Posted on 03/28/2006 7:19:33 AM PST by NYer
CLEARWATER - The one-story brick house sits in a carefully tended yard in a cul de sac, a gray Honda minivan parked in the driveway shaded by trees. Hospice, the license plate says, Every day is a gift .
Inside, he reads his daughter to sleep and changes his son's diapers. He steps over disregarded toys and animal books and escapes with the Sopranos and Extreme Home Makeover , slipping happily into someone else's drama. He works 12-hour days to keep the bills at bay and yawns as he sits on the couch. She reminds him to take out the trash, and he does.
This is Michael Schiavo's new life. Life after Terri.
Every day is a gift.
* * *
In the year since Terri Schiavo died the most public of deaths, Michael still leads two different lives.
He guards his privacy but has written a book about the years-long political and ethical battle he waged to remove his wife's feeding tube. He fails to keep up with happenings in Tallahassee and Washington yet has started his own political action committee. He removes all signs of his first wife from his house yet welcomes recognition and comments from strangers about what he did for her.
The book, Terri: The Truth , which will be released in bookstores today, calls for education about living wills and eating disorders and for fighting politicians, activists, anyone intervening in end-of-life decisions.
In his first newspaper interview since Terri died, Mike - known by the world as Michael but called Mike by family members and friends - tells the St. Petersburg Times that a lot has happened to him in the last year, but not much has changed.
He buried his wife. Changed jobs. Got married. Was promoted.
But much of the bitterness remains, dividing the family, dividing America.
These days, there are only flashes of the elusive, arrogant Michael Schiavo the world got to know. He's more reflective now but still has to remind himself sometimes not to get angry.
"This was the biggest right to die case in history. This will never ever go away. So everybody has to learn to live with it and just get on," he said in a lengthy, wide-ranging interview last week. "I can't make it go away. It will always be there. But you can teach yourself how to move on."
Has he taught himself to move on? Not quite, he said, but he's working on it.
* * *
After his wife's death on March 31, 2005, Mike left town for two months. He and his longtime girlfriend, Jodi Centonze, took their two young children to a friend's beach house.
Mike, a registered nurse, took the extended time off from work at the Pinellas County Jail after his co-workers donated vacation days to him. They contributed so many days he gave some back.
The family returned to their home in Countryside where they had lived quietly for years, before the case ever landed in court.
The four-bedroom house with the sage green trim and enclosed swimming pool sits alongside five other houses. It was there that camera crews camped out on the sidewalk and activists threw roses for Terri on the front lawn.
Mike helps supervise the 150 nurses who care for the jail's 3,600 inmates. His schedule is never the same two weeks in a row. These days he comes home at 7 p.m. It used to be midnight.
Jodi, whom Mike calls Jo, had worked her way from file clerk to vice president at an insurance agency when she quit in 2000 after the company was sold. She stays home with their kids now and the family lives off Mike's annual salary of $68,500.
Three-year-old Olivia loves all princesses from Cinderella to Belle. She prances around the house in her bathing suit, hoping for time in the pool. She attends a Catholic preschool three days a week.
Nicholas, 2, likes Thomas the Tank Engine, climbing and beating up on his sister. He never tires of stuffing big chunks of bananas in his mouth.
"Meow. Meow," Nicky grins. No one knows where he got that. The family has a dog, a golden retriever named Samantha.
The couple have never considered moving from Pinellas County where his former in-laws, the Schindlers, still live and where Schiavo has been a household name for years.
"Why should I?" asked Mike, 42, wearing shorts and a T-shirt while eating his usual chicken Caesar salad from a favorite Italian restaurant on a recent Sunday night.
Mike notices strangers nudging each other when they catch sight of him in a restaurant or shop. Every few days, someone will approach him.
"They talk. They whisper. When they say something to me, it's always complimentary," he said. "I had one gentleman tell me the other day that I'm his hero."
Jodi, 41, is never recognized. In the dozen years she has known and loved Mike, she has never attended a court hearing or spoken publicly. Until now.
Almost at the last minute, Jodi has decided to join Mike as he embarks on a week's worth of national publicity to talk about the book. She will appear on at least three national shows.
"How do you prepare for that? I don't know. You never know what people are going to say or do to you," she said, curled up on the couch wearing jeans with her curly brown hair pulled back. "I am not embarrassed or ashamed of who I am."
Inside their house, there is no sign of Terri. Photos of her are stored under the bed in the master bedroom, where Jodi worked with a professional decorator to develop their sophisticated dark wood and animal motif.
Mike packed away years of newspaper clippings, magazine articles, documents and letters about Terri in two huge plastic bins. They sit in the garage, alongside an old dining room table and outdated toys.
He said he will pull the boxes out one day when his children are old enough to hear about Terri. He hopes they will be proud.
* * *
Mike and Jodi met in July 1993. Mike was visiting a friend, who is an orthodontist. Jodi was sitting in the waiting room.
It had been three years since Terri's heart mysteriously stopped in 1990, depriving her brain of oxygen and leaving her in what her doctors called a persistent vegetative state.
Mike and Jodi became friends, and he said he gradually realized he was falling in love with her. He said he broke up with her three or four times as he struggled with the guilt of loving two women at the same time. He worried about dragging Jodi into his messy life.
"I knew the score when I met him," she said. "I didn't expect Mike to turn his back on Terri, just to move on to an easier life with me."
He eventually asked Jodi to marry him in October 1994. She said yes, though she felt uncomfortable wearing a ring at first. They bought a home together in 1995 and years later decided to have children without knowing when they would marry.
Mike and Jodi were together through almost every legal decision about Terri, through the entire battle with the Schindlers, through the political fight. These days, it's Jodi, even more than Mike, who can't seem to stop talking about the case, constantly steering their conversations back to the Schindlers, the anger still apparent after all these years.
Jodi said she felt like she knew Terri from Mike and his large family. Early on they often misspoke and called her Terri.
After Mike's mother died, Jodi took over the Terri chores. With help from nurses and aides, Jodi did Terri's laundry each week and shopped for the clothes, makeup and perfume Mike insisted she keep wearing in bed.
Jodi visited Terri once, in 2000. Judge George Greer ordered that the feeding tube be removed. It was supposed to be the end, and Jodi wanted to say goodbye.
In March 2005, Terri Schiavo was still alive and her case had become a national cause. Mike still was arguing for her feeding tube to be removed; her parents still were arguing against it, saying she could recover. Court appeals were exhausted. Gov. Jeb Bush and the Legislature had tried to intervene on the side of Terri's parents. Congress and President Bush were about to step in.
As protesters and TV cameras camped out at their house, Jodi worried about their children. She asked Mike something she had never asked before: Give up the fight.
They argued for hours until he agreed. Then he called his attorney, George Felos.
Felos reminded him the case was now bigger than Terri Schiavo. He said it was about everyone who wanted to be able to refuse medical treatment, everyone who didn't want the government to intervene in their lives.
Mike told Jodi he had changed his mind, that he would not walk away. Jodi did. She packed her bags and left with the kids.
"I was done," she said. "It was no longer Mike and the Schindlers. It was Mike and the governor and then Mike and the president. Forget it already. This is crazy. You are just one little person from Florida. Enough already."
She came back the next morning.
Mike and Jodi planned to wait until April 2006 - a full year after Terri's death - to get married. Friends persuaded Jodi to stop caring what people would think and move up the date.
The invitations were mailed in early December. Word didn't leak until the day before the Jan. 21 ceremony. Jodi's wedding planner used her last name for most arrangements. Jodi bought her dress under her mother's maiden name. Even the photographer was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement. The first one refused.
About 90 people attended the wedding at a Catholic church in Safety Harbor and reception at East Lake Country Club where everything from the bridesmaids' dresses to the M&Ms, the couple's favorite, fit in with a black and white theme.
At each place setting was a note announcing that a donation had been made to Hospice of the Florida Suncoast in memory of Mike and Jodi's parents. And in memory of Terri.
At the wedding, Mike wore his new wedding band, a circle of diamonds almost 3 carats in weight. He asked Jodi Schiavo if it would be okay if he also wore another ring, one he fashioned long ago out of diamonds from Terri's wedding ring. She said yes.
"It's always been Mike, Terri and me," she said softly.
* * *
Mike doesn't read the daily newspaper that lands on his front walk. He doesn't follow the Florida Legislature or Congress either.
But he knows he needs to start. He has formed a political action committee, TerriPAC, to raise money and challenge the politicians who tried to intervene in his effort to remove Terri's feeding tube. He has raised $10,000 so far.
"People who got involved in my life should have never gotten involved," he said. "If they can do it to me, they can do it to you. They are voted and elected in to run the country, not my life. Or anybody else's life."
Mike said he hopes his book will spur more interest in his cause and is spending this week in New York trying to drum up sales with appearances on NBC's Today Show and ABC's The View , among others.
He said he has no plan to seek public office, though he said "quite a few people" asked him to run for U.S. Senate.
Mike said he won't earn any money from the PAC or from what he expects to be regular speaking engagements. He won't say what he received for writing the book.
Mike and Jodi Schiavo switched from registered Republicans to registered Democrats after Terri died. Mike said it's not about partisan politics and said he will support Republicans or Democrats, even though it was the GOP majority in the Legislature and Congress that tried to prolong Terri's life.
He plans to endorse candidates this year in many races, including the Florida governor's race. Both Democratic candidates, state Sen. Rod Smith and U.S. Rep. Jim Davis, vocally opposed legislative efforts to reinsert the tube.
* * *
Terri was cremated and her ashes buried at a cemetery in Clearwater. A brass grave marker inscribed with the words "I kept my promise" and a simple marble bench overlook a pond with a fountain in the center.
Jodi Schiavo helped find possible sites. Mike made the final decision.
"I think Terri would have been very proud and very happy," Mike said. "I did what she wanted. She's set free."
Mike will fly home from New York on Friday, the anniversary of Terri's death. He wants some time alone, some time to do something private just for her.
But first a car will be waiting to take him to tape an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer.
You'd think he'd at least wait until her body was cold. If nothing else, but for publicity sake.
I'm gonna search for the insurance story and see what I come up with. Will ping you if I find something.
I'm surprised he and his cohort didn't spill out onto the front lawn, tap a keg of beer, dance around, get silly, and engage in various forms of debauchery.
>> Will ping you if I find something.
Yes, please do, thanks.
Whether a person looks good or bad to you should never be a deciding factor in whether or not they're allowed to live. Terri had a right to live, no matter how uncomfortable that makes you.
"Oh, here we go again. You can't seem to make it past a few posts without re-informing us of your complete ignorance of Terri's medical condition. Terri was not brain-dead until a year ago, on March 31,2005. That's the point that hooking up a heart machine or a ventilator would've been doing the work for her brain. She didn't need either of those machines within a few weeks of her initial hospitalization."
"I do hope you'll educate yourself on some of these terms. It could come in handy some day."
Here's your response:
My wife's grandmother was on a ventilator and she certainly wasn't "brain-dead". She had congestive heart failure. I see you are another person who sees nothing wrong with asphyxiating people when medical technology could prevent it, but is against dehydration and starvation. Why? Is air less vital than food and water?
First, I find it interesting that you somehow pull that baloney out of your hat when I am trying to describe what the term "brain-dead" means to the other poster. How you got from my post to your response is beyond me.
Second, you know zilch about me. Nothing could be further from the truth. Air is absolutely vital, every bit as much as food and water. However, it wasn't an issue in Terri's case.
FWIW, my own father died three years ago from congestive heart failure, so I know exactly what your wife's family was enduring watching their grandmother suffer from that disease. He wasn't brain dead, either. He had a ventilator and oxygen for a while. We removed his ventilator, preparing ourselves for an imminent death, but that didn't happen. He was able to breathe a bit on his own. We never removed his oxygen. He did. It was a wonderful moment, because it affirmed what we thought he wanted, to be removed from the tubes that were everywhere. He hated to be tied down or confined, and he felt that way when the ventilator and oxygen were on him.
We offered him food and water, which he accepted in small amounts. After a day, he had no more appetite, but was constantly thirsty. He sucked the water off a sponge-like Q-tip many times, and we cooled his forehead with a cool, wet washcloth. He was surrounded by friends and family 24/7. He lasted only five days from when we gave permission to have the ventilator removed, but they were probably the most blessed five days of his life. We prayed over him several times a day. Our priest often visited, and gave him Last Rites. We told jokes and stories with him and his guests. We all laughed and cried. He got anything and everything he wanted. Any old wounds were healed during those days. It was not physically pretty nor fun to watch him suffer, and he did suffer, but we made him as comfortable as was humanly possible. I think he had about as good a death as anyone can hope to have, and I am honored to have his example of grace under trial. We were all blessed with his life.
I do not take life or its value lightly. It is a precious gift from God, no matter the circumstance. It is His to take at a time of His choosing.
For real! I didn't understand the jump in logic, and I'm glad I'm not the only one!
Thanks for helping out. I hope the other poster understands what I was trying to say. I know you did!
I have no doubt about the Schindlers' faith. The grace they possess is obvious. Very telling that Michael cannot see it.
http://www.lifenews.com/bio1420.html
MIKEY SAYS: If you haven’t heard about the book, it’s called Terri: The Truth. And if you haven’t heard about it, don’t worry, you will.
Beginning this week I am starting a national media tour to promote the book and TerriPAC. You’ll be seeing me on many national TV shows and hearing me on national radio programs. And you can already pre-order the book from many national booksellers such as Amazon by clicking here. Next, but in now way least, TerriPAC is living up to our mission to hold politicians accountable and support public officials and candidates who respect the rule of law and our rights to privacy.
So, I am delighted to tell you about one candidate TerriPAC is supporting. Kathy Castor is running for Congress in the 11th Congressional District in Florida and she’s a great candidate. Kathy is a Hillsborough County Commissioner (Tampa) and her mother, Betty Castor, served as Florida’s Commissioner of Education and President of the University of South Florida.
I met with Kathy, questioned her about her commitment to our issues was proud to give her one of the first checks from TerriPAC to support her election to Congress.
And like we promised, TerriPAC is not just about supporting good candidates. We’re also about keeping bad ones out of office. Kathy’s main opponent in the primary election does not agree with our basic rights to privacy. As a member of the State Senate, her opponent voted for the political intervention into my family’s personal decisions. And that’s just not acceptable.
So I’m asking you, in addition to your generous and continued support for TerriPAC, that you take a moment to learn more about Kathy Castor and support her campaign as we have.
FV SAYS: So, if you are against murder, you are a bad candidate??? Schiavo works for the Sheriff's Dept. now and makes more than the deputies. I'm sure they're peeved that he's been a model employee for just a year and is making $70K and gets plenty of time off from the Sheriff's Dept.
I wonder about citizen's arrests? I think somebody already tried to arrest Greer.
From what I've read she went from 200 to 150 before meeting Schiavo, and then 150 to 110 while with him. When she hit 110, she stopped menstruating according to the articles.
While on the topic, to your assertion as proof that she did use birth control pills, I say you must not realize that Terri was seeing a gynecologist to find out why she wasn't having success getting pregnant without using birth control. People do have fertility problems you know, and it is not always related to birth control.
I never said birth control pills.
Yes, I know people have fertility problems, but hers only occurred about 5 years into her marriage after her weight fell drastically to 110. You have to admit based on the normal actions of faithless Catholics such as the Schiavo's (who rarely went to Mass at this time), that 98% of them are using artificial birth control as well. This is quite well established by numerous large surveys. The chances are overwhelming that the Schiavo's weren't devout Catholics following the teaching of the Church on birth control, but simultaneously failing to go to Mass.
There is no need to canonize Terri or her parents, and certainly not Michael to wade through their subsequent issues. They were ordinary sinners, and its tiresome to here about their supposed devotion as a part of this story, because it clearly wasn't there until they decided to drag the Church into their family feud.
Your assertions about the Schindlers and their faith are ridiculous, IMHO. I can see from your posts to me that if someone gives you an inch, you take a mile.
Welcome to Free Republic.
This will never be over for me. I will never forget.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.