She was in the middle of a business call and had mounds of work. But the minute Sue Kelman heard Terri Schiavo had died Thursday, she couldn't wait any longer. She drafted an e-mail to her parents, her brother and her sister.
"I think I know how some, but not all of you wish to be treated at the end of life," the executive at a Boston health organization wrote to her family. "But even if I were to hazard a guess
The lengthy, sometimes ghoulish public deathwatch over Schiavo is touching off soul-searching, but also practical and highly personal conversations in offices, living rooms and bedrooms.
Medical ethicist -- An article in Friday's Section A about how Terri Schiavo's death prompted Americans to talk about life-and-death issues referred to Dr. Michael Grodin, the director of law, medicine and ethics at Boston University, as Dr. Charles Grodin.
Men and women find themselves contemplating difficult philosophical issues and the deep, dark matter of trust. Some wonder: Is their spouse the person to whom they want to delegate their own end-of-life decisions? How should friends, children, siblings, parents be involved?
Others wrestle with a more fundamental question: What constitutes a life worth living?
In short, as the nation watched Schiavo die, many people gave new thought to how they and their loved ones live -- and how they hope to face death.
At record levels Thursday, living will forms were downloaded from Internet sites. Some people set out to learn the meaning of such terms as "health proxy" or "power of attorney for health decisions."
"It has made me more militant," Lucinda Dyer, 57, an author in Franklin, Tenn., said Thursday. Dyer, who is single, said that several years ago, she had drafted a living will, designating a close friend as her healthcare proxy, "because I know she'd pull the plug for me in an instant, which is what I would want."
But just to make sure, Dyer said she called her lawyer earlier in the week "to make absolutely certain that everything was in place."
And once again, Dyer had a conversation about end-of-life care with her 94-year-old mother, who has stipulated that she does not want to be kept alive if she becomes incapacitated.
Schiavo's death, said Dyer, "has reconfirmed for me how strongly I feel about the right to die on one's own terms."
As a result of all the attention given to Schiavo's lingering death, Vermont novelist Chris Bohjalian said he had a first-ever conversation with his 77-year-old father.
"I am not sure that my father and I had ever said the two words 'living' and 'will' in the same sentence prior to this," Bohjalian said Thursday. "In that regard, I think it has been helpful."
