Suicide by illness?

Commentators on the life of John Paul II have frequently mentioned the example he set in dying with dignity. The pope chose to be treated at his home in the Vatican, instead of being taken to a hospital, in the final stages of his ailing (story). It is brave to face death instead of using machines and interventions to stave off an inevitable occurrence that no Christian should fear; indeed it is dignified. The fact that the Pope chose to let himself drift closer to death instead of partaking of every possible prolonger of life should inspire us to ask tough questions about which choices should be made to sustain life, and when. The Pope, a holy man with no reason to fear death, was conscious enough to perhaps feel himself weakening and to make the choice not to impede his moving on to be with God. A person whose consciousness was snatched from her before she was able to make decisions about the prolongation of her own life does not have the option that the Pope did of fighting death of of letting her ailing body do what it naturally would. There are important reasons for the Church's opposition to the ending of artificial life support: a prominent one is to exclude the possibility of surviving relatives making life-and-death decisions for what may be self-serving reasons, as many believed Terri Schiavo's husband did. But these technologies have been in existence for a second's worth of time in the lifespan of the Church: constant work to understand them better is necessary to provide a useful and pastoral ethics of the end of life.
One of the confusing things about Terri Schiavo's case and cases like it for many people is the question of where Ms. Schiavo's soul was while her body remained sustained by machines. Was her soul attached to her body, remaining in a state of spiritual and moral stasis? Does the soul die with the mental capacity rather than with the body, meaning that it would already have been with God while the debate about Ms. Schiavo raised on earth? In a blog (otherwise offensive) written satirically in Ms. Schiavo's voice, a blogger wrote: "Update from heaven: This place is awesome. Why didn't you guys let me come here 15 years ago?" The notion that the soul is "trapped" in a body until freed by death is a fairly common one, especially when a person's life is as minimally lived as Ms. Schiavo's was after her accident. This is also the sort of unfortunate notion that led to ascetic flagellations and a few condemnations for heresy back when Christianity was young and brash.
"The biblical view of human being is we are whole persons with no part detachable. We do not have bodies, we are bodies. We are flesh-in-unity-with-soul," quoted blogger Donald Sensing. (A thoughtful and faithful piece; if you click, I'd just skim the history of thought on the soul and spend time with his theology.) How are we best to value the body as carrier of - and inseparable creation with - the soul, in an era when technology can keep the body alive indefinitely?
The answer is not simple, and my hope is that difficult discussion will be chosen over easy responses. What do you think?