Sick sad world

Whatever the outcome of the Schiavo case, what's being lost in all of this mayhem is the utter sadness of the situation.

On CBC news, they ran a videotape from her birthday in 2002. One of her parents had a bright blue balloon with a picture of a birthday cake, and they were waving it gently in front of her eyes, trying to have some sort of celebration. She didn't track the balloon with her eyes, but they just kept trying. For whatever reason, as numb to this case as I am by now, that just devastated me; I've been on the verge of tears since I saw it. I think it's just that horrible sense of pain and anguish that you feel radiating from those tapes, the desperate refusal to let go of hope. Or maybe it's just the sense of loss and the recognition that everything you do isn't enough to bring back your daughter. It's difficult for me to articulate why this affected me so much. The whole situation feels awful, particularly because such intimate moments are being paraded out before the public - a family's grief is live on national television for viewers who have no real connection to the case. It just feels sick and tremendously, irrevocably sad.