This was God in His mercy, someone said. Probably you.

Yes, it was merciful, first for Terri Schiavo, over whose unconscious form and inert brain an ugly battleground had been created to indulge some of the worst excesses available to the human condition. Among the more prominent desecrations of an innocent person’s last hours it produced gross piety, the attempted perversion of political power, exhibitionism, misplaced rage and a media sideshow.

In the end she was kept alive long enough to be transformed from an international cause, a fate she didn’t deserve, to being the helpless victim of her self-serving advocates, which she deserved even less.

The rancor is not going to be silenced by her death. That is too much to hope for. But we can be thankful that the garments of mercy fell most urgently on an institution that truly needed them, America’s court system.

The rescue essentially flowed from a source that had almost been forgotten in the clash of political, legal and medical wills: The good sense of the American public when the sideshow stirred in part by Bible-pounding political activists got too brazen to stomach.

In the midst of the hysteria, there was enough repellant behavior—up to and including Jesse Jackson’s grandstand act—to allow an understanding of the parents’ grief, their persistence and their enlistment of allies that extended into the most powerful office on earth.

If you are a parent, you may not have been driven to those extremes out of respect for your daughter or son.

But if you are a parent you may not know how you would have acted under identical circumstances. Perhaps you would have been unable to see the now-mindless and vegetative form of your daughter as Anna Quindlen could, in sympathy but detachment, as “a music box that no longer plays,” with her eyes open but the light in them gone.

What the country was spared, almost surprisingly, was a constitutional crisis provoked by the reckless attempt of the White House and the congressional majority to subvert law and the courts, to create new, off-the-wall law overnight that would simply have told America and the world: “We’ve got the power to do anything we want.”

They don’t, for the time being.

The attempted putsch dissolved when the American public said, “let her die in peace.”

The president backed off. The Congress backed off. The courts, whatever their political makeup, defied some predictions that the center would not hold. The center--the rule of law and good sense--held.

The public’s assertion of its own wishes in behalf of Terri Schiavo via the polls may have been the biggest and most important town forum in years in the quirky evolution of the American society.

We now have the knowledge that we were very close to an omnipotent government achieving the ultimate hypocrisy, on one hand trying to reshape the court system to serve its political ends and on the other trying to choke the same system by making it irrelevant.

But there had to be a more solemn and humane legacy for America in Terri Schiavo’s death.

There was. We now know, more dramatically than we have before, of the simple but profound service we can perform by making sure what most of us want in our waning days. We want to be allowed to die in peace and with whatever grace is available to us when there is a choice.

If we can’t make that choice ourselves, audibly, at the moment it matters we can make it unmistakable when we still have the power of expression.

We can do that in writing, with our wishes and our signatures. If there are decisions to be made afterward, we can designate those we trust to make them.

Doing this is not an act of cold legalese. It is an act of service, to our families, to our society and to ourselves. It is also an act of love.

It is a way we can look at the episode of Terri Schiavo and be thankful for her peace, and ours.

---Jim Klobuchar

© 2005 Jim Klobuchar