an obscure sorrow

[jrtom]

CBS News: Brain-Dead Woman's Baby Dies

This story--not just the linked article, but the entire narrative--has given me strange feelings since I first encountered it.

Looked at in one way, the idea of functionally-dead woman as live incubator is a bit creepy.

Part of me wants to think of her as still existing, somehow--among other things, it would makes it seem less weird that her husband quit her job to stay by her side even after her brain-death. (I'm not sure I could do that, myself--knowing she'll never speak again, but having to confront the evidence of her body's continued functioning on a continuing basis.) Plus, I want to view this as somehow heroic--you know, taking care of your child from beyond the grave and all that.

But if she _did_ still exist, how must it feel to know that all this wasn't enough to save her child? And how would it feel to see your own body lying there, kept "alive" artificially?

Comments

swimming around in a plastic bag

[amnesiadust.livejournal.com]

Had I known just how apropos the lyrics were to my post, I might have quoted them myself (although they do imply a specific assumption about the nature of what it means to be alive).

This sort of thing was what I thought of immediately when I heard the song: a long, lingering death due to degenerative disease. As opposed to "No Way Out" where it's a sudden death due to violent trauma.

The lyrics do assume a sort of ghost-in-the-machine viewpoint. They're all over the album; "Growing Up" is another obvious example. The mythology attached to the idea of an incorporeal soul makes for good poetry, and human beings the world over are ready to believe in it unless they're hard-core orthodox Buddhists.

Random question: what do the characters in your icon mean?

ai ki do: literally, "harmony-energy-way", usually rendered as "the Way to Harmonize with the Energy of the Universe."