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Our story is like a movie shown on two screens: my loved ones' experience on one, my experience on another. Their story happened to me but I missed it, missed two months of my life and the greatest tragedy my family's been through. My story shows me giving a happy birth, then having trouble, then going to sleep before the surgeries. I awaken from a drug-induced coma, thinking it was the next morning, and hear my husband say, "You've been here for 47 days." Later that day, I slip back into the coma for several more weeks, then awake to the invasion of the body snatchers, unable to breathe or move on my own, my heart severed from my newborn.

When Schiavo's story broke, I waded through the murky ground of what many felt but few voiced. Many prolife Christians agreed that what was being done to Schiavo was terribly wrong, but still deep questions swirled: Who would want to be in her position? Is there a morally acceptable line for relinquishing life support? Could sanctity and dignity of life walk hand in hand?

When Dr. James Dobson was a guest on Sean Hannity's national talk-radio show discussing Schiavo, he recounted my story. Add me to the list of poster adults for not pulling the plug. Yet from my new perspective, the sanctity of life versus the dignity of life still seems complex.

Gradually I've begun to remember bits of my comatose state: The swimming-through-mud feeling of trying to surface to awareness. The frightening dreams. The intense and very real spiritual warfare, a battle as unto death. The fog of being strapped in a chair with daytime television on to "stimulate" me, vaguely registering that people were in my room, but unable to comprehend that, let alone communicate. It was like watching someone through opaque glass underwater, visible but obscure and unreachable. And the weeks of living in the shadowland between my coma and full awareness, with times of frustration beyond belief.

I remember Tim holding one of my hands, a neurologist the other, and telling me to squeeze their hands. Unable to do so or to speak, I felt my brain screaming, "Why can't I do this? Maybe I'm dying." Later, my inability to use the call button left me banging a spoon on the bedside table for an hour and a half. No one came. They thought it was the repetitive motor response of a brain-damaged woman.

These memories seeded a need for clarity in answers and—just as important—a passion to ask the right questions in life-and-death issues. William Temple, who was Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1940s, wrote that the "church must announce Christian principles and point out where the existing social order is in conflict with them."

What then are the Christian principles at the heart of this argument? Two come to mind: "Thou shalt not murder" is a protective boundary whose removal would incite societal moral free-fall. And life is sacred and reflects God's image, with innate value regardless of its quality or productivity.

But if God values us, whole or brain-damaged, and there's value in being a loving caregiver to an incapacitated person, what about the seeming purposelessness of that patient's existence? A second biblically derived principle sheds light here: if our chief end is to glorify God, then we can find purpose and meaning in a life that society deems a mere existence. God can be glorified even through our suffering.

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February 2004, Vol. 48, No. 2