A Life That Matters (19 page)

“Monsignor Malanowski was there every day. When Terri’s tube came out, he said it was the first time he’d cried since his mother died. We had preachers with us. This was fantastic. People from all denominations were at our side—all of a sudden, everybody was a member of the same parish. Everybody was united in a common cause.”

“Randall Terry is a controversial guy,” Suzanne says. “He has a huge following, despite a reputation for over-the-line tactics—we were told that he carried too much baggage and were urged to not associate ourselves with him. But to us he was a sweetheart, and thanks to his efforts, a lot of people showed up at the hospice. Our petition was obviously gaining momentum. It was being reported that the governor’s office was getting inundated with phone calls, faxes, and e-mails. I mean, they were bombarded! The messages were literally shutting down their fax machines, the phones were off the hook. Now that Glenn Beck was national, a lot of other radio programs were talking about Terri’s case, and everyone—Randall, the petition, the talk show hosts—kept pointing to the governor.”

I vividly remember the day Terri’s feeding tube was removed: October 15, 2003. It was also the day we met with Jeb Bush. Suzanne describes the circumstances, since it was she who—inadvertently—was the star:

“We had heard that Governor Bush was going to be in Plant City for a groundbreaking ceremony. Plant City is about an hour away from the hospice. Randall Terry handed me the phone and said, ‘You’re going to call his office, and you’re getting a meeting with him.’

“I was mortified. ‘I can’t do that. I mean, he’s the governor. I can’t just call him.’

“Randall forced me to do it. I called the governor’s office and got hold of Jeb Bush’s secretary. ‘I’m calling for the Schindler family,’ I said. ‘This is Suzanne Schindler. We are requesting a meeting with the governor right now. He’s less than an hour from the house.’

“‘I’ll call you back,’ the secretary said, and in a few minutes she did. ‘The governor will see you. You’d better get there ASAP. The governor won’t be there long.’

“So we piled into my Toyota 4Runner—Mom, Dad, Bobby, me, and Randall Terry in his suit and cowboy boots, curled up in the back. My husband, Michael, drove. The media, seeing us leave the odds-and-ends store, followed in a dozen or so cars, wondering where we were going. The atmosphere was light.

“The car just flew. I don’t think Michael ever drove faster in his life. The groundbreaking was for prefab homes for migrant workers. We stopped at a tree-laden area, not sure where to go. We walked toward a group of people, the reporters and photographers walking backwards in front of us, shouting questions and taking pictures. One of them slammed into a tree. We thought it was hilarious.

“We were ushered into the kitchen of a demonstration house, empty except for a bunch of folding chairs set in a semicircle on the white tile floor. The governor arrived, along with two of his security men and Racquel ‘Rocky’ Rodriguez, his attorney, a short, no-nonsense woman I liked immediately. There were others in the room, but I never identified them. I was very,
very
nervous, and I started to shiver, though it was a warm, beautiful day.

“We sat down and introduced ourselves. Dad shook the governor’s hand and immediately began to cry. He composed himself quickly, explaining that the tears were a sign of his desperation. We made small talk, then outlined the situation. It was very stiff and awkward. The governor seemed genuinely sympathetic, but he didn’t answer Dad’s question: ‘Is there anything you can do to save Terri?’

“I didn’t say much at all in the beginning. In fact, I was getting restless. I thought,
Here we have the governor of the state of Florida. Surely he’s in a powerful position.
So I blurted, ‘Pardon me, Governor, but you have to know someone of your stature, someone who’s even more powerful than you are, who can help.’

“A big smile came over his face. ‘You don’t mean someone in Washington that I might know?’

“I had forgotten he was the president’s brother! It never occurred to me. I just thought,
Come on, this guy’s got to know
some
body
. And then I realized what I said. I backtracked. ‘No, no. That’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean—’

“By now, everybody was laughing, no one harder than Jeb Bush. The awkwardness was broken. In that moment, we were a team. Randall Terry stepped in. If I can find a way legally to save Terri, he asked, would the governor look at it? He said he would.

“The meeting was over. The governor hugged me and hugged Dad. Dad said he had the utmost respect for Jeb’s father and his family, and tears welled up in the governor’s eyes. ‘So do I,’ he said. Dad said, ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,’ and started to cry again.

“We tried to leave, but couldn’t because the doorway was blocked by a sea of cameras and reporters, not only those who had followed us from St. Petersburg but others from Orlando, which was also an hour’s drive away.

“So we had to give a brief press conference before they let us go back to the car and, an hour later, to the hospice and the continuing fight.”

The crowds were suffocating. Well-meaning strangers came up to us in the trailer to offer advice on how we could prolong Terri’s life after the feeding tube was removed. Women rushed up to me to ask how we were going to feed all the people outside.
¹
It was as though they wanted me to be the hostess at a cookout—and my daughter was dying.

When I get upset, I can’t swallow, so I wasn’t eating. Food was the least of my concerns. “Listen,” I told one of the women who expressed concern about the food situation, “that’s not my problem. If those people want to be out there, they can feed themselves.” Not very gracious, I’m afraid.

Lawyers would barge in, telling us to fire ours and hire them—that
they
knew how to overturn Greer’s order. Doctors arrived telling us what to look for in Terri’s condition after the tube was removed. “Check her heart rate.” “Check her skin.” “Check to see if her eyes are dilated.” A woman told Bobby he should visit Terri with his mouth full of water and transfer it to Terri through a kiss. After he had visited Terri, she approached him again to see if he had followed her suggestion. He told her he had. Not altogether truthful, I’m afraid.

Police were lining the streets around the hospice and guarding the hospice doors. Red mesh fences were set up along the streets for crowd control. There were some protesters making a nuisance of themselves, squabbling with the police and demonstrating with foul words and in exhibitionist ways that made us blush. (Father Malanowski kept making the sign of the cross, a subtle gesture we found endearing.) Some of them volunteered to form a human barricade so we could sneak Terri away. We told them to leave, and they did, but overall, it was difficult to distinguish our true friends from the attention-seekers. I felt that too many people were tearing at my flesh, wanting a piece of me for their trophy cases.

Suzanne recounted the family’s position:

“For the most part, within reason, our attitude was,
You know what? All we care about is saving Terri. That’s it.
Sure the media were using us, but so what? If the interviews were a chance to save Terri, if these people had a chance to save Terri, then so be it. We definitely had a line we wouldn’t cross—everything else we used.”

We did interviews all day long, not only with Christian radio stations but with secular stations across the country. We were handed microphones and cell phones virtually every minute and told to talk. “Interview this guy.” “Interview that guy.” Most of the time, we didn’t know whom we were speaking to. Bob and Bobby were the major spokesmen. I tried to stay clear, but there were dozens of times I couldn’t avoid them.

Bob was getting phone calls day and night, not only in the trailer but at our home. Nobody seemed to care whether he slept or not. He got calls from Massachusetts and Illinois militias who announced they were armed and ready to march on the hospice. A group of Australian mercenaries announced they wanted to fly in to take Terri out of the hospice. Of course we told them not to come.

On the fifteenth, the day Terri’s feeding tube was removed, people held up a huge banner that said, “Gov. Bush where are you?” They had “Starvation Day 1” printed on it, and they’d cross it off to say “Starvation Day 2” and “Starvation Day 3,” etc. It was on the news all the time.

Pressure on Governor Bush came from another ally as well. On the fourteenth, when Pat Anderson told us our legal options were exhausted, Bob contacted the Gibbs Law Firm after hearing from several supporters that they might be able to help. Shortly thereafter, Bob and I got a call from an attorney at Gibbs, who asked if we could come to his office at ten that evening.

We had mixed emotions about seeing a lawyer that late. We were bone-tired and would have preferred to stay in the trailer. Besides, we were not familiar with the Gibbs firm and couldn’t imagine what the attorney had in mind. Yet Bob thought about how reluctant he was to do the TV interview in 2001. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have found Cindi Shook and Terri would be dead. So at ten o’clock on the night before Terri’s tube was to come out, we drove over to the Gibbs offices in Seminole, not far from the hospice.

“The room was surprisingly large with a full-width glass wall overlooking a garden of flowers and tropical plants,” Bob remembers. “In the center was a conference table that comfortably sat eight attorneys. In fact, there must have been sixteen, eighteen lawyers, some standing around the perimeter of the room. The meeting was led by David Gibbs and his father. They asked us to sit down and tell them everything we could about Terri’s case. For the next couple hours, we reviewed the case, answering questions along the way. By the time we finished, it was after midnight. Mary was out-and-out spent, and I was pretty darn tired myself. But the attorneys were bright-eyed and full of energy.

“Unbeknownst to me—and I only found this out recently—they stopped doing all their other legal work and for a week concentrated on Terri’s case. Gibbs was doing this out of his own conviction and the goodness of his heart. They had contact with the legislators and wrote the initial legislative bill that was eventually presented to the Florida Legislature. And they were also trying to get the governor to act. They wrote him letters explaining how he could use his executive powers to get Terri’s feeding tube reinserted by taking her into his own custody.

“And still Bush hesitated.”

After Terri’s feeding tube had been removed, Michael’s other lawyer, Deborah Bushnell, told us we couldn’t go into Terri’s room unless we were escorted by one of his representatives, and the police were on hand to make sure we didn’t disobey.

One day when I went in—this was after the tube had been taken out and Terri was starving to death—Jodi Centonze’s mother was sitting there knitting. The mother of Michael’s fiancée knitting! Another time, Centonze’s sister was there, reading a magazine. They were so casual, cavalier, waiting for Terri to die. They ignored me. It was the coldest, most unfeeling behavior I’d ever seen.

CHAPTER 17

Another Reprieve

Even after Terri’s feeding tube had been removed, I knew in my heart that something good was going to happen. And I kept saying every day when I woke up, “Today’s the day Terri’s going to have her feeding tube reinserted.” I just kept praying and praying and praying and telling God, “They can’t let her die. She doesn’t deserve to die. She just needs help because she’s handicapped. They can’t starve her to death.”
This is insanity
, I wanted to scream.

What I saw was appalling. Even after they had removed Terri’s tube, they were trying to hurry her death. When I would go to the hospice at night to visit her, before I went back to the trailer, she would be lying on her bed dressed in corduroy pants and a turtleneck sweater, blankets up to her neck. And it was hot—
hot!
—and her sweat would be dripping off her.

Don’t forget. She was given no water, no hydration, and whatever water was in her they were sweating out of her. I would pull down the blanket, and I’d be screaming, “Put her in a nightgown!” It happened three nights in a row, the same thing.

The police in the room? They were there not to protect her, but to make sure we didn’t help her, even though she was sweating and miserable, and human decency should have been enough to ease her suffering. After a few days, Terri’s lips became chapped and dry, and I tried to put some Vaseline on them. I don’t remember which member of Jodi Centonze’s family was there, but I remember a policeman. He came flying across the room and stopped me. Stopped me from putting salve on my daughter’s cracked lips.

The effect on my family was devastating.

“I would go to bed at night,” Bobby says, “either in the trailer or at home, and sleep for a few hours. I’d just pass out, exhausted. There would be times I’d break down, crying. And when I woke up in the morning, I didn’t want any noise. No talking, no radio on—only silence. When I was getting ready to go to the hospice, I felt like I was getting dressed in slow motion. It was a weird, surreal feeling. You got up at five, six, after two or three hours’ sleep, and your head felt like it was going to explode. Your body felt like it had been in a boxing match with Tyson, and you had so much on your mind you couldn’t think straight. You weren’t doing anything, but the emotional drain seemed to slow everything down, and the smallest thing—shaving, pouring a glass of water, even walking—was an effort. But you had to run the gauntlet, face the press, do the radio interviews, go through the guards at the hospice to get to Terri, and so you forced yourself to go on. Every day, go on.”

“I tried to get back to some sense of normalcy when I got home,” Suzanne says. “I had my ten-year-old with me. I helped her with her homework. I made sure she took her shower and brushed her teeth and went to bed on time. My husband, Michael, was there for me. The phone was ringing every minute, but I didn’t answer. Of course I was thinking about Terri, about Mom and Dad, about all those people trying to help, I found it difficult to sleep. When I got up in the morning and showered and took Alex to school, everything still felt normal. Even driving to the hospice was fine. Everybody along the way was going about their business normally. But as soon as I made a left onto that road in front of the hospice and I saw the gazillion media trucks and the hundreds of people, I felt like I was hit by a ton of bricks. It was like driving into this other world, a freak world, a world I lived in until I got back home. And then I was fine.