A Life That Matters (2 page)

“We believed the only explanation was that Michael or his lawyer, George Felos, had imagined her death as they wished it and had given CBS the story, and that CBS had run it before Terri died. It was appalling! Now, in the middle of the night, I remembered it, and it scared me.

“I rushed over to the police, paying no attention to the people outside the hospice. ‘When are we going back in?’ I asked. And they said, ‘We haven’t heard anything yet. We’ll let you know.’

“The hospice had told my parents that they would call if Terri was near dying, and Mom and Dad, emotionally spent, had gone home to wash and change clothes. But suddenly I was sure that the hospice
wouldn’t
call and that Terri
was
near dying—or was already dead—and I wanted my parents to see her, if they wanted to, after she died.

“By dawn, I’d heard nothing. I got mad. I went back and got Father, and the two of us held an impromptu press conference. ‘Michael’s preventing our family from going inside,’ I said. ‘He’s scripting this. Felos wants Michael to be alone with her. They don’t want her family members to be there.’

“On Michael’s orders, the hospice still barred us. I thought I’d go mad with frustration. It was about 6:00 a.m., and Suzy had come back, and we kept going over, and the police kept saying, ‘You can’t go in.’ Suzanne finally called our lead attorney, David Gibbs, and he called Felos and raised a stink. But it wasn’t until 7:30 that they let us in.”

“She looked even worse,” Suzanne says. “She was jaundiced, but her hands were black and blue, and you could see her veins. Her skin was so thin, like a sheath. And of course she looked much more drawn. Her eyes were still full of blood, and darting, and her breathing was heavy, heavy. Father Pavone and I were on her left side. Bobby was on her right side again, and there was a policeman in the room and another one at the doorway. Father Pavone had a watch in his hand, a stopwatch. I don’t know why. The policeman made him hand it over. My sister’s dying, and he’s worried about a watch!”

“The policeman was hovering over us,” Bobby goes on. “Just standing there with his arms folded and watching us while we prayed. It was very uncomfortable. This was terribly private, and there were these policemen standing and looking.

“Father continued his prayers, singing in Latin, and we knew the end was very close. Then all of a sudden some hospice people came in—administrators and nurses—and they looked at Terri and left, and then they came back and said, ‘You have to leave now. We need to assess Terri.’

“I knew what was going on, that they didn’t want us to be with Terri when she died, so I said, ‘We don’t want to leave. We know Terri is close to dying. We’ll stay in the room.’ They said, ‘No. It’ll just be five minutes. Wait in the hallway, and you can come back.’

“So Father, Suzy and I walked into the hallway, and immediately a policeman got in front of us. ‘You have to leave the facility.’ I remember the word he used. ‘Facility.’

“That’s when I was ready to lose it. I said, ‘What’s going on here? The nurses told us that in five minutes we’d be back inside. My sister’s close to dying. We want to be in the room with her. I don’t care if Michael’s in the room with us. We’re not leaving!’

“I was belligerent. ‘You know as well as I do what they’re doing. Please ask Michael to let us be in the room with Terri,’ I pleaded.

“The policeman got belligerent right back. ‘We’ll talk about this outside,’ he said. ‘If you don’t leave, I’m going to arrest you.’ I said, ‘This is bull. They’re scripting her death. Michael wants to be here when she dies so he can go to the media and play the loving husband.’ I asked him to find an administrator, and when he came back with one, the administrator said, ‘Michael Schiavo has ordered you off the premises.’ ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m going to leave. But I’m coming back in fifteen, twenty minutes.’ The cop said, ‘If you don’t have permission, I’ll arrest you.’ ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You can arrest me, then. I’m coming back. I want to be with my sister.’”

“We stormed across the street,” Suzanne remembers. “But one thing struck me as peculiar. The argument—and Bobby and the policeman were loud—went on right outside Terri’s door. Maybe the nurse was with Terri, but Michael was nowhere in sight. I wondered why he didn’t come out. I wondered whether he was even
in
the hospice, let alone by Terri’s side. It’s something we’ll never know.

“I called David Gibbs, who was en route to the hospice, whose battles on our behalf were inspiring. ‘Terri is near death,’ I told him, ‘and they kicked us out.’ David said he’d call Felos to see what he could do.

“Then minutes later, David walked in. ‘Terri passed,’ he said. I began to cry.”

“Felos gave a press conference,” Bobby says. “One of the first things the press asked him was, ‘Why did you throw the family out of the room before Terri died?’ And Felos says, ‘Because Bobby Schindler started a disturbance inside the room and had to be forcibly taken out.’ It wasn’t true: I’d been
outside
the room. I had made a fuss
because
they kicked us out!

“Then Felos starts describing Terri’s death—Michael supposedly at her side, cradling her with stuffed animals. ‘It was a peaceful, beautiful time,’ he said, mimicking the CBS obituary issued two days earlier. Father Pavone, who was furious, gave his own press conference, contradicting everything Felos said.

“And Suzy called Mom and Dad to tell them Terri had died.”

That was the end. The beginning was fifteen years earlier.

CHAPTER 1

The Collapse

The phone call woke us. I watched my husband, Bob, stumble to the living room of our small condo, a matter of fifteen steps, where he picked up the receiver. It was around 5:30 a.m., February 25, 1990. Calls at that hour could only mean bad news.

“Dad, it’s Michael,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “There’s trouble. Terri’s passed out. She’s unconscious. I can’t wake her up.”

“Call 911,” Bob shouted, and slammed down the phone.
¹

“There’s a problem with Terri,” he said, coming back to the bedroom. We decided to call our son, Bobby, right away. Bobby, aged twenty-five, lived in the same apartment complex as Terri and Michael, whose address was 12001 4th Street North, in St. Petersburg. Bob went back to the phone. “Something’s happened to Terri,” he whispered to Bobby, barely able to get out the words. “Michael called and said he can’t wake her up. You ought to get over there right away. Check it out and call me back.”

Numb, too shocked to feel pain, Bob returned to the bedroom again. He has always had high blood pressure, and I was watching him with anxious eyes, close to panic over him and over Terri, yet half sure that nothing really bad had happened to our daughter. We had just had dinner with her that evening. Had gone to Mass with her that afternoon. None of us realized how ominous the news was. There was nothing for us to do for the moment except get dressed and wait for Bobby’s report.

Over the years, Bobby never told us fully what happened
when he entered Terri and Michael’s apartment. The memories were too vivid, his pain too great. But now, in tears, courageous, he told the story:

“The apartment was only two hundred yards away, but I figured it would be faster by car. So I threw on some jeans and a T-shirt, drove over, got out, and went to the third floor. Michael answered the door. I went in. Terri was lying face down in the corridor between the bathroom and the living room.

“I remember it like it was only hours ago. Her torso was on top of her arms with her hands up by her neck. I could see half the side of her face, and she was having trouble breathing, like almost a gurgling sound. I leaned down and shook her shoulders and said, ‘Terri, get up. Get up.’ There was no response. And it was at that moment that the paramedics knocked on the door.

“Michael let them in, and actually I think he was behind me when I shook Terri’s shoulder, or to my side. At first, I wasn’t overly concerned. I’d seen Terri just a few hours earlier in my apartment. She was perfectly fine. I asked her to go out with me and my roommate, Craig Hicken, that night, and she said she didn’t want to because she had been fighting with Michael earlier that day and she was going to wait for him to come home. So I said okay, and I remember she ironed my pants.

“So I wasn’t really concerned. I thought she had just passed out. But when the paramedics got there—as soon as they went down and assessed her condition . . . I mean, I knew it was serious. That’s when I became frantic.

“They didn’t say much. The only thing I remember, they wanted to know if there were drugs. They were really hitting us hard about drugs. ‘
Does your wife do drugs?
’ ‘
Does your sister do drugs?
’ In fact, one of the paramedics got in my face and said, ‘Look, if you don’t tell us that she was doing drugs, you know we’re going to hold you responsible.’ I think they even threatened criminal charges against me. And I knew my sister. I never knew Terri ever doing drugs. I mean, she would drink—socially drink when we went out. But never drugs. And I was adamant. ‘No. She doesn’t do drugs.’

“I remember the paramedics being young. I remember them hitting Terri with the defibrillators a number of times. I remember I called my dad. I went into the living room and called my dad. And didn’t know what to tell him, except that she would be taken to Humana Northside Hospital. I said it was serious, but they didn’t know what was wrong with her. My dad kept asking me over and over again, ‘What do you think is wrong?’ And I didn’t know. I didn’t know what was wrong. And we just waited. And they were working on her for upwards of a half hour.

“In that time frame, the police arrived, and firemen, and more paramedics. They finally got Terri stabilized enough to put her on a bed, one of those rolling beds. I remember them taking Terri out, and I remember looking at the floor. I couldn’t believe all the stuff that was on the floor—trash that they were using. You know, something they injected her with, stuff they were using on her. There was just trash everywhere. Needles everywhere. So I knew there was something seriously wrong, terribly wrong, because they were injecting her with things, I guess to try to get her heart started.

“I walked downstairs. Someone was left behind—I don’t know if it was a paramedic or policeman or firefighter. I said to him, ‘What’s going on? What’s wrong with my sister?’ And I remember him saying, ‘If she makes it to the hospital alive, it’ll be a miracle.’

“Michael got in the ambulance with Terri. I said, ‘Michael, I’ll be there shortly.’

“I was hysterical. I drove home, hands shaking. I called my girlfriend at the time, Julie White, to come and get me—I could barely drive, I told her. I walked in the door of my apartment and I fell to my knees and I just started crying. I woke Craig up. He was half asleep, didn’t know what was going on. I told him what had happened, and Julie got there a short time after, and then we drove to the hospital.”

CHAPTER 2

The Hospital

When Bobby called, he hadn’t told us how serious Terri’s condition was. He simply said that they were taking her to Humana, and we were left to guess the rest. Our guesses were grim.

Bob and I had just seen her a few hours before. She was fine. We had dinner with her. She got in her car. She went home. We couldn’t imagine what could be wrong with her. I felt confused and frightened. It seemed unreal.
This can’t be happening
, I thought.

Bob’s memory of that morning is strong. “We drove to the hospital. The hospital is probably a twenty-minute drive from where we live, but it felt like ten hours. It was getting light outside. But on the way up, I vividly remember seeing lights in a would-be shopping center that were brighter than the other lights. And it was strange to me that they stood out with all the night city lights or streetlights; that this cluster of lights was more illuminated.”

When we got to the hospital, we went to the emergency room and asked about Terri. Nobody answered. Someone—a nurse or orderly—ushered us into a waiting room, and then a doctor came in. Dr. Samir Shah. He couldn’t tell us much, only that Terri was fighting for her life. Bobby arrived, shouting, “Is she dead? Is she dead?” and I said, “No. Settle down.”

But of course none of us could settle down. The words “She’s fighting for her life” had blown us away. Bobby told us that they had to use “paddles” on Terri, and he may have said something about the paramedics and police. It was hard to listen. The words didn’t penetrate. I don’t remember whether Michael was with us—he may have been with Terri—but all we could do was wait. Dr. Shah told us that Terri had been taken from the ER to the intensive-care unit and that until they knew more about her condition, we wouldn’t be allowed to see her. Imagine! Not allowed to see our daughter.

Dr. Shah left; we were alone in the waiting room; we had no information. In the years to come, we would have many frustrations with hospitals and their staffs, but this was the worst—and it was nobody’s fault. Nobody had any information. Nobody knew what was going to happen to Terri.

Around eight in the morning, I called Suzanne, who was at the University of Central Florida, and told her to come to Humana Northside. I didn’t want to go into details for fear Suzanne would drive like a maniac to get there, and UCF was about two hours away. “Please just take your time,” I pleaded. “Terri’s alive. She’s okay.” (Of course, as I suspected she would, Suzanne sped to the hospital, making the drive in an hour and a half.) Both Bob and I felt the same way: we were anxious for her to get there, but we dreaded telling her about her sister’s condition.

Many hours later, we were allowed to see Terri in the ICU. The sight was wrenching, almost unbearable. She was on a respirator. She had an IV in her arm. She had a tube coming out of her shoulder—it was for her heart. She had something going in her nose. She had tubes in her mouth. Her skin was ashen, her eyes were closed. To Bob, it was almost inconceivable that his daughter would live. But I had faith.
She’ll be all right. She’ll get through this
.
My daughter will not be taken away.

Bobby didn’t want to go in at all. “I didn’t want to see her until I knew for sure she was going to live,” he told us. “And we didn’t know. That’s why I was scared to see her.”