What is life's meaning anyway?

It is difficult enough to accept my mother's mental deterioration, to try to deal with what can only be described as short curcuits in her ability to think and put a few short sentences together. It can only be worse for my sister as she cares for my mother and tries to balance medications, so Mother can think a while longer and not have potentially dangerous physical side effects from the medications. Why is it that some people live life with zest even until their late 90s and others are doomed to simply exist?

I was just on the phone with my sister when she told me a friend of our mother's had been living more or less as a vegetable in a nursing home for more than 15 years. Tell me, what purpose does God have for allowing someone live essentially without a functioning brain....for FIFTEEN years? Obviously the woman is getting good care, but would anyone ever choose to live......no not live, EXIST this way? Have our medical advances only served to doom us to mere existence? No one seems to bat an eye when it comes to not going to heroic measures to "save" babies who are born with nothing but a brain stem. Why do we insist on prolonging the lives of people who no longer have anything resembling normal brain function?

I'm not interested in reopening debate about the Terri Shievo case, so please do NOT go there.

This is a test.

Had this been anything other than a test, I would have given myself more instructions.