As wretched a this image is, it’s the artistic representation of what Terri Shiavo looked like as she lived her final moments on earth, deprived of food and water by a judge’s orders 10 years ago.
This is how we looked ten years ago as she left the planet:
This is a delicate subject.. and still as divisive today as it was then. My position then and today was that her death was wrong..and that the only person who benefited from it was her ex-husband. I still believe I am right.. I also understand the vast amount of people who think differently than me. But regardless of what anyone thinks, the description (graphic, beware) of her final hours needs to be documented for history books. Lawyers at that time were not completely honest about her “beautiful” death ..
And yet, Schiavo’s attorney falsely told the public during a press conference, just days before Terri’s death, that she looked “beautiful”. This is what they want you to believe, not the harsh truth about the madness of what we permit in the rooms of hospitals, nursing homes and hospices every single day across this country. These are the hard facts my family and I will have to live with for the rest of my life: After almost two weeks without food or water, my sister’s lips were horribly cracked, to the point where they were blistering. Her skin became jaundice with areas that turned different shades of blue. Her skin became markedly dehydrated from the lack of water. Terri’s breathing became rapid and uncontrollable, as if she was outside sprinting. Her moaning, at times, was raucous, which indicated to us the insufferable pain she was experiencing. Terri’s face became skeletal, with blood pooling in her deeply sunken eyes and her teeth protruding forward. Even as I write this, I can never properly describe the nightmare of having to watch my sister have to die this way. What will be forever seared in my memory is the look of utter horror on my sister’s face when my family visited her just after she died.
I believed in 2005 that this was not a case of a ‘right to die’ patient despite that current thought that it was.... Instead I believed there to be ulterior motives to the man who was requesting her death. It may be unfair to be a judge of character .. and I know this post may find some people who disagree with me. Fair enough.
But fair game: The truth about her final moments on the planet.. During a full moon in Florida, March 31, 2005.
The co-pilot Andreas Lubitz who steered an airline with 150 people on board into a French mountainside had been dumped by his girlfriend the day prior to the crash and was undergoing treatment for depression from a doctor, according to reports Saturday.
But we are just finding out so much about Lubitz so quickly, aren’t we? The problem I have with all of these stories is that unnamed people are being quoted and we are not finding the true source of the information. Where does it come from? Family? Friends? The EX? I am not trying to cast too big a shadow of doubt—I believe in conspiracy but also know that not everything is one, so i am trying to be cautious but sensible. But here is a quote from the FOX NEWS story that gets me into the caution zone:
The New York Post reported that the German newspaper Bild quoted an ex-girlfriend saying that Lubitz “would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, “We’re crashing!”
“When I heard about the crash, one thing that he said kept going through my head: ‘One day I’m going to do something that will change the whole system, and everyone will know my name and remember it.’ ” the woman told the paper, according to the Post.
“I didn’t know what he meant, but now it makes sense,” the woman added.
The Post also reported that French TV channel iTELE reported Lubitz and another girlfriend of seven years shared an apartment in Dusseldorf and planned to get married next year. However, the channel had said Lubtiz’s fiancée ended the relationship the day before the crash.
So how convenient. Suddenly when a big crime is committed, we are told by this EX that she broke up with him a day prior.. And we also have been told as a child he loved this area of the ALPS. And we also know that he was DREAMING about crashing a plane now.. All of this added up together sure sounds like the perfect story book beginning and ending …
I think this girlfriend story is a little sketchy. Don’t get me wrong, again, I am not trying to create rumors where there are none.. but I would think investigators should be asking more about this EX.. asking why the breakup happened. If it did. Asking more about those dreams. If they did..
And if someone is speaking about ‘doing something everyone will remember,’ or something of the like, the partner usually queries a lot more about that than this girlfriend apparently did.
And now pilots are going to have to sign away their medical information on a regular basis to a corporation to ensure something of this nature will never happen again.. I guess Andreas Lubitz will be remembered for that…
….but I keep pondering the ‘we’re crashing!!’ dreams, and they are peculiar. I have reservations about buying into the storyline at this point—at least as it is being presented by the supposed ex-girlfriend of 24 hours.
And let me ask something more.. in our information age where everyone tweets and tumbles and Facebooks into the night, where is the social media presence of Lubitz? Or this girlfriend?
x x x
I am not offering up any theories of my own, I am simply adding a mixture of doubt and logic to this whole thing..
From a distance, we have a perfect story. A mentally unstable pilot breaks up with his girlfriend a day before—the same girlfriend who now says he had dreams about planes crashing. Then he locks out his fellow pilot and he crashes a plane, murdering 150 people, into a location in the Alps he supposedly enjoyed visiting as a child.
There is no letter, though. No motive. But we do have a great set of audio files of people screaming and a pilot using an ax, we are told, to chop away at the door while screaming “My God” … The crash takes 8 minutes. Scratch that. Eighteen. Wait. No. Seven. . Well, pick your own on that.
It glides into the hell on earth, leaving behind a dead metal cylinder of humanity. A tragic story. But we have a villain.. An evil pilot who was hellbent on killing all the innocent souls that day.
This is the flight audio recording, we are told, that finishes this story and gives us the inside view of what occurred.
There is another piece of the puzzle, however, missing. And it’s a big piece that provides the scientific and industrial evidence as to how the plane crashed: The flight DATA recorder was found. But it was missing a memory card. AS The AP reported last week:
Confusion surrounded the fate of the second black box. French President Francois Hollande said the casing of the flight data recorder had been found in the scattered debris, but was missing the memory card that captures 25 hours’ worth of information on the position and condition of almost every major part in a plane. Jouty refused to confirm the discovery.
The BEA has yet to hold a follow-up briefing on the investigation and it fell to the European Cockpit Association to remind the world that investigators have yet to find the aircraft’s flight data recorder, analysis of which could prove vital to confirming the facts.
Was the memory card taken? How was it missing? We haven’t gotten much more word on this.. Instead we have seen the public trial and verdict on the pilot..
I am not arguing that he did not do it. I am not saying he is an innocent patsy.. I am not pretending that people didn’t die.. I am not attempting to begin a conspiracy theory. I am adding a little bit of cold water to a burning hot public feeding frenzy.. that is it.
And I will also add this:
If a pilot was going to intentionally crash a plane, there are two things that don’t make sense. 1) He would have had to crashed the plane while being alone.. the notion that he was alone only occurred since the co-pilot had to urinate. Are we to believe that if both pilots would have stayed put that day, this crash would not have happened? And 2) If a suicidal pilot was going to crash a plane, would have truly have done it by doing a steady descent into the alps for over ten minutes? Or wouldn’t he have just ..well..crashed the plane?
To me, these are perplexing questions that, in the heat of the moment, few are asking and none are addressing.
Instead, we have the tale of Germanwings Flight 9525.
The co-pilot Andreas Lubitz who steered an airline with 150 people on board into a French mountainside had been dumped by his girlfriend the day prior to the crash and was undergoing treatment for depression from a doctor, according to reports Saturday.
But we are just finding out so much about Lubitz so quickly, aren’t we? The problem I have with all of these stories is that unnamed people are being quoted and we are not finding the true source of the information. Where does it come from? Family? Friends? The EX? I am not trying to cast too big a shadow of doubt—I believe in conspiracy but also know that not everything is one, so i am trying to be cautious but sensible. But here is a quote from the FOX NEWS story that gets me into the caution zone:
The New York Post reported that the German newspaper Bild quoted an ex-girlfriend saying that Lubitz “would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, “We’re crashing!”
“When I heard about the crash, one thing that he said kept going through my head: ‘One day I’m going to do something that will change the whole system, and everyone will know my name and remember it.’ ” the woman told the paper, according to the Post.
“I didn’t know what he meant, but now it makes sense,” the woman added.
The Post also reported that French TV channel iTELE reported Lubitz and another girlfriend of seven years shared an apartment in Dusseldorf and planned to get married next year. However, the channel had said Lubtiz’s fiancée ended the relationship the day before the crash.
So how convenient. Suddenly when a big crime is committed, we are told by this EX that she broke up with him a day prior.. And we also have been told as a child he loved this area of the ALPS. And we also know that he was DREAMING about crashing a plane now.. All of this added up together sure sounds like the perfect story book beginning and ending …
I think this girlfriend story is a little sketchy. Don’t get me wrong, again, I am not trying to create rumors where there are none.. but I would think investigators should be asking more about this EX.. asking why the breakup happened. If it did. Asking more about those dreams. If they did..
And if someone is speaking about ‘doing something everyone will remember,’ or something of the like, the partner usually queries a lot more about that than this girlfriend apparently did.
And now pilots are going to have to sign away their medical information on a regular basis to a corporation to ensure something of this nature will never happen again.. I guess Andreas Lubitz will be remembered for that…
….but I keep pondering the ‘we’re crashing!!’ dreams, and they are peculiar. I have reservations about buying into the storyline at this point—at least as it is being presented by the supposed ex-girlfriend of 24 hours.
And let me ask something more.. in our information age where everyone tweets and tumbles and Facebooks into the night, where is the social media presence of Lubitz? Or this girlfriend?
Given history, I suppose it’s amazing I even got the chance to read SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK when I was a kid in the 90s. I was doing more reading on the upcoming documentary being made on this and learned something I never quite knew previously: This was among the most banned book of the 1990s..
The interesting thing that I have been encountering as I begin to talk about this documentary is the question of how I can “bill” the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. It is listed as the most banned book between 1990-1999 and remained at #7 in 2000-2009. It was #1 on the list for several years in the 1990s. In the 21st Century there are a number of other books that have taken the mantel for most frequently banned… Harry Potter is often up there, and recently the bookAnd Tango Makes Three is often high on the list because of the presence of a homosexual couple (animals though they may be). So although Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is no longer top on the list, for the last 25 years that the American Library Association has been compiling a list, it has been a major title on the list. The original books are over 20 years old at this point, and yet they still show up on the lists amongst more widespread and known books such as Harry Potter and Huckleberry Finn. That says something.
I remember the moment I got my first SCARY STORIES book.. it was during grade school when a book fair truck came and set up in the school gym.. I found this black book with a skull on it and somehow was attracted to the concept and stories.. It became a treasure for me and then, with each new one, I would buy them up for the collection.
The most amazing part, given history of book bans, is that I bought my SCARY STORIES book at a Catholic school book fair! The same Catholic school that suspended me for a day for bringing a fake Freddy Kreuger glove to class in fourth grade for our field trip..
I suppose the school’s nuns couldn’t be aware of every book that was sold. And even more, I ponder if the book seller was secretly trying to fight the pop culture movement at the time to hide these books from kids.
If it wasn’t for the SCARY STORIES books, my appreciation of the paranormal and even love of drawing perhaps would never have blossomed. I bet there’s a lot of 90s kids in the same boat as me because of this series..
Let me first explain what this is.. Late at night, if you’re perched at the right place in my bathroom, this is a view directly into my bedroom.. There is a piece of blanket stuffed into the closet which pokes out. Quite frankly, perhaps my laziness has equaled this, it has been there for a long time.. Too long. As a matter of fact, each night at 3am when either nature calls or some other noise of the house startles me awake, I make my way to the bathroom and see this blanket.. The more I stare, though, the less it is looks like a blanket.
See, this blanket has been scared me for months. With the darkness of night shrouding the room and just the faint glow from a nearby night light, this little piece of blanket starts it morphing. It looks at first like a witch, sort of staring at me.. If you look long enough, it begins to change into a smiling old hag, almost with a knowing cackle on her face as she sees me have a heart begin to race.. A few times it turned into a man, posing as though he was taking his final photo of life. There was a time when it appeared to be a wolf.. Another time it was simply a blank figure but yet somehow had eyes that were staring at me, almost winking with each second I gawked back..
Sure, I know this is all a figment of the wild night time imagination–when your reality suspends for a little as you take walks between the here and the dream world there.
But each time this is so realistic that I need to check this blanket prior to attempting to regain the sleep world. Regardless of my knowledge, my distinct knowledge, that this is a blanket, my deep fear of the shapes it poses as forces me into a nightly check.
I maintain sanity, let me explain.
I maintain reality..
But in the dangerously dark night air, the shapes that objects take can piece your imagination and scare you to the bone.
The earthquake occurred at a depth of about 5 miles.. It was a minor 2.9–but minor is meaningless when you consider the location, a city that isn’t equipped or ready to handle shaking of much measure..
Reports indicate a loud and thunderous sound also accompanied the quake as it rattled the nerves of the windy–and shaky–city..
French prosecutor Brice Robin gave further chilling details of the final ten minutes in the cockpit before the Airbus A320 plunged into the French Alps killing 150 people. Revealing data extracted from the black box voice recorder, he said the co-pilot – named as 28-year-old German Andreas Günter Lubitz – locked his captain out after the senior officer left the cockpit.
MORE…
THE CO-PILOT was alive and breathing when the plane crashed .. The latest news accounts state that it was an 11 minute descent–not 8 or 18 as previously reported.. According to prosecutors commenting on the voice recording, the final 11 minutes inside the cockpit were calm, with Lubitz showing no trace of panic as he prepared to mass murder 150 people, including innocent children..
According to prosecutors, screaming could be heard on the audio recording only in the last few minutes, and death was instantaneous for those on board when the plane crashed. Whether that is true or not, perhaps we’ll never know.. It certainly is easier for humans to digest the idea that death is unknown rather than an 11 minute knowing of the doom to come..
News agencies are blasting information around the world today that the Germanwings Flight 9525 which crashed over the French Alps was most likely taken down on purpose..
Last night, it was revealed that a pilot was locked out of the cabin and audible noises were heard of him trying to break the doors–all of this as the flight glided to the hell on earth for 18 minutes. A plane filled with 150 innocent people, including high school and two infants..
This breaking news is being reported by various agencies tonight.. I chose the words from the NEW YORK TIMES as they best describe what stumped officials are contemplating as the search for debris and body aorta continue in the French Alps:
PARIS — As officials struggled Wednesday to explain why a jet with 150 people on board crashed in relatively clear skies, an investigator said evidence from a cockpit voice recorder indicated one pilot left the cockpit before the plane’s descent and was unable to get back in.
A senior military official involved in the investigation described “very smooth, very cool” conversation between the pilots during the early part of the flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf. Then the audio indicated that one of the pilots left the cockpit and could not re-enter.
“The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door and there is no answer,” the investigator said. “And then he hits the door stronger and no answer. There is never an answer.”
The data is providing no answers, only more questions and theories..
