Are are one of those people to sometimes wonder: "Whatever happened to Ariel Sharon?"

Here's your answer: Ariel Sharon is not dead.

Former ABC News correspondent Lynn Sherr reports at The Daily Beast that Sharon's eyes are sometimes open, that he is sometimes propped up in front of a TV featuring nature shows, and that he only has four regular visitors.

Sherr uses her piece as a launching pad to wonder: What might have happened in the Middle East if Sharon had not been felled by a stroke in 2006.

"I think we would have a Palestinian state," former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says in the article.

The Middle East is filled with such "lost opportunity" declarations.

(Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, now under indictment for a series of political corruption charges, likes to argue that he was within reach of an historic deal with the Palestinians when he was forced into early retirement.)

Remarkably, Sherr's piece doesn't even mention that, three weeks after Sharon's stroke, Hamas stunned the world (including Rice, who was famously blindsided) by winning control of the Palestinian Authority.

The Hamas political victory led Israel and the Bush administration to create a policy of isolation that helped fracture the Palestinian political scene, which is even more divided today than it was when Sharon had his stroke.

Would Sharon have cut a deal with Hamas to create a Palestinian state?

That central question is left unaddressed in the piece. But the answer is not hard to imagine.