A Life That Matters (5 page)

Suzanne described it. “Actually there were two times. When they were first married, I spent a lot of time with Terri and Michael. There were often times when Michael was roughhousing with both of us. He would pinch. He used to grab the back of your arm and he would twist. Here today I cringe because it hurt really bad. I would see bruises on Terri, and she would always brush them off as horseplay, but I would get angry, and he and I would fight because the horseplay got real physical. And he did not like me. I mean, he wasn’t going to control me. Terri was definitely more passive. If she would stand up to him in front of other people, I’m sure she heard about it when we all left, behind closed doors.

“The other time was really scary. We were all living in a rented house in Vina del Mar when Terri was well enough to be moved from the hospital to live with us. It was in ’91, right before I got married, so I was living at the house, and I had the same kind of situation Bobby described. I had to keep my mouth shut a lot, just to forestall any arguments. I don’t remember exactly why we fought, but I’ll bet it was about how disrespectful he was to all of us, and how he was too moody. And everyone was so good to him at that time, that’s what bothered me. We treated him like a son or a brother.

“I must have opened my mouth to him. I mean, he was rude! Terri was in her room, in her wheelchair, and I was grateful she couldn’t hear us. It really bugged me how he had no respect and he was not a kind person. I had said something, and I remember he just went from zero to sixty, and then he started to come after me. And I think Dad stepped between us.”

Bob remembers the fight clearly. “He came across the room after her, and I jumped in between the two of them. I thought he was going to hurt her. He backed off. I said to Suzanne, ‘When you go in your bedroom tonight, lock the door.’ I didn’t know what Michael was going to do.

“Michael was under a psychiatrist’s care at the time, and I got so upset I called the psychiatrist in Bradenton and described the incident with Suzanne. And he said to me, ‘If it ever happens again, call the police immediately.’ That scared the hell out of me because we were all living in the same household. ‘Keep a hammer under your pillow,’ I told Suzanne. ‘Just in case.’”

Suzanne and Michael didn’t speak after that. A month later, she was married and out of the house. But I was left to think of the implications of Bob’s advice. A hammer under her pillow? Did Terri need similar protection? How many times had Michael turned his anger on her? The questions tortured me. What happened in their marriage that I didn’t know about? How much had Terri kept from me?

The kids’ stories reminded me of a time in Pennsylvania right after Terri and Michael married.

Our whole family was up to his parents’ house. We were having a barbecue, and everybody else was outside. I was sitting at the kitchen table—I don’t remember why—when Michael came into the kitchen with his brother Scott. All of a sudden the trash can went flying and they started hitting each other and Michael grabbed Scott around the neck and got him in a choke hold. And they were fighting and arguing, and Michael pushed Scott down, choking him. Then his father came in and they stopped fighting, but Scott was in pain. There was obviously a violent streak in “Mr. Charm” beneath his social politeness.

It seemed to us that Michael was angry most of the time. No matter what restaurant he was working at, the owners and managers who were running them “didn’t know the first thing about it,” he’d say. They were “stupid jerks” and “bums” who didn’t let him do his job right. Neither Bob nor I can remember a time when Michael took the blame for anything, and naturally it worried us that he might be acting the same way toward Terri. Terri told Suzanne that he was angry she spent so much time with us and her siblings. He didn’t like it when Terri went out with her girlfriends, either. “I think it was a control issue,” Suzanne says. “Besides, they worked on opposite schedules. Why shouldn’t she spend time with us when he was away?”

In the early days, Terri didn’t say much to any of us about her marriage, but from time to time, she did complain to Suzanne about some of the things Michael was doing. “Like marking down the mileage on her car before he would go to work. And then verifying with her where she went when he got home to make sure it matched up with the miles on the odometer.”

He monitored her expenses as well as her mileage, and was furious when she spent money on herself. Terri’s best friend, Jackie Rhodes, says that on the day before she collapsed, Terri told her in a tearful phone conversation that she and Michael had quarreled bitterly because she had spent eighty dollars to color her hair blond. Michael wanted it brown because it was less expensive to maintain. Jackie was contemplating a divorce at the time, and Terri told her she was thinking about divorcing Michael. The two even went window-shopping for furniture in case they decided to share an apartment.

I wasn’t surprised when I found out that Terri had wanted a divorce. It hurt, of course, because it proved how unhappy Terri must have been. She was a fighter. She’d have stayed with almost any bad situation and tried to solve it. She must have been desperate, to go against the teaching of our religion, and I realized she was too ashamed to confide in me. The battle in her soul must have been awful.

Despite his attacks on Terri for her “extravagance,” Michael spent freely on himself, especially on jewelry, even when he was out of work. Suzanne’s husband, Dan, whom she subsequently divorced, was financially comfortable, and Michael looked up to him, spending as much time with him as possible, as though to partake of wealth.
¹
Suzanne remembers that when Dan went to Cleveland to visit his parents, Michael would call him several times a day. “It was very odd. There were months when he’d call him incessantly. We all began to question it, and it got so bad that Dan’s mother would call down here and say, ‘Why is Michael calling so often? What’s going on?’ I think eventually Dan told him to stop, because it was out of hand and it was odd. And Terri couldn’t explain it.”

When Terri and Michael were living with us in Philadelphia, Terri came to Bob one day. “Daddy, look at this,” she said. She showed him a wristwatch, a Rolex or a Lucien Piccard. “It’s magnificent,” Bob said. And she said, “Well, he bought it for a co-worker.” Bob was furious. “You guys don’t even have enough money to rent an apartment, and he’s spending that kind of money for a watch for a casual friend.”

Still, Terri rarely complained, at least to us. She confided that her sex life with Michael was deteriorating. On two occasions, she told me that Michael would say he worked all night and was too tired. Once, in tears, she said Michael told her “he just didn’t want it.”

I was astounded. To me, his disinterest in sex meant he wasn’t interested in her. It was my first indication that something wasn’t right in their marriage.

Terri’s outlet was harmless flirtations, one with the UPS man who came to the Prudential office every day. Sometimes they would lunch together, and she would tell her best friend at work, Jackie Rhodes, how handsome she thought he was. One day Bob picked her up for lunch at the Prudential office. A co-worker said something to Terri about the guy, and Bob asked her about him. “Her face went red. ‘Nothing, Daddy. Nothing, Daddy.’ Very defensive.”

“Well, she was human,” Suzanne says about the incident. “The guy was nice to her. They laughed together. She told me he was funny. And they did go to lunch. Of course Michael never knew about it.

“It was all innocent. I remember we used to go to a restaurant called Crabby Bill’s—a group of our friends and Mom and Dad’s friends. Terri was funny because there was a bartender in there and—oh, God, he was this scary-looking guy. He had tattoos. Rough-looking but attractive. And Terri thought he was just so cute. And I think he google-eyed her, too, because she’d colored her hair blond and she looked great. She was tan, I’ll tell you, she was just beautiful.

“I thought it was terrific that she had dyed her hair. That she was feeling so good about herself. After all the time she spent alone when she was growing up, here she was, out of her shell, enjoying
herself.”

After a similar flirtation with a waiter, Bob and Terri went to a Mass as St. John’s. Terri, looking angelic in a white dress, went to Communion, and afterward Bob teased, “I hope you went to Confession, too.” And our sweet, good girl looked at him and said very seriously, “I don’t have to because I have nothing to confess.”

I knew less about the downward spiral of Terri’s marriage than our children did. With Suzanne away at school, Bobby became her closest confidant. And several weeks before she collapsed, she told Bobby what she told Jackie later: that she wanted a divorce.

“We were at Bennigan’s with Michael and Michael’s brother Brian, who was in St. Petersburg on vacation. We were having dinner. Terri said, ‘I have to go to the bathroom,’ and she asked me to come with her. I couldn’t imagine why, but of course I went with her. As we were walking to the bathroom, she stopped right in front of the door. And just broke down. Started crying. She said that her relationship was horrible. She wanted to divorce him but felt she could never do it. She didn’t have the courage or the guts. And she was a devout Catholic. She wasn’t
supposed
to get divorced.

“I was shocked. I’d no idea things were that bad. Because she’d never really opened up to me like this about her relationship with Michael. I could sense there wasn’t a lot of affection there the last couple of years—that there was contention between them. She’d make snide remarks about him, about his attitude and how moody he was. But still—
divorce?

“I said, ‘Did you talk to Mom and Dad about this?’ And she was emphatic. ‘No. I would never tell Mom and Dad. Don’t you say anything to them. I don’t want to upset them.’ We were all very concerned about upsetting my parents, so that was it. I told her, ‘If there’s anything I can do to help . . .’ and I might have suggested she see a marriage counselor. But it threw me.”

If only Bobby had told me,
I think now.
If only Terri had confided
in me.
Would it all have turned out different? Would we have supported her to leave him? Would leaving him have saved her life?

CHAPTER 5

Early Days

“Your daughter is PVS,” Dr. Garcia DeSousa, Terri’s neurologist, said, taking my hand at the side of Terri’s bed, toward the end of her second week at Humana Northside after her collapse.

I looked at him uncomprehendingly. “What does PVS mean?”

“Persistent vegetative state. It’s a condition where the patient is, and will remain, unconscious and unaware.” His tone was sympathetic. “As long as we keep feeding her, she won’t die from it, but this is how it’s going to be. She’s never going to get any better.”

News like that is impossible to digest. Bob and I took it in without processing it and without considering its implications. Our grief was so intense, our minute-by-minute advocacy for Terri so fierce, that DeSousa’s diagnosis felt simply like one more piece of bad news. Besides, “persistent vegetative state” certainly
didn’t
describe Terri, who had already responded to our presence with smiles, and whose eyes were able to follow our movements around the ICU.

Michael himself, in his notebook written between April and May 1990, which he showed to me at the time, notes that Terri was able to follow voices; respond to his questions by nodding; was obviously dreaming; could squeeze her nurse’s hand; cried; was able to hold her head up and turn it; and could move her whole body around in the bed. As I read his words now, I get teary. He
saw
the potential for Terri’s recovery. He
wanted
it. Implicitly he was ready to
fight
for it. He made a commitment to Terri and our family to help her. It was he who soon changed his mind, not Terri.

True, even at the beginning, there were times, even days, when she was unresponsive, but more often than not she was with us. And it was inconceivable to us that she wouldn’t get better. Hadn’t Bob’s niece, Kathy Brown, a trained nurse, already warned us not to listen to the doctors, because they always gave the worst-case scenario?

We dismissed the diagnosis and, with Michael, planned for the first steps in Terri’s rehabilitation. Yet it was a diagnosis that was to haunt us for fifteen years.

Within twenty-four to forty-eight hours after Terri’s col-
lapse, Dan Grieco, a lawyer who was also Michael’s boss at Agostino’s restaurant, approached us in the ICU waiting room. “In order to expedite Terri’s medical care, it would be better if one person deals with the doctor,” he said.

Grieco made sense. There would obviously be many times to come when we would not all be together when a medical decision about Terri’s care was necessary. Even at the hospital, every time
a doctor emerged from the ICU, there were five people—Michael and all the Schindlers—who ganged up on him, and the result was chaotic.

Michael was the logical choice, given that there was nothing written by Terri to say otherwise. He was, after all, Terri’s husband; she was his primary “responsibility.” Grieco subsequently brought the documents authorizing Michael to be the liaison between the family and the medical staff at Northside, and Bob and I signed them.

We didn’t realize—and our naïveté in those early days now seems to Bob and me mind-boggling, even given our extreme duress—that we had essentially given Michael power of attorney. It was a document that permitted him to intercede for us with Terri’s doctors, to deal with the medical staff and
relay
information. He could filter that information as he wished. If he wanted to hide something from us, either good news or bad, we could not prevent him.
¹

None of this would have mattered if Michael and we had remained a team. For the first two years, we acted in concert, everybody working for Terri, everybody thinking first about her well-being. We didn’t consider the consequences of signing those papers. The only thing on our minds was that Terri was fighting to stay alive, and we devoted all our energies to joining her in that fight.