why slow starvation instead of a relatively quick overdose of painkillers

Because that removes the option of a miracle.

I think people are prayerfully waiting for a miracle - for God to replace the fluid with brain.

Is "prayerfully" even a fucking word?

I can't figure out how to make it one. It's being used as an adverb, but I can only make it mean- in a way that suggests prayer- which doesn't work in the context.

It's an adverb that means "in a prayerful manner." So the manner in which the family was excited was in a prayerful manner, one assumes.

And before anyone asks, yes, there are prayers of excitement, or prayers said during something exciting.

[I don't agree with Schiavo's parents and I damn well don't agree with the people who insist on dragging God into everything. My point, such as it is, is only that of a pedantic grammarian who used to belong to a church that prayed their asses off any chance they got.]

I really don't like feeding tubes as a rule. My grandmother suffered for years with ALS unable talk or move any part of her body other than her eyes. The disease would have killed her years earlier if wasn't for the feeding tube.

It's being used as an adverb, but I can only make it mean- in a way that suggests prayer- which doesn't work in the context.

Well, "full of prayer"; or, following the examples of pitifully, "causing prayer," or hopefully, "deleting prayerfully and sticking a '[subject] pray[s]' onto the beginning of the sentence."

want to come live in the cave with me? We'll install one of those hugeass jaccuzi tubs.

That sounds quite lovely.

why slow starvation instead of a relatively quick overdose of painkillers

I can see a justification for this, in that someone would have to give her the overdose, and it would probably have to be a medical professional, and that's a really tough thing to ask someone to do in a professional capacity.

My brother used to work in a nursing home that had a lot of residents that were near death. Some of them chose to stop eating to shorten their suffering. Hard for me to imagine, but it makes me think that it might be harder for those of us left behind to see the wasting away than for the one who is doing the dying.

Or maybe that's just something I tell myself to feel better about the whole thing.

I'm certain her parents are loving, devout people of faith, but their lawyer's comment (whether with their approval or not) is very crassly aimed at the religious right and the people who support it, and is only and expressly intended to paint a "the side of the parents is holy, righteous and blessed, and any other view point is heathen, godless, sinful, wrong and bad, regardless of fact or nuance," picture.

I'm with the Minister, I think. And not just cause I want a franchise.(Although I'd better send people, no? After a few times, Wheels of Death get noticed.)

erika, have you read Infinite Jest? There's a group in it known as the wheelchair assassins, iirc.

I'm not certain I can really recommend reading the whole thing, but you might want to skim through for passages relating to this feared and deadly group.