A feeding tube for thought

From eating a bagel cut into small triangular pieces for lunch to the most splashed face on TV, Terry Schiavo has come a long way. We could term it to be a journey but to me it's an ordeal of gigantic proportions.

Most of us will always remember her as a file photograph taken in 2002 (after she was kept alive in a vegetative state for 13 years) and flashed all across the length and breadth of this country by media networks. An inanimate figure with cropped hair and glazed eyes smiling in a retarded manner to the touch of her mother. I wonder if that's how Terry wanted the world to know her. Would she, who suffered from an eating disorder as she was afraid of being overweight, have liked us to remember her as this unsightly figure who could elicit nothing but a tepid sympathy?

We will never spare the time or the effort to read who Terry really was. We will never know that she was a shy and insecure kid who had more birds than friends. We will never know that she was so conscious of her looks that she veered into an eating disorder that caused the cardiac arrest. All that we will ever know is that she's someone who, for most of us, has become synonymous to a feeding tube.

Terry does not deserve it. She deserves to be left alone with her family and not crucified everyday on national television. She does not need the support of pro-life demonstrators; she needs a peaceful end to the drama that has surrounded her life. She does not need Congress or the President to use her misfortune to prove a point; she simply needs to retire far from the madding crowd where she's treated like a human being and not a primetime reality series.

In times that we live, sometime that's too much to ask.