I read the whole paper pretty much every day (that is, if you use “read” in the loose sense of perusal). It has become a time-consuming habit, but still worth it, I think, to discover what is happening locally. Occasionally you get an article which lifts the curtain on cultural mores. Saturday we got three.

The front page news was Terri Schiavo. The woman is now being starved to death by her adulterous husband, who seems determined to ensure the woman’s death rather than wash his hands of her care by entrusting her back to her parents. Culturally there is much at stake with letting this brain damaged woman slowly die, and in contrast to the conclusions of some, this woman’s story provides the pathos and passion we need to put a face on the issue of life and cultural responsibility (see Dr. Groothuis’ piece for a well-written exposition of the social and moral issues working out here).

In Saturday’s paper, the social reaction to Mrs. Schiavo’s situation was buttressed by two almost surreal articles printed on the same page. The first piece talks about the surreal activities requested by Hunter S. Thompson with regards to his cremated remains. Evidently he would like the ashes of the body in which he refused to live shot from a bizarre 150’ tower topped with a double-thumbed fist. How eccentric! How charmingly odd! First the writer famous for his dependence on chemicals and alcohol bravely blows his brains out in the room next to his young grandson, and now he maintains his eccentricities from beyond the grave with this nonsensical “tribute.” Note the words of his widow at the end of the article: “You wonder if the joke is on us, don’t you?” I can emphathize with her: the woman’s husband put a bullet through his head rather than deal with the pains of living. But she and the others in the house poured cocktails and raised their glasses to toast the man in the same room with his gruesome, still-warm corpse. There was no sense of tragedy or loss. That bullet was just the inevitable gonzo exit of a man not bound by social or moral conventions. (Note Lileks’ commentary on Trudeau’s handling of the thing [the “WTH?” paragraph])

Perhaps the most disturbing article is this one. Here a brilliant young man takes his life violently, and his family endorses the action with brave resolve, replacing Thompson’s alcohol-soaked eulogies with New Age nonsense: “Brandenn was very deeply spiritual. His mind was too powerful for the limitations of the physical world. He knew it was his time and he needed to move on.” Look at all the good he did! He gave up his organs so that others could continue living. This was not a desperate, short-sighted act of an isolated teen: it was the inevitable spiritual evolution of a soul too wise for this world.

Where is the rage? Where is the trembling sadness? I can understand how various individuals and families might adopt varying and unorthodox mechanisms to deal with the sudden trauma of suicide and death, but the larger culture should not fail to mourn such losses and rage against the dying of their lights.

Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.”

Jesus wept.