the first noble truth; “life is suffering,” or “life is painful and difficult.” It’s painful and difficult because we cling to so much, including life itself. It’s the clinging that causes suffering; clinging to life, even clinging to sufering itself, to the point that it blinds us to much else.

Terri’s parents clung to her for 15 years, and thus wanted her—or what was left of her—to keep clinging to “life,” defined in this case as having enough of a brain stem left to support breathing and a heartbeat if not much else. It seems they also clung to the belief that she would return to some semblance of her old self, though there was no real evidence to support that, perhaps because they clund to the idea of what their daughter was, rather than accepting what she had become because that would also mean accepting that she was not coming back. (Somewhere inside of themselves, her parents must have known this. Otherwise, they would have taken up responsibility for her physical therapy during their daily visits, after it was stopped, and not let her develope the contractures that virtually assured she would never move again in unlikely event that she regained consciousness.)

I’m not sure what good 15 years in that bed did Terri Schiavo. It may have inadvertently caused other people to think seriously about what they would want if they were in a similar situation, and to put those desires in writing, thus helping many avoid being in a position like hers in the future. It may have given her parents a chance to postpone grieving, and to cling to the idea that she might return. But what possible good did it do Terri?

I find it hard to see her plight as anything other than needless, purposeless suffering. And yet it’s that plight that people were passionate about prolonging and calling it “life,” and in their actions—particularly Congress and the White House springing into action—elevating it to a sort of “super-life” worth more resources and effort to protect than anything or anyone else. Indeed, elevating it to an almost holy state, not for Terri’s sake, but for their own. She became little more than a prisoner of the culture wars; a symbol conveniently without needs, demands, desires or even a voice, on to which they could project almost anything—a fetish object.

Sometimes the cruelest thing one can do is to force someone to live in a state of suffering. Sometimes suffering is just suffering, and the merciful, compassionate thing to do is to end it or let it end.