FOR ONCE, YOU MUST NOT TRY TO SHIRK THE FACTS: Kesher Talk remains a necessary source for understanding what happened to Terri Schiavo.

Again, I think this is the most important thing most people can read about this case.

All of us have an inoperable illness. For the best of us, death is the crown of our lives, the title of the story. For those of us in the wealthy West–where, honestly, I’m not going to die from a mine explosion or a suicide bomb or a factory fire–death is at least one of three things. It’s the expression of the most humiliating, unconquered urges (all those hamburgers, all those cigarettes, all those whiskey-and-Diet-Cokes); or it’s the unfair, weirdly singular fact of a genetic problem or a sudden illness, where you’re singled out and it’s horrible because no one else is; or it’s the last laugh of all us carnivorous, smoking, drinking people against the rest of you. “Hah, you’re dead too!”

None of these three situations is especially attractive.

Richard Brookhiser cited this limerick on the seven ages of man:

Seven ages: first, puking and mewling;
Then very pissed off at one’s schooling;
Then fucks; then fights;
Then settling chaps’ rights;
Then sitting in slippers; then drooling.

I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about humiliation. I think at the very least we should all be deeply skeptical of any worldview that attempts to present humiliated, helpless human lives as somehow less worthy than autonomous, dignified lives. It’s bullies and torturers who try to convince us that if you can show someone humiliated and helpless you’ve somehow shown her as less worthy of sympathy.