The feeding tube is gone. The legal fight is over. Edna Folz lies in a bed in a room with pink shades and lace curtains on the windows, unable to talk, her only nourishment the liquids fed into her mouth with a syringe as she waits to die.
And for the sister who fought unsuccessfully all the way to the Supreme Court because she believed Edna did not want any extreme measures used to keep her alive, there is finally relief."Yes, I am preparing for the end," Betty Spahn said Thursday. "There is a sense of joy that she is going to be at peace, that I can see the end coming and knowing that I have done all I can do now. The rest is up to the Lord."
Her voice was strong and firm, even colored by happiness. "There is a little bit of a feeling of accomplishment," Spahn said. "But it took longer than I wanted."
Folz's plight became known across the country as Spahn, her legal guardian, tried for years to earn a court's approval to have the feeding tube into her abdomen removed. She said her sister told her decades ago she would rather die than live helpless.
Folz was an award-winning journalist who worked for 37 years at The Evansville (Indiana) Press. For years she has been bedridden, curled in nearly a nearly fetal position, silenced by the crippling dementia of Alzheimer's disease at a nursing home in Marshfield, 40 miles southwest of Wausau.
Spahn, of Rockford, Ill., authorized insertion of the feeding tube nine years ago. She first petitioned a circuit judge in 1995 for permission to remove it after the nursing home refused to do so without a court order.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court said in June that Folz was not in a persistent vegetative state and never clearly said she objected to having extreme measures taken to save her life.
Last week, days before the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take the case, doctors determined Folz was in a vegetative state and withdrew the tube.
On Thursday, Spahn moved her sister to Sylvia's Rest Haven, a home with eight residents, each in various stages of Alzheimer's disease and other dementia.
Doctors say death could be days away, maybe weeks.
Frustrated by the long ordeal and physically tired, Spahn wondered what her sister might say to her now if she could explain her feelings.
"I don't know," she said. "She would probably have some kind of remark to make like, `Why did it take so long?' But she would say, `Thank you.' "