A Life That Matters (25 page)

I didn’t go to the press conference. The idea of facing the public with my private grief was too much to bear. I understood the need to speak to the media, but I wanted to be Terri’s mom for a little while longer. I wanted to commune with her one-on-one and let those memories come that related only to us.

So I stayed behind, with my longtime friends Judy Bader and Fran Casler, while the others piled into cars and drove back to our headquarters at the odds-and-ends shop.

Suzanne describes what happened there:

“The media had set up a press conference area in front of the hospice. At four o’clock, Dad, Bobby, our extended family, David Gibbs, Monsignor Malanowski, the Franciscan Brothers, Father Pavone, my husband, and I left the shop and walked across the street, as usual with a police escort, but this time there was no pushing and shoving, no shouts, no frenzy.

“We faced an amazing sight: rows and rows and rows of microphones, ten times the usual number, and hundreds of cameras, their flashbulbs going off like huge fireflies. I remember standing in front of a microphone and thinking,
How am I going to get through this? I can’t lose it. I can’t break down
. It was eerie. My sister had died that morning, and here Dad and Bobby and I were in front of the world.

“Bobby and I had rehearsed how we would split up our family statement, and we read it without faltering. The press was very respectful. Afterwards, many people told me how moved they were, but I felt like an actor playing a part. Only when the conference was over, when we were all back in the shop, did the pain of Terri’s death return.”

“Right after the conference,” Bobby says, “one or two of the reporters came up to me. ‘Have you heard about the pope?’ they asked.

“‘No. What’s happened?’

“‘Pope John Paul was hooked to a feeding tube today.’

“
Unbelievable.
I imagined that Terri’s feeding tube had been transferred to the pope, and the image brought me close to tears. Mel Gibson’s movie
The Passion of the Christ
and Gibson’s recent call offering support had moved me in the same way. After years of estrangement, I felt close to my faith, and to me the feeding tube was no coincidence, but a sign of God’s acknowledgment of Terri’s worth and Terri’s suffering.”

We believe it is no coincidence that on the very day Terri died from having food and water denied her, Pope John Paul II, her chief shepherd on earth and the man who promulgated the Gospel of Life, received a feeding tube for nutrition, hydration, and comfort. He was aware of Terri’s plight and of what the judicial execution by dehydration and starvation meant to the vulnerable of our world. Nor is it a coincidence that both Terri and Pope John Paul II (who passed just two days after Terri) died during the Easter season, the most holy time of the year for Catholics, representing the passion, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

“Somebody told us there was going to be a memorial,” Bob remembers. “A nondenominational service somewhere in Pinellas Park. Everyone was exhausted, drained. I said, ‘Well, someone has to go,’ and a whole bunch of fingers pointed at me.

“The memorial was in a church—for the life of me, I can’t remember which one—and I went there right from the shop. It seemed like there were ten thousand people there. Even the balcony was packed. There were rabbis—one of them kissed me on the lips—black and white clergymen, two or three priests, a Muslim cleric. There was music. Catholics stood side by side with the Baptists, Methodists stood with Jews, everyone family, brought together by Terri.

“I heard people addressing the attendees. I was asked to stand, and I did, apologizing because I was wearing shorts and everybody else was dressed up. But nobody cared, and the sympathy that poured out from everyone, no matter what faith they were, or what color, or what profession, blew me away.

“I said to myself,
Now here’s a miracle
.”

Many people came back to our house, but they didn’t stay long. Mikey and my sister-in-law, C. B., were living with us. I assured them there was nothing more they could do for me. Bobby returned to his home, Suzanne and Michael back to their daughter.

Bob and I were alone. We didn’t say much to each other—at least I don’t remember any of our words—but I was enormously grateful for his presence and his love. The world seemed hollow without Terri. Hollow and silent and sad.

I thought of the Christ welcoming her to heaven and was comforted.

On Tuesday, April 5, 2005, at seven in the evening, a funeral Mass was celebrated for Terri at the Most Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church in Gulfport, a suburb of St. Petersburg. Monsignor Malanowski was the principal celebrant. More than eight hundred people filled the church to capacity and flowed out the doors to the adjoining courtyard. I thought it was the most beautiful of all the services for Terri. There was a calmness to it, a sense of awe. Terri was with everyone who attended.

In the days and weeks that followed, we attended masses in Philadelphia and Jacksonville. Condolences poured in from all over the world. It became clear to us that Terri’s life, her suffering and death, had touched the lives of thousands, if not millions, of people.
She belongs to them now
, I thought with a touch of regret.
We must share her
.

CHAPTER 23

Autopsy

The services and memorials were never-ending and, in fact, continue to this day. I went to several of them, always with Bob, and they brought a measure of comfort. To our amazement, people came up to ask for our autographs, as if we were celebrities. Maybe we were, but if so, it was nothing we sought and nothing we savored. We hated it.
¹

If Terri was to be remembered, we all felt, it would not be because we were on television or in someone’s autograph book, and it wouldn’t be through commemorations and sermons. We needed something solid to honor her memory.

So we decided to restructure the foundation we established in 2001 and use it for a vehicle for helping people with disabled daughters, sons, husbands, wives, or grandparents cope with their problem more knowledgeably, and therefore more effectively, than we did. We had had no tools. We would supply others with one.

To put a mother—to put anyone—through what Terri and my family went through, and to see hospitals, hospices, and courts do something so cruel to another human being that should never ever have been done, is beyond my understanding. You don’t dehydrate or starve somebody to death. Not here. Not in America. Not anywhere. But to do it, and
knowingly
do it, is something I will never forget, and something no other mother should have to see. As David Gibbs said, “You can’t starve a dog that way; you can’t starve a mass murderer that way; the Geneva Convention keeps us from starving prisoners that way—but they did it that way to Terri.”

So my own motive was clear: I determined to devote my life to making sure that what happened to me and my child would never have to happen again.

Actually Terri didn’t die from starvation—she died from dehydration. The autopsy on Terri’s body was conducted by Dr. Jon R. Thogmartin, chief medical examiner for Pasco and Pinellas Counties (the Sixth Circuit).
²
His report was issued on June 15, 2005. It included analyses by a variety of medical experts—a neuropathologist, an anatomic/clinical/forensic pathologist, a toxicologist, and a radiologist. Eighty-six X-rays were taken and 188 photos of her body. There’s no question that the report was thorough.

The media leaped on the autopsy report like lions. Terri was “brain-dead,” they said. She was in a persistent vegetative state and had been for years. She was blind at the moment of her death. She couldn’t swallow.

The media verdict, almost universally proclaimed: it was a blessing that Terri had died; it made no sense to keep her alive any longer. But a close reading of the report shows that this conclusion was not nearly as absolute as the media made it out to be— that, indeed, the report is full of ambiguities and unanswered questions.

For example, while it is incontestably true that Terri was severely brain-injured, that does
not
mean she was brain-dead or even PVS. The distinction is vital. To Barbara Weller, a Florida-certified attorney and a colleague of David Gibbs, there was no question that Terri was responsive, even at the end.

Barbara visited Terri three times between December 2004 and March 2005, the last on the day the feeding tube was removed. (As our lead attorneys, she, Pat Anderson, and David Gibbs were allowed on the visitors’ list, while Tom Broderson was taken off.) She wrote extensive descriptions of all three visits. Here’s an excerpt from the last. Suzanne was in the room with her when the events she describes happened, and verifies them:

Terri was sitting in her lounge chair and her aunt
³
was sitting at the foot of the chair. I stood up and leaned over Terri. I took her arms in both of my hands. I said to her, “Terri, if you could only say, ‘I want to live,’ this whole thing would be over today.” I begged her to try very hard to say, “I want to live.” To my enormous shock and surprise, Terri’s eyes opened wide, she looked at me square in the face, and with a look of great concentration, she said, “Ahhhhhh.”

Then, seeming to summon up all the strength she had, she virtually screamed, “Waaaaaaaa.” She yelled so loudly that Michael Vitadamo, Terri’s sister Suzanne’s husband, and the female police officer who were standing together outside Terri’s door clearly heard her. At that point, Terri had a look of anguish on her face that I had never seen before and she seemed to be struggling hard but was unable to complete the sentence. She became very frustrated and began to cry. I was horrified that I was causing Terri so much anguish. Suzanne and I began to stroke Terri’s face and hair to comfort her. I told Terri I was very sorry. It had not been my intention to upset her so much. Suzanne and I assured Terri that her efforts were much appreciated and that she did not need to say anything more. I promised Terri I would tell the world that she had tried to say, “I want to live.”

Almost immediately, doctors began to refute the press analysis of the report. Thomas W. Hejkal, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Ophthalmology at the Nebraska Medical Center, said that although the autopsy findings certainly indicated that Terri had some deficit in her visual field, “cortical blindness could only be diagnosed by assessing her visual function while she was living.” Dr. Bernadine Healy, a former director of the National Institutes of Health, pointed out that an autopsy can tell us nothing about Terri’s neurological function. Dr. Michael DeGeorgia, head of the neurology/neurosurgery intensive-care unit at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, said that the PVS diagnosis “cannot be confirmed by surgery.” Dr. Mack Jones, a Florida neurologist, noted that while there was evidence of severe brain injury, “these findings nor any other findings have no bearing on the diagnosis of ‘minimal consciousness’ or PVS.” Dr. William Cheshire, the neurologist from the Mayo Clinic, agreed with our position that Terri was awake, aware, and at least minimally cognitive, and quickly made his opinion known to Governor Bush. And Harvard neuropathologist E. Tessa Hedley White said that a pathologic examination of the brain “can’t tell if there is a persistent vegetative state or not.”

Even Dr. Thogmartin wrote that “PVS is a clinical diagnosis arrived at through physical examination of living patients. By definition, an autopsy is performed after a patient dies.” As Diana Lynne points out in her excellent book,
Terri’s Story
,
Dr. Stephen Nelson, a consulting pathologist, who helped Thogmartin with the autopsy report, admitted that while Terri’s symptoms were consistent with PVS, he could not rule out the possibility that Terri was in a minimally conscious state. And Thogmartin conceded that it couldn’t be determined how much Terri’s long period of dehydration contributed to the shrinkage of her brain.

“Mrs. Schiavo’s heart was anatomically normal without any areas of recent or remote myocardial infarction,” Dr. Thogmartin noted. “An underlying, undiagnosed cardiac anomaly is possible, but diagnostics at the time [the time of her collapse] along with postmortem examination of the heart were negative.”

Translation: a heart attack wasn’t the cause of Terri’s collapse.

Nor was bulimia nervosa. “According to those that knew Mrs. Schiavo,” Dr. Thogmartin wrote, “her eating and drinking habits included eating lots of salads, eating a large omelet on weekends and drinking large amounts of ice tea. No one observed Mrs. Schiavo taking diet pills, binging and purging or consuming laxatives, and she apparently never confessed to her family or friends about having an eating disorder. Recent interviews with family members, physicians, and coworkers revealed no additional information supporting the diagnosis of bulimia nervosa and, indeed, other signs and symptoms of bulimia nervosa were not reported to be present.”

The main argument
for
bulimia that Michael Schiavo’s lawyers used when he sued her ob-gyn and family doctor for malpractice in 1992, was knocked down by Dr. Thogmartin’s findings:

On February 25, 1990, according to available records, a 911 call was made at approximately 0540 hrs.
⁴
Both Mr. Schiavo and Bobby Schindler were present prior to arrival of emergency responders. They both describe her as lying prone and breathing, or at least they describe her as “making gurgling noises.” According to her medical records, paramedics began treating Mrs. Schiavo at 0552 hrs. The Pinellas County EMS report records her as supine in the hallway with no respiration and her initial cardiac rhythm was ventricular fibrillation . . . Her time of arrival at Humana Hospital-Northside was 0646 hrs. At 0701 hrs, her blood was drawn and that sample showed hypokalemia [low potassium] . . . one hour after her initial collapse and after over 30 minutes of CPR . . . Her doctors began potassium supplementation almost immediately resulting in a rapid rise of her potassium . . . She also received epinephrine [from the EMS] . . . The dosage of epinephrine she received was sufficient to cause . . . lowering of potassium . . . Thus it is reasonable to conclude that Mrs. Schiavo’s level . . . measured after a period of ventricular fibrillation, epinephrine, and fluid administration was an unreliable measure of her pre-arrest potassium level. Thus, the main piece of evidence supporting a diagnosis of bulimia nervosa is suspect.