Funny. It's April Fool's, but everyone's dying.

Terri Schiavo's finally been put to rest, the Pope has been given his last rites, and two more conjoined twins have arrived in Singapore for separation, of course with a high risk of death for both, especially since one of them has a hole in her heart.

Turned on the TV for a short while this morning while I was eating breakfast and saw that Terri Schiavo had finally passed on, and then George Bush came on; they showed an excerpt of his speech about how "today, everyone mourns the death of Terri Schiavo".

No. Not everyone. She should've been allowed to move on a long time ago.

All right, so I understand; to say that it's difficult to deal out "mercy killing" to a family member must be one of the greatest understatements ever made. But if you ask me, her family's just been selfish all this while.

Fifteen years. Isn't that enough to tell you that she isn't coming back? Wasn't the scan showing that her brain was complete mush enough to tell you that she hasn't been in there all along?

Have they just been afraid to let her die because they'd like to convince themselves that as long as her body draws breath, she's still alive, in some sense? Have they refused to let her move on because they want her around?

I wonder what makes you think a person is alive.

If I have a routine that I follow, doing the same things day in and day out, am I alive?

If I lived for the moment and stood in the sunshine and sat by my window and slept and woke as and when I felt like it, am I alive?

And what if I saw the same people everyday, ones that I hate and ones that I love, and ones which are everything in between and I loved and laughed and basked in their companionship; would you think me truly alive?

And what then if I ran from everything and everyone all the time and lived in a world where I never saw the same face twice and my world was full of strangers that I did not wish to talk to, but I walked in sunlight and I breathed fresh air, would I still be alive?

What then if I simply breathed and did nothing more?

Would you tell me that I am an idle daydreamer, taking joy in the world without giving anything in return? Would you think me useless, making nothing of my life? Would you think me "alive" if I watched Life run on and pass me by and never gave thought to give chase?


And Bush said that Americans should value life and treasure it, and treasure the lives of those who live at the mercy of others; how about the Iraqis, then? Do they live at your mercy or at the mercy of your soldiers?

And don't we all live at the mercy of everyone else, then? No one could have everyone else in the world like or love them, and if someone so decided to kill them someday because of this, who could stop them if they'd made up their mind? Discounting the arm of the law, that is.

Funny; when humans first lived on this Earth, we knew that life and death were natural and could let each other go because we could do nothing about it.

Now that we can stave off death and prolong life, we grow tired of it and wage wars and commit suicides; we use more resources than we've ever had to in the past and we leave less and less for those who may or may not come after us, even as we talk of increasing our populations; we fool ourselves into believing that our doctors and their instruments will always be able to keep Death at bay, and we believe that those whom we love will always be here because we don't wish them to go. We won't let them go.

Until everything else in the world reminds us that we don't really have a say in it. It makes for a good wake-up call, and everyone mills around in despondent thought for a while (or not), but in the end, we all still go back to laughing and walking in the sunshine, and back to sleep, waiting for that next rude awakening.