A Life That Matters (10 page)

A:
In 1995. End of 1995.

There was another surprise, this one from the deposition Michael gave before the 2000 trial:

Q
(Campbell): Have you considered turning over the guardianship to [Robert and Mary] Schindler?

A:
(Michael): No, I have not.

Q:
And why?

A:
I think that’s pretty self-explanatory.

Q:
I’d like to hear your answer.

A:
Basically, I don’t want to do it.

Q:
And why don’t you want to do it?

A:
Because they put me through pretty much hell the last few years.

Q:
Can you describe what you mean by hell?

A:
The litigation they put me through.

Q:
Any other specifics besides litigation?

A:
Just their attitude towards me because of the litigations. There is no other reason. I’m Terri’s husband and I will remain guardian.

It took Felos to rescue him:

Q
(Felos): You were also asked a question about resigning as guardian or would you consider doing that. Upon reflection, is there anything that you want to add in response to that question?

A:
(Michael): Yeah. Another reason would be that her parents wouldn’t carry out her wishes.

Michael’s testimony in 2000, given with all the passion and tears he had mustered for the malpractice suit in 1992, convinced me he was a fine actor, but failed to persuade me he was telling the truth.

Another surprise came in the form of the “corroborating” witnesses Felos called in on the matter of Terri’s wish to die: Scott Schiavo, Michael’s brother, and Joan, Michael’s sister-in-law. Both of them quickly backed Michael’s statement and were dismissed.

We thought their testimony was ridiculous. For one thing, they were rushed in at the last minute; for another, their testimony was hearsay; for a third, Scott’s testimony cited different, contradictory versions of Terri’s wishes, and Joan never specified what Terri’s wishes were. Finally—and this was a question that applied to Michael himself as well—why had they waited ten years to say anything about Terri’s wishes? They hadn’t been deposed, and Pam Campbell had no material with which to prepare her cross-examination.
⁹

By the time they testified, there was a fairly large audience, including a few members of the press, some of our family and friends—and Brian Schiavo, another of Michael’s brothers, who was then called to testify. At this, several people in the courtroom stood up and yelled to Pam, “He’s been sitting here the whole week long! He’s heard all the testimony. He can’t testify.” Pam asked that Brian be disqualified, and Judge Greer upheld her objection.
¹⁰

Michael’s side called other witnesses. One was a neurologist, Dr. James Barnhill, who said that Terri was PVS and would not get better. (It made me all the sadder that Pam had advised us not to have a doctor examine Terri for purposes of the hearing, so that Barnhill could be refuted.) Another was Beverly Tyler, who had taken a “regional poll” for a research center in Atlanta and found that most people said that if they were like Terri, they would not want to live in her condition.

Such polls—and there were many conducted about the case over the next five years—made us furious. The responders did not know the specifics of “her condition.” And who can say what they’d do in actual circumstances? It’s easy to talk about giving up life if you’re healthy enough to answer a poll. But at what point in an illness, or at what degree of pain, do you say, “That’s it”—an irrevocable decision? “I wouldn’t want to be a burden to my caregivers,” many respondents say.
^1
1
In Terri’s case, we
know
that she would have wanted to live, because she would have found her life surrounded by the people who loved her, and because she would know how much we wanted her with us.

A different witness upset us profoundly. On the second or third day we came to the courthouse, Bob approached a Catholic priest, Father Gerard Murphy, sitting outside the courtroom and, thinking the priest was there to offer us support, thanked him for coming. But Father Murphy had arrived to testify on Michael’s behalf. He had never spoken to anyone in our family, had never gone to visit Terri, and did not know that Terri was a practicing, faithful Catholic who had gone to Mass the day before her collapse. He had gotten all his information about Terri from Felos, who introduced him at the trial as the official spokesman for the Roman Catholic Church on end-of-life matters—in fact, I didn’t think he could appear without permission from his bishop, Robert Lynch.
¹²
It didn’t seem to bother him that Michael had been cohabiting with someone for five or so years, just that Terri was disabled and wouldn’t want to live with her disabilities, though of course he never heard her say so.

He testified that part of his ministry work was visiting old-age homes and nursing homes to comfort and bless the people who were dying. The church, he announced, condoned the termination of a human life by removing life support and would indeed permit the removal of Terri’s feeding tube.

We had not known Father Murphy would testify, or how he would testify, for we could have produced a dozen priests who would have refuted him. But attorney Campbell called no one and did not ask for help.

After the hearing was over, we all went to see Bishop Lynch himself. Bobby pleaded with the bishop to say that Father Murphy was wrong about church teaching, that his testimony set a false legal precedent, and to publicly speak out about what was happening to Terri. Bishop Lynch refused. We believe that if he had intervened, if he had testified that the church opposed the taking of life in any form, if he had asked his priests to mobilize the hundreds of thousands of parishioners in the St. Petersburg area to say that Terri was a human being even though badly injured, the entire trial might have ended differently, and Terri might be alive today. But Bishop Lynch ignored us. He turned his back.

Catholicism had been ingrained in me from the moment I was born. Now I felt betrayed, not by Catholicism itself, but by its representatives in St. Petersburg. Bob, Bobby, and Suzanne were enraged at the bishop for his hypocrisy. I was saddened. It seemed to me that the church was deserting my daughter, and it was only God Who could tell me why.

Much later, Bobby put together an editorial regarding the bishop’s disregard for the Catholic Church’s teaching and his responsibility, as Terri’s chief pastor, to defend not only her life but the sanctity of all human life:

I am a professed Roman Catholic man striving to be a good Christian. I believe in the teachings of the Catholic Church and I have a deep respect for our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II. However, I struggled profoundly with my faith and trust in the Church after Father Murphy’s testimony in which he stated that to remove my sister’s feeding tube depriving her of nutrition and hydration, causing her death, was morally acceptable according to Church teaching. Furthermore, our local bishop of the Diocese of St. Petersburg, Bishop Robert Lynch, refused to correct this grave misconception of Church teaching and basically said, “It’s Michael Schiavo’s decision to make” and stated that the Church would not get involved.

I was devastated and angry. How could this be? I may not be a theologian or Church scholar, but I know that to remove my sister’s feeding tube deliberately to cause her death is euthanasia and is forbidden by the Church as stated in our catechism . . . Why did Bishop Lynch not rise to Terri’s defense? Why did he not defend her inherent right to life? How could he stand in direct conflict with the clear teaching of the Catholic Church, and how can he remain as a bishop after having done so? Terri was a practicing Roman Catholic woman, and he should have been the one to shepherd and defend her. “He is her Bishop!” I thought to myself. “How can he abandon her?”

It wasn’t only Bishop Lynch who disappointed us. In 2004, my family sent a letter to every Catholic bishop of every diocese in the United States asking them to publicly speak out about what was happening to Terri. We received only three affirmative responses.

When Felos spoke of Terri as though he knew her, or knew what she wanted—as though they were friends—it drove Bobby crazy.

“I’m sitting there thinking,
He has no idea who Terri is. None whatsoever.
I got so mad one time that I stormed out of the courtroom, and I hit the door so hard I actually snapped my watch in half. If Terri had known what was going on, she’d have been the first one to tell Felos to go to hell. She’d have been fighting just as hard for us as we were fighting for her. The notion that Felos and Terri had some type of alliance—that he knew her mind—it was absolutely the furthest thing from the truth, and so infuriating that I thought I’d get thrown out of the courthouse.”

Felos called another witness, Judge Greer’s appointed guardian ad litem, Richard Pearse. “If you had known that Scott Schiavo and Joan Schiavo had heard Terri Schiavo’s request to have her life ended under extreme circumstances, would you have reported as you did?” Felos in effect asked Pearse. “If you had known of Beverly Tyler’s poll or Dr. Barnhill’s findings, or Scott and Joan Schiavo’s testimony, would your mind have changed?”

His answer was disturbing. “My mind would possibly have changed.”

Reflecting on the hearing later, Suzanne summed up what we were all feeling:

“As the week went on, we became more and more frustrated, more and more upset. I mean, we went through a week of hell. In the beginning, we were concerned, but we still felt pretty good. But when it was over, I felt like we were all run over by a truck. I mean, it was a hellacious week. Hellacious in that we heard testimony from Michael’s sister-in-law and brother—and then the priest—that was just incorrect. We were all blown away by the priest. We couldn’t believe it.

“It’s frustrating to hear people saying things you know are untrue and you can do nothing about it. You want to stand up and say, ‘That’s not true,’ because you know in your heart that it’s not. And they’re people taking an oath on the Bible!”

Like Suzanne, Bob was stunned at the testimony of Michael’s relatives. “I kept thinking,
Right will prevail
, because everything we said was true and everything they said was dishonest. I believed in the theory that honesty and truth prevail. Greer’s a judge. He’ll rule in our favor. But these people put their hand on the Bible and immediately said things we’re sure weren’t true. I couldn’t believe that was actually happening.”

Bobby suffered as much after the trial as during it. “There were moments when I thought there was no way we were going to lose, and there were moments when I thought,
He’s going to rule against us
. I hardly slept for two weeks. The night before the decision, I didn’t sleep at all. It was just a horrible two weeks, waiting for the decision to come in. And I must have talked over the phone every day for probably hours at a time, just rehashing the case over and over with my dad. I didn’t know what to think. I remember just going back and forth. I remember what my parents said: ‘Our family’s made a lot of mistakes, but the one thing we don’t do is lie.’ I was asked, why not testify and lie that Terri had expressed a wish to live? I said no, because if we had, we would have been like them. In point of fact, we turned away a man who offered to produce an unimpeachable forgery of Terri’s living will in which Schiavo’s claims would have been contradicted.

“I taught in a Catholic school, and I taught my students that honesty is everything. I think we all like to think that at the end of the day, because we were truthful and honest, we would prevail based on that. And that the judge would see we were being honest. But it didn’t happen.”

I saw the trial somewhat differently. Of course I was unhappy with the way it went, them lying and me knowing they were lying. But at the end of the trial, I thought to myself,
I know all this happened and I know the trial didn’t go well, but there is no way that anybody is going to starve a human being to death
.

That’s all I kept thinking. Over and over, that’s all I kept thinking.

CHAPTER 9

The Fight for Terri’s Life

We tried to keep up our regular lives. Suzanne was a stockbroker for TD Waterhouse by day and a wife and mother at night. Bobby taught at Tampa Catholic High School. I was working at the Hallmark store on St. Peter Beach. Bob was working under contract for an engineering firm. But the suspense of waiting for Greer’s decision pervaded every minute of all our lives.

Just after noon on February 11, 2000, two weeks after the trial ended, Bob got a call from Pam Campbell’s paralegal, Teresa Muhlstadt, asking us to come to Pam’s office in the Alexander Building in St. Petersburg. Greer had made his decision, and Pam wanted to tell us about it in person. It’s a ten- to fifteen-minute drive from our house, and I don’t remember either of us saying a word. Neither before nor after, in the entire time frame of our daughter’s ordeal, can I remember being so anxious, so scared.

When we pulled up in front of the building, to my astonishment there must have been eight or nine cameras poking at us, and reporters’ indistinct questions buzzed around us like mosquitoes. By this time, to the local press at least, Terri’s fate was a big story. The media presence was like a dress rehearsal for what came later.

Teresa had come outside and held the press back. I looked at her face. She said nothing, but her expression gave her away. We had lost.

No!
my heart screamed. I couldn’t believe it. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Pam would have good news. I couldn’t look at Bob. Had he guessed what I guessed?

Teresa led us upstairs to Pam’s office. She had also notified Bobby and Suzanne that the decision was coming. Bobby was already in the office, having gotten there with his childhood friend Steven Meyer just before the fax came announcing Greer’s verdict. Suzanne arrived moments after we did. Pam turned to us and shook her head. “He’s allowing the feeding tube to come out.”