First, there was this wierd light...

...then I woke up, curled up in the fetal position, in a cornfield in Saskatchewan.

Yes, I was abducted by aliens a few weeks ago. How else to explain my lengthy absence from the world of Daily Upload?

No? Not buying that? All right. I guess I can't really blame you.

But the part about Saskatchewan, if not the corn field, is kind of true. I have spent some time out there in the last couple of weeks. I was there for my Mom's 83rd birthday. We had a great party for her and she seemed to have a really good time. I was glad that I had made the effort to fly out there. All the more so since the next day, she had another stroke.

Unfortunately, the stroke seems to have affected her memory more than some of the previous ones (she has a history of these TIA's or mini-strokes.) Right now, a week later, she remembers that she had fun on her birthday, but she doesn't remember that I was there. Sigh. We'll just wait and see.

On a somewhat related note, I don't know about you, but I'm having a lot of trouble with this whole circus around the Terri Schiavo.

The "wrongness" of what politicians are doing in the US is overwhelming. I don't know what the right answer is in that case, but I do know that it is not something that should be played out in public like this. It's an intensely private, personal tragedy and there's no way we should be participating.

Two articles today grabbed my attention as insightful pieces on this controversy, although they come at it from different perspectives.

The first, from Salon.com is a first-person account of another family's story about their decision to end their brain-damaged son's life and the angst it caused them.

The second is a superb analysis from Rick Salutin in today's GlobeandMail. I'm not sure whether this is available on-line without a subscription. If it isn't, and you want to read it, drop me a line and I'll e-mail you a copy.

Death is a part of life. But that simple logic is hard to accept when the real thing faces us directly. And sometimes media events like Terri Schiavo's sad situation force us to confront our own feelings. I know that it's made me that much more likely to draft my own living will, so that my family never has to go through anything like that.