Legal wrangle hits home for many retirees in Florida

In wills, many have expressed their wishes about being kept on life support.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
MIAMI -- Tucked away somewhere in Velma Fields' Florida home is a living will, made so many years ago that she can barely remember when she wrote it.
In recent days, however, she has been sharply reminded of the document's importance. Like many other seniors, the bitter legal wrangle over the fate of Terri Schiavo has, for Fields, pulled into sharp focus the necessity to record one's end-of-life wishes in writing.
"I would never want to be kept alive like that poor girl," she says of Schiavo, whose husband Michael claims that his wife once told him during an unrecorded conversation before her collapse in 1990 that she would not want to be kept alive artificially.
"My family understands fully that they are not to let me linger like that. I don't want any machines and tubes. When it's my time, I want them to release me so I can go and meet my maker," says Fields, 75, who lives with her daughter Kay Daugherty in Coral Springs.
Across the country, Americans are rushing to pen detailed instructions about end-of-life care in the wake of the Schiavo case.
Floridians focused
But perhaps nowhere are the discussions and the planning more intense than in Florida, the nation's retirement capital, where millions of seniors have been living with the emotional perturbations in the case for more than a decade.
Of Florida's 8 million citizens, 2.9 million are 65 and older. That's 17 percent of the state's population, the highest in the nation. Florida has more elders within its borders than 17 other states and the District of Columbia combined.
About 60 percent live with a spouse and 25 percent with another relative such as a child or grandchild, according to a study carried out by the state's Department of Elder Affairs last year. One quarter of the state's senior population describe themselves as caregivers.
While making a living will is not just an issue for seniors -- Schiavo, for example, was just 25 when she collapsed in 1990 and suffered brain damage -- it is one that is perhaps more to the front of the minds of those in their twilight years.
Organizations such as the American Association for Retired People, and the state government, issue literature and advice on end-of-life choices, and many nursing homes require some kind of "advance directive" from their patients as a condition of entry.
Jack Hirschbein and his wife, Shirley, live in a seniors community in Margate, Fla., and made living wills several years ago. Jack Hirschbein feels that it has given him "peace of mind" as he has watched the Schiavo saga unfold.
"It's very hard to make up your mind about what's gone on with this case because I believe Terri Schiavo has a very loving husband who doesn't want to see her suffer any more and wants to let her go. I think he's doing the right thing," he says. "But I think it's all gone beyond the way it should be, with the government getting involved and the president and his brother. This isn't what dying should be about. It's not the way I'd want it."
Ben Rabinowitz, an octogenarian in Coral Springs, Fla., feels strongly that Schiavo's parents "should have backed away years ago" and let their daughter die.
Both he and his wife, Selma, have suffered heart attacks in the past, with his wife undergoing major surgery, and have left strict instructions about their final wishes with their daughter Elise, who lives in New York.
"I looked at that Schiavo woman and her feeding tube and I told my daughter 'If that should ever happen to me, I don't want to be left like that.' She said 'Dad, I'd pull it out in a heartbeat,'" says Ben Rabinowitz.