An advance directive is not the solution

It usually takes a hospital admission before people think seriously about advance directives and living wills. But these days people are hearing the advice about getting one before it's needed... just in case.

But, as I've focused on "what I would want," I find I'm really not all that sure of what I'd really want. This far removed from the reality of the choice, it just seems so hypothetical. What would I really want if I were really choosing?

So, just when I thought I'd read everything that could be said about Terri Schiavo, I really found something fresh in Mark Steyn's Sunday Sun Times column. Here's most of the part I found most challenging.

We all have friends who are passionate about some activity -- They say, ''I live to ski,'' or dance, or play the cello. Then something happens and they can't. The ones I've known fall into two broad camps: There are those who give up and consider what's left of their lives a waste of time; and there are those who say they've learned to appreciate simple pleasures, like the morning sun through the spring blossom dappling their room each morning. Most of us roll our eyes and think, ''What a loser, mooning on about the blossom. He used to be a Hollywood vice president, for Pete's sake.''
But that's easy for us to say. We can't know which camp we'd fall into until it happens to us. And it behooves us to maintain a certain modesty about presuming to speak for others -- even those we know well. Example: ''Driving down there, I remember distinctly thinking that Chris would rather not live than be in this condition.'' That's Barbara Johnson recalling the 1995 accident of her son Christopher Reeve. Her instinct was to pull the plug; his was to live.

Right now, when I'd wonder how I'd be able to go on, I might make one choice. But maybe, if faced with the real choice, and not just the possibility, I might find the strength and grace to do what I can not imagine doing now.

Which leads me to appreciate the wisdom behind something else I read last week. In The Weekly Standard, Eric Cohen wrote, "The human answer to our dependency is not living wills but loving surrogates." Or, as I'm beginning to think, the answer is not a piece of paper I write today with hypothetical musings on something that may or may not be real. The answer is caregivers who know my values and commitments well enough to think and choose what I'd likely choose, if I knew what the situation actually was.

Which makes a kind of sense. Why should the solution to a human dilemma be a piece of paper? Surely the proper way to resolve a human dilemma is with a human solution.