Miami Gardens, Fla. ? Day after day, year after year, two mothers sat vigil beside their children.

They sang snatches of favorite songs. They told bright stories out of fragments of the past: Remember when you put that snake in my flowerpot? Remember playing with our old dog, Sweeper?

In Florida, Kaye O’Bara would stroke her daughter’s cheek. “Wake up, honey,” she’d say. “Wake up and we’ll go to Disney.”

In Kansas, Shirley Bradley would clutch her son’s limp hand. “Squeeze if you can hear me,” she’d tell him.

But there is no recovery from brain damage so severe. The daughter would not wake up. The son would not squeeze back. The children would not ever again speak or read or move. And so the mothers made their choices.

Kaye O’Bara chose to bring her daughter home, to sustain a life she still viewed as a blessing. Shirley Bradley chose to close off her son’s feeding tube, to end what she saw as his suffering.

Neither mother would presume to pass judgment on the other.

Neither claims to have made the right choice. Just the choice that was best for her child.

A different life

With the certainty of a mother’s love, Kaye O’Bara knows her daughter is happy.

Edwarda O’Bara lies in a room filled with angel figurines. Her eyes flick about, restless and unfocused. Her tongue lolls slackly in her open mouth.

When she was 16, a lack of insulin sent Edwarda into a diabetic coma. Her heart stopped for several minutes; her brain, starved for oxygen, began to shut down. She can breathe on her own, and cough, and not much more. Edwarda turns 52 today, on her birthday, as on every day, her mother will braid her long gray hair with ribbons and pour a murky mixture of baby food, eggs, milk and yeast into her feeding tube.

Edwarda coughs hoarsely, chest heaving.

Chris Dilliard, of Gainsville, Fla., left, and Sean Smith, of Port Ritchie, Fla., right, argue outside the Woodside Hospice where Terri Schiavo is a patient on Thursday in Pinellas Park, Fla. Smith is against the government stepping in to try and prevent individual citizens from carrying out the will of their spouse, and Dilliard argued in favor of life for Schiavo. Two mothers who made two very different decisions in the lives of their children say they are glad they avoided the public spectacles and court battles that the Schiavo case has attracted.

O’Bara wrestles with Edwarda’s motionless body, hoisting her up to change the pad on her sheet, adjusting her head, shifting her hips to avoid bedsores. “You’re going for your ride, aren’t you?” she says, in the singsong voice mothers use with babies. “You’re going for your ride!”

O’Bara, 77, is panting a bit with the effort of turning her daughter.

As her mother kisses her, Edwarda’s mouth curls into an awkward, fleeting smile.

‘Randy was gone’

Shirley Bradley got those smiles, too.

But she knew, with the certainty of a mother’s love, that they meant nothing.

For 12 years she had watched over her son, Randy McCullough, in his nursing-home bed: Unmoving, unseeing, his warm brown eyes gone dull, his limbs stiff and wracked with spasms.

He seemed to know when his mother was with him. Massaging him, she could soothe him into sleep. Although he, like Edwarda, was in a persistent vegetative state, sometimes he seemed to smile at her.

“That smile. That wasn’t a smile,” she says now, sitting in her home in Topeka. “It was a muscle reaction. Involuntary. Randy was gone.”

She had known it the moment she saw her 25-year-old son strapped to a hospital gurney after a motorcycle crash that caused such extensive head injuries he was not breathing when the paramedics arrived.

“I knew intuitively that Randy’s spirit, Randy’s essence, was no longer with him,” says Bradley, a social worker.

She nurtured the body on the bed, tended the sores and kissed the slack cheeks, but it began to seem a charade: “This body was being kept alive, but there was no person in it.”

‘How you look at life’

Ever since she brought Edwarda home on May 31, 1970 — five months after the teenager slipped into a diabetic coma while everyone thought she was simply sleeping off the flu — O’Bara has chosen to treat her as a functioning member of the family.

She will not subject Edwarda to any experimental treatment for brain damage, lest it make her worse. But she makes sure she gets the same medical care as anyone else.

O’Bara used to say with conviction that Edwarda would wake up. Now, she says only that perhaps she might.

But even if her daughter remains in this state until she dies, O’Bara has no doubt that it’s a life worth living.

“It’s all how you look at life,” says O’Bara, a former teacher at a Catholic school. “She’s enjoying doing what she’s doing.”

She says her daughter can understand the love that surrounds her. A book and a video about the O’Bara family have drawn visitors to Edwarda’s bedside from around the world.

“Maybe someone would come in and say Edwarda doesn’t have a good quality of life,” O’Bara says. “Well, can you tell me anyone doing as much good as she’s doing? To me, that’s quality of life.”

‘Just let go’

After the accident in 1991, Bradley saw no quality in her son’s life.

Randy, the youngest of her three children, was always so playful, so full of zeal. In the sunroom of her Topeka home, Bradley holds up a photo of her son. He stands waist-deep in water, muscles bulging out of his yellow life vest, grinning and blowing a kiss. That was Randy, alive.

In the nursing-home bed, “he was living, breathing, pulsating, but it was a life sustained only by technical means,” his mother says.

“There was energy, of course. But it wasn’t life.”

The doctors advised her to wait; they told her it was possible he could recover some function. So Bradley waited.

She hoped he could hear her. She never saw a sign that he did.

Instead, she saw his bedsores fester. She noticed bruises from when his caretakers dropped him as they struggled to prop him in a wheelchair.

After several years of fighting to get good care for him in Topeka, Bradley moved her son to a nursing home near his sisters in North Dakota. His care did seem to improve.

One day, she says, she saw in her son’s eyes a plea for help.

“I hesitate to say this, because people won’t understand, but if there was any life in that body at all, it was as if he was saying: ‘I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough.’ I knew then that I couldn’t stop until I brought him peace.”

Bradley told Randy’s doctor what she wanted to do.

The doctor convened an ethics committee; they studied Randy’s case for months.

In January 2003, the doctor agreed to stop feeding Randy, and Bradley flew to North Dakota, to her son.

“I told him what was going to happen. I told him how much I loved him. How much we appreciated the gift of him. I told him it was time now to bring him peace.”

For six days, Bradley sat by her son’s bed, watching him die.

At the end, she recalls, as he gasped for every breath, she wrapped him in her arms and whispered:

“Let go, Randy. I love you. Just let go.”

A private decision

A picture of Terri Schiavo fills the TV in Edwarda’s room.

The sound is muted, so O’Bara squints to read the news flash: The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to step in. Schiavo’s parents are nearly out of appeals. O’Bara strokes Edwarda’s arm.

She has sympathy for both sides: For Schiavo’s husband, who says Terri would have wanted the feeding tube removed, and for her parents, who say Terri would want to live.

There is no one correct course, O’Bara says. It’s a private decision — one a family must make on its own, and with love.

In Kansas, Bradley feels the same.

She’s felt angry all week, as she watched politicians, judges and protesters presume to know what’s best for Terri. She would not have wanted a stranger to make the choice for Randy.

Bradley thinks of her son not only with sorrow, but also with joy.”None of us know what awaits us when we die, but I sense that he’s aware I’m talking to him,” she says. “He’s healed. He’s free.”