[Editor's Note: This was originally posted on the message boards May 21, 2002. I thought our eMag readers would be interested in it as well.]

As promised, I checked some facts and wrote up an analysis of this scene that some of you criticized so strongly.

I'll quote some of the criticisms about Ma Skywalker's death first:

Shezan the Overly Critical wrote:

Shmi's death. Talk about hackneyed! I have now looked at spoiler sites, and apparently it was first written differently, with a Tusken striking her the blow that ultimately kills her. I'm sure it would have worked better. She's been a prisoner for a month, and she lingers on *exactly* until five minutes after Anakin finds her? Puh-leeese.

Big Mac chimed in with:

That was my same beef. To be holding on until she sees her son that she hasn't seen in 10 years is a bit ridiculous. I don't think she even lasted 5 minutes. It was more like one drawn out minute of her trying to say "I love you."

If I recall correctly, after downloading the threads into my offline reader I also saw a post online calling the death scene "ridiculous" (again) on the grounds that it was acted badly and her death didn't look right.

So I went and got some informed opinions. My girlfriend works in an intensive care unit. My ex-girlfriend is a paramedic. Both have seen people die from various causes and under various circumstances. When it comes to medical information, I know I can trust them.

So let's have a look at the medical aspects first. How exactly does Shmi Skywalker die? Basically, it's heart failure. We know she's been a prisoner for a month. She's obviously been beaten. When she speaks, it becomes obvious from her voice that she is dehydrated. She has been bound to force her into an upright position, not allowing her to relax, preventing sleep and putting a boatload of stress on her cardiovascular system. To put it in a nutshell, she's on the constant brink of circulatory collapse. She's probably been in a near-death state for some time, but has managed to hang on so far (scroll further down for my take on the timing of her death).

Trying to talk to Anakin puts additional strain on her weakened system, resulting in circulatory failure and thus cardiac arrest. And the way she dies on screen is medically correct. The suddenness of her slumping back is correct, as the heart stops and the muscles holding up her head go limp almost immediately. The sounds she makes are correct. The fact that she has trouble seeing is also perfectly correct in her circumstances.

As I said above, someone called the scene "ridiculous". It's NOT. It ain't pretty. It's not the kind of "clean" death people want to see in the movies. It's entirely undignified. And guess what? Dying IS a damn undignified business in most cases. Sorry if I'm ranting here, but I thought the scene was great from the very beginning, even before I checked whether it's believable, and the (IMHO unfounded) criticism heaped upon it seems to have pushed my button.

By the way, forgive me if the medical vocabulary used here is not correct. My information sources are Kraut only ;-)

Next question, could Anakin have saved her? Medically speaking, no. Let's ignore the question whether he could have kept her alive through the Force as the movies give us no information on Force Healing whatsoever, unless you count old Ben waking up Luke after he fainted in the Jundland Wastes (we don't even know whether such a skill as "Force Healing" really exists).

The way Shmi dies indicates that her system has been weakened beyond the point of no return. According to Kathrin, you couldn't even have brought her back using CPR because the weak heart would not have caught on again. It might have been possible to bring her back in a fully equipped emergency room, but you'd probably have had to put her on a respirator, pump her full of drugs like nobody's business, and get her heart beating through external stimuli (shocking her with a defibrillator might have sufficed, but it's also possible that nothing short of a pacemaker would've got her heart beating in something approaching a steady rhythm again).

Now the big question remains: why does Shmi die at such a convenient time for the story? Actually, there is a very simple answer for this, which sounds ridiculous at first, but really isn't: SHE REFUSED TO DIE ANY SOONER. 

People working in hospitals, nursing homes or hospices know the phenomenon of people (especially if they know they're going to die) holding on to life through sheer willpower. Most of the time, this holding on is connected to a special condition that has not yet been fulfilled. For example, people often hang on until an important date, like an anniversary, the birthday of their late spouse or something similar. Or they hang on waiting for a certain event, like an important relative (most often the spouse) arriving at their deathbed.

When I was a kid, my father used to know an old man in his late 90s who by rights should've been dead - bad liver, bad lung, smoked like a stack, drank like Dean Martin. And all the time this old geezer claimed he was going to be a hundred years old. So on his 100th birthday, he showed up at his usual pub, celebrated, got drunk like an ass, went home, went to bed and never woke up again. It just happens.

Willpower is an amazing thing. Terminal patients who have lost their will to live pass more quickly than those who still have hope. Others just refuse to let go and their willpower keeps them alive for longer than the doctors would have thought possible.

And this is the case with Shmi Skywalker. She never gave up hope that Anakin would come back one day, as he had promised. And she desperately clung to that thin straw that was her life as she waited in the Tusken camp, waiting not for death, but for her son. And when Anakin was there, she finally let go, knowing she was beyond help.

Notice the words she says to Anakin: "Now I am complete." These words do leave a lot of room for speculation (esp. as we still do not know how Anakin actually came into being), but let me pull a Ferrett here and apply Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation for these words is that now she knew her son was alive, had prospered, that her dreams for her son had become true. Thus, she was "complete" in a sense of being at peace with the world and willing to leave it now.

So there you have it, folks. The scene works, not just in the context of the story and the dramatic impact it has on Anakin, but also from a medical perspective - and Shmi's actual death is acted medically correct, too.

Oh, and here's another small thing. When Kathrin explained the medical circumstances surrounding Shmi's death to me, she told me that "she has been dying piecemeal day by day". And this struck an association in my mind. Padme tells Anakin she has been dying a little bit each day since he came back into her life. Almost the same words Kathrin used to describe Shmi's final days. And suddenly it hit me how ridiculous Padme's words are in the face of this. The girl knows nothing about suffering. Nothing at all.