The people who thought it would be about two weeks seemed to have it right. The body of the person who was Terri Schiavo has finally stopped metabolizing. How many more weeks will it be before we stop talking about it?

There are lots of comments over at Free Republic about “bless her soul,” and “she’s with God now,” and the like.

While my heart goes out to the long-suffering family, whose hearts are surely now fully (if only figuratively) broken, at the risk of being (more than) a little iconoclastic, as long-time readers know, I’m not fully down with this soul thing. Perhaps those who are can enlighten me.

At what precise instant did the soul pass from her body, and was transported to God’s sitting room?

Was it when she stopped breathing? When her heart stopped beating? When the phosphor trace on her EEG (assuming that she was on one) stopped wiggling? Even now (or at least a few minutes after the end of these activities) she could have been resuscitated with CPR and defibrillator, and resumed these activities, at least briefly, particularly if rehydrated. Had someone done so, would the soul have had to rush back from heaven, to take up residence in the body again, in case there was still one more legal appeal to play out? Or was the body a lost cause, and the soul would know it? But if the latter then why wait for the conventional functional shutdowns that we arbitrarily use to declare legal death? Why not vamoose once it was clear that all the appeals were exhausted, and the organs were failing, regardless of the respiratory and cardiac state?

The relatives said that Terri has been communicating with them, and they with her, but was that wishful thinking? Did they see a spark in her eyes that they imagined was her, words in her vocalizations that they, in their grief, fantasized as expressions of love and human desires? If so, and those who said that she was truly in a “persistent vegetative state,” uncomprehending of self or anything else, are right, then is it possible that her soul actually left when her cortex collapsed, years ago, and that since then they’ve only been feeding an empty shell in the form of a human being?

I ask these questions for two reasons. First, because I’m genuinely curious, not about souls per se, because I don’t believe in them, but about how those who do justify their beliefs, and how they think about them. Second, because I do think that this bears on a more practical issue to those of us who do want to live as long as possible–at what point should someone be allowed to go into cryonic suspension? While the issues of soul dispositions and locations shouldn’t enter into legal discussions, it’s inevitable that they will, and I’d like to know how the arguments in court might go.