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.
By Fuhrman's account it started shortly after they were married....
Prior to the invention of artificial feeding tubes, she would have naturally expired many years before. She could not eat or drink anything. She was simply a body hooked up to machines, like in bad science fiction stories.
None of your examples address one of the most common use of respirators, which is in people with things like congestive heart failure. The person can continue to live for some time with respirators and draining of the lungs. But we feel it morally permissible to turn off their respirator and let them drown in their own fluids, which is anything but a pleasant way to die.
Also consider this. A person who has no brain function will die without the ability to breath within minutes, not hours. For those who have basic but impaired brain function, lack of oxygen will kill within hours. She spent two weeks dying from dehydration. I see a huge difference in that, don't you?
No more a difference than that of slowly draining someone of their blood and cutting open their throat and letting it quickly gush forth. One's slow, one's fast, both end up with a dead person by deliberate intent.
When I think about Michael Schiavo's wedding to his new wife in a Catholic ceremony, words just fail me. How could the bishop allow that? Doesn't that make a mockery of the church? Do you know if there was any public outcry from parishioners or other Catholic organizations?
What is a lie? Was he saying all along that she wanted to be starved to death? If that was the case, why did he sue?
Because divorce is a sin, while Michael had apparently justified in his mind that she was already dead, so therefore he was not murdering her, and that the only reason he could not already remarry his new lover was because he lacked a death certificate, not because he still had a living wife. I don't see how else you can explain his actions.
Her long-term friends (before Michael) testified that she was very Catholic in her beliefs and wouldn't want to die.
What rubbish. She did not regulary assist at Mass as an adult, and clearly used birth control prior to her massive weight loss which ended her normal fertility cycles. Her parents are big liars and a total disgrace to the side of good in this fiasco, who expressed theological nonsense such as allowing her to die would "lead to the damnation of her soul". Nor were they devout Catholics. "Today, the Schindlers say they don't attend church as regularly as they once did." (http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:0lABcnrB2rwJ:www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/7104920.htm+%22Bob+and+Mary+Schindler%22+%22attend+Church%22&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=4) There is no devotion at all from those who think Mass is merely an option.
Michael and Jodi.
Thank you
Amen to your Entire Post, Dear Sara! Thank you for your Pings!
I do not. I have no idea. I'd love to know, as well, though.
I'm aware of that.
That is only because Michael refused to have the wheelchair she used to use fixed.
There are photos posted on other threads that show Terri up in her wheelchair. In fact, there was a film loop shown on news stations of Michael pushing Terri in her wheelchair in a park, pointing something out to her. In another, we see her in an outing to a mall where she'd gone to have her hair fixed.
All this changed after the malpractice trials, after he'd remembered that she "wouldn't want to live that way." At that point, he would get upset with nursing home staff for getting her up in the wheelchair and bringing her out into the halls -- though that is ordinary care that is done for any nursing home patient in that condition.
Not in a coma. Not asleep. Not on life support -- at least, not until the FL legislature (Jim King's legacy) changed FL law in 98 - 99 to make food and water to "extraordinary measures".
I bet you can figure it out on the very first guess. ;-)
Oh, and he's been living in that dandy house (gated community) for several years now, well before his last pay raise to $68,500. I saw it's appraisal a few years back, and back then it was worth ~$300K. Man, he must have won the lottery or stolen it from a bank or *something* to be able to live in that house with that paycheck!
My, my! Showing our ignorance of reality are we?
For your information, Terri came out from her coma approximately five weeks after her *collapse*. She already woke up! Maybe you just believed the earlier misnomers by the MSM that called her comatose. Just because they don't seem to understand the difference isn't any excuse for you. And you called other posters delusional and easily duped! Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!!
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.
Please, I know that you're on the same side as I am, but Terri was never brain-dead. This is a complete lie that the media kept repeating. Brain death is completely different from what was wrong with Terri, whether it was PVS or MCS. In a brain-dead person, the rest of the body HAS to be kept alive via machines. The heart won't beat, and the lungs won't move without machines and plugs. Terri had been off a heart machine and respirator just weeks after her initial hospitalization. The media has completely misled people about these terms. Whether it was intentional or not is another argument.
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.