Four years ago, my family faced one of the hardest decisions we would ever have to make. It… Four years ago, my family faced one of the hardest decisions we would ever have to make. It was late October and I was a freshman at Pitt, still reeling from the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. My mother was in the intensive care unit of Riddle Memorial Hospital, having suffered an aneurysm that had left her in a vegetative state. A machine was breathing for her, pumping in pure oxygen, while a man from an organ donation service lingered outside the ward.

When we made the choice to remove her from life support, we knew the brain damage she had suffered was irreversible, and that every day we waited would only make it worse. We also knew that she was pointedly opposed to any form of prolonged artificial respiration, especially if it meant denying vital organs to someone who needed them. She was that kind of person.

Until last week I knew very little about the details surrounding the Terri Schiavo controversy. I spent most of Tuesday afternoon reading up on it, and what I learned left me completely stunned. Compared to the personal hell that the Schiavo and Schindler families have endured for the last decade and a half, my family seems to have been let off relatively easy.

I have a picture on my desk of Terri Schiavo, taken many years before the heart attack that put her in the hospital. Her smile is flawless — the kind a dentist would photograph to hang in his waiting room. She was beautiful back then, despite having battled serious weight problems as a teen.

If more photos like this one had been circulated during the last couple of weeks, people might understand the true difference between who Terri Schiavo once was and the shell of her former self that she has become. But the media doesn’t want us to focus on Terri Schiavo’s humanity. They’d rather view her as a prism through which they can safely debate polarizing issues of public policy.

Some think that keeping Schiavo alive will promote a “culture of life” and protect the civil rights of those unable to do so for themselves. Others claim this is yet another example of a power-intoxicated administration trampling over federalism.

The Village Voice called the most recent vote in the House a “great victory for the Christian right” while the National Review denounced one of Schiavo’s doctors, who approved of removing her feeding tube, as a “right-to-die zealot.”

By now, we should be keen enough to recognize when the hydraulics of political spin are put into motion, such as when FOX News invites six anti-abortion talking heads to lecture unabated on “Hannity and Colmes.”

We need to resist the urge to buy into the panic and the relentless assault of sensationalism that the mainstream media is trying to sell us.

Terri Schiavo is the exception to an otherwise perfectly functioning rule. The system works fine the way it is, and there is no need for change. Nearly every poll that has been conducted shows the public is firmly on the side of Michael Schiavo. We don’t need legislation to protect our right to life. We can begin tonight, by telling our friends and loved ones under what conditions we would desire to be kept alive.

Sadly, the Schiavos will not be afforded such a luxury. When Terri’s parents look at her, they don’t see the lifeless, unresponsive zombie that I see. They see the girl they used to know — the one smiling and laughing in my photograph and in all the others ranging from infancy to adulthood that pepper the front page of the Schiavo Foundation’s Web site. They see the girl they once drove to elementary school and sleepovers, to recitals and proms, whom they walked to the altar on her wedding day.

They probably don’t listen to the doctors who have performed complicated scans and found their daughter’s cerebral cortex to be completely destroyed, replaced with spinal fluid and atrophy.

I remember when my own family desperately railed against the same, cruel reality check — when the doctors informed us my mother wouldn’t pull through. We tried buying into our delusions that better doctors, a transfer of hospitals or a sudden leap of faith might make an inkling of difference, that the slightest tic or toe wiggle was evidence enough to give us hope. We saw what Terri’s parents still see.

But that is not what Terri’s husband sees. Michael Schiavo is brave enough to admit the truth. He knows the body on the bed is not his wife.

He’s waited 15 years for her to return, but Terri left him long ago, and she is never coming back.

The Web site for the Terri Schindler-Schiavo foundation is www.terrisfight.net. Send feedback to [email protected].