I posted this morning on Terri Schiavo, remarking that she was putting up a darned good fight–14 days–for someone who was supposed to have “died 15 years ago,” as one of my liberal friends glibly put it on Easter Sunday (of all days). Now, after two full weeks of staving off the killers, namely her own husband, a Florida judge determined to see starved and dehydrated if it was his last act on the bench, and the employees of the “hospice” where her husband?s lawyer sits on the board–Theresa Marie Schiavo is dead.


We all long to die natural deaths, at home, surrounded by our loving families. But Terri Schiavo never got to go home. She never got to die in the arms of her mother, or her father, or the brother and sister who loved her so much. She died instead in the brightly lit house of murder, where anyone who so much as tried to bring her a drop of water for her parched lips was promptly arrested and whisked away to jail. Her husband’s lawyer, George Felos, claimed it was a “peaceful” death, a “beautiful death”–assertions belied by the morphine that they–in the only act of mercy they doled over that grim fortnight–gave her to quell what must have surely been the most excruciating pain.


The bloggers have much to say about Terri Schiavo and the way we–supposedly living in the age of women’s rights– turned this particular woman over to her husband as his property, to do with as he liked. I’ll let Ann Coulter, writing yesterday, speak first:


“There are a lot of telling facts, but two big ones are:


“- The only family member lobbying for Terri’s death is her husband, who is affianced to a woman he’s been living with for several years and with whom he already has two children. (Today’s brain twister: Would you rather be O.J.’s girlfriend or Michael Schiavo’s fiancee?)


“- Terri’s husband has refused to allow her to be given either an MRI or a PET scan, which are also known as: ‘The tests that could determine whether Terri is even in a permanent vegetative state.’ (I believe his exact words were, “PET scan? MRI? What do I look like, a guy who just won a $1 million malpractice settlement?”)


“On the basis of these facts, Pinellas County Judge George Greer found that it was Terri’s wish to be starved to death. She requires no life support; all she needs is food and water. If being (a) on a liquid diet, and (b) unresponsive to one’s estranged husband are now considered grounds for a woman’s execution, wait until this news hits Beverly Hills!


“Despite the media’s idiotic claims that scores of courts have made painstaking findings of fact over 15 years that Terri is in a permanent vegetative state and would have wanted to die, only one judge made such a finding. Other courts have not made any factual findings whatsoever. They simply refused to overturn Greer’s findings of fact as an abuse of discretion.


“Greer made his finding based on the testimony of Terri’s husband that Terri said she wouldn’t want to live like this — a rather important fact the husband only remembered many years after Terri was first injured, but one year after he won a million-dollar malpractice award and began living with another woman.”


Compared to Michael Schiavo and George Greer, the Taliban and the female-circumcisors of Central Africa look like charter members of the National Organization for Women, (a group that, like rest of the supposedly anti-patriarchal feminist establishment, was nowhere to be seen when patriarchy returned with a bang to Pinellas County, Florida).


Ann does take note of a number of liberals who actually did protest Terri’s gruesome fate, giving the lie to the latest elite-media meme that the last-ditch effort to save her life was pure Republican political grandstanding:


“On the anti-killing side, to one extent or another, are: former Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis, former Gore lawyer David Boies, former O.J. lawyer Alan Dershowitz, Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, McGovern and Carter strategist Pat Caddell, liberal blogger Mickey Kaus, Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader and Rainbow Coalition leader Jesse Jackson, as well as several of my friends who are pro-abortion and pro-gay marriage but not Pro-Adulterous Husbands Who, After Taking Up With Another Woman, Suddenly Recall Their Wives’ Clearly Stated Wish to Die.”


And believe me, all of the above–even Jesse Jackson–are going to get a free pass from me for an awfully long time. 


I’ll end with this, from Michelle Malkin’s blog:


And Death Shall Have No Dominion


And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.


And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.


And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.


-Dylan Thomas


I burst into tears when I read this–but where you are, Terri, my sister, there are no more tears. There is no more weeping, and around you flows in clear and limpid streams all the water that your own husband would not let you drink.