c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Nobody’s perfect, and nobody knows what he’d do under certain circumstances until he’s actually in those circumstances.

Which is why it’s hard to fault Terri Schiavo’s husband or her parents and siblings, all of whom have insisted that they wanted only what was best for her.

True, Michael Schiavo didn’t keep the vow he took to remain faithful to his wife. A few years after her collapse 15 years ago, he began to see other women and now lives with a woman with whom he has two children.

But he is Terri Schiavo’s husband, and she is incapacitated, and as such he is in charge of her health care. Court after court has accepted his testimony that while she and he were in their 20s, she made it clear to him that she would not want to be kept alive with a feeding tube.

Should we have expected him not to honor and defend her wishes?

It’s true, also, that Terri’s parents have said all manner of shocking things about their son-in-law, suggesting at best that he is a gold digger and an adulterer, and at worst that he is a murderer.

But they are her mother and father. They bathed and fed and rocked her as an infant, kissed away her nightmares and tucked her in bed as a child, and over the years watched her grow into a lovely young woman.

When she suffered brain damage after a collapse at the age of 26, which was followed by a diagnosis of persistent vegetative state, they joined forces with their son-in-law to take care of her.

Then Terri’s husband sought to take away her food and water with the express purpose of causing her death.

He called it allowing her to have “a peaceful death.” They called it “killing our daughter.”

By any name, it launched a nearly unbearable spectacle _ not just for Terri’s family, but for all of us. Did Michael Schiavo “pull the plug” on his wife as though she were “a broken appliance,” as the Vatican accused? Did Terri’s parents attempt to subvert the political and judicial process to thwart their daughter’s “right to die”?

We’re bound to have learned something from their misery, including of course the fact that it is irresponsible to avoid writing down your wishes regarding end-of-life health care.

But surely there’s more. Surely we have seen anew the importance of our nation’s cherished principle known as “the rule of law.” We may not have liked the outcome of the legal wrangling, and we may have been sickened by politicians’ self-serving attempts to interfere, but the rule of law prevailed.

Surely, too, we have given more than our usual amount of thought to the meaning of life and the morality of how we live it. For me, such contemplation came in discussions with my teenage daughter about the fact that what’s legal _ for example, abortion and capital punishment _ isn’t always moral, and about what we should do when the two clash.

I can’t know what I would have done if I had been in Terri’s mother’s shoes. I think, though, that at some point I would have had our attorney go to our son-in-law’s attorney and say on our behalf:

We’re dropping all our legal challenges and will make no more public statements or accusations about what’s happening to our daughter. In exchange, I ask only that you allow me to sit at my daughter’s bedside and hold her hand as she dies. Not because I want to confront or challenge you, but because I am her mother and she is my child.

And then I think I would have sat until the collision between morality and legality culminated in my daughter’s death.

MO/JL/PH END COLEMAN

(Frances Coleman is editorial page editor of the Mobile (Ala.) Register.)