The Anchoress
Leticia Velasquez has written a beautiful witness to life and love on the main page:
It was the first day of spring in 2005. I was at the florist in the seaside village where I grew up, assembling a basket of flowering spring plants for my sister, who had just given birth.
Immersing my hands in budding greenery, inhaling the earthy scents—it helped to chase away, for a few moments, the looming death which occupied my mind. Later that evening, watching my sister’s pink newborn suck on his tiny fists, I smiled; it was a welcome break from the tragedy that was flooding the airwaves, and leaving me feeling panicked.
Terri Schindler Schiavo was being dehydrated to death in Florida, and I took it very personally.
Schiavo had her family by her side, yet they were helpless to give her even one drop of water, though the flowers in the vase next to her bed had plenty, to keep them fresh and alive. Would that, I wondered, be our situation someday?
I fought pain in my stomach as I listened to Sean Hannity report from Schiavo’s hospice in Florida. What was a woman my age doing in a hospice, anyway? Until her husband had won a battle to remove her feeding tube, Terri Schiavo had not been dying. After his victory, though, even an act of Congress wasn’t enough to save her life. What chance would I have of saving Christina’s life against a society which devalues the weaker members?
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