Two stories in the news this week caught our attention, each concerning struggles within families over long-suffering family members being kept alive by medical science.

In Boston, a woman is challenging doctors' plans to remove her long-comatose mother from life support, while down south some parents are seeking court approval for a divorce for their daughter who has been badly brain damaged for many years. The woman's husband says his wife wishes would be to be removed from a feeding tube that sustains her life, and her parents say they want to keep her alive, and the divorce would remove him from any control over her medical treatment.

The two stories have received some small measure of press reports, yet the underlying issues have been subordinated to the media focus on the bizarre trial of pop singer Michael Jackson in a California courtroom. Sadly, thousands of words and images are published each week over that case of alleged pedophilia, while the stories of the two patients has been dropped from the news.

Those stories are gripping because they say so much about who we are in our modern American society. They are about a person's right to die, of personal dignity and quality of life at a time when modern medicine has developed ways to prolong life even in the face of catastrophic health issues. In previous generations, the two women would have long ago passed away, but their bodies continue to function because technology can keep their hearts beating. Surely there can be no expectation for recovery to full conscious life. But science has made it possible for their lives to be prolonged, and loving, caring family members find it impossible to let them go.

Their stories pose the essential questions in medical ethics: When it is right to discontinue extraordinary means of prolonging a life? When can it be said that enough is enough, it is time to pull the plug? If the life-support devices are removed, is it assisted suicide? And when is it time to face a loved one's certain death, and let them go?

Every day, many good, God-fearing, religious families are faced with such decisions. Hospitals asks patients to sign a health care proxy, allowing a caregiver to make such decisions when a patient cannot. Many loving children have been asked to struggle with the decision to sign a DNR order- "Do Not Resuscitate"- for an ailing parent. It is a gut-wrenching choice, a truly life-or-death decision that many prefer to avoid.

There are no easy answers. But there are serious, hard questions to be asked, and deep, emotional discussions urgently needing to be held, between husband and wife, parent and child, brothers and sisters. What does the patient want, how would they want to be treated, what measures would they have their family take. In the Christian tradition, there is the belief that where there is life, there is hope, and some conclude that prolonging life, even using the artificial means of ventilators, feeding tubes and other modern science methods, is always the proper choice.

But for the terminally ill patient, there are two questions that must be resolved, and since we all will be there one day, they can best be phrased in this way: In those last days, how would you want to live, and how to die?

- Ed Forry