Free A Life That Matters by Terri's Family:, Robert Schindler Page A

became my daughter again—injured, God knows, but warm and sweet and precious. Alive to me, as I was to her.
    We speak of the years 1994 to 2000 as the “lull” in Terri’s case, the time from her transfer to Palm Gardens to Michael’s suit to
have her feeding tube removed. Our days routinely included visits
to Terri, but we went to work, shared dinners and phone calls, and tried to remind ourselves that there were other aspects to our daily lives.
    Still, neither side was inactive.
    Michael certainly wasn’t inactive in his personal life. Terri’s girlhood friend Sue Kolb, now married and living in Pennsylvania, called me in July 1997.
    “Did you see the obituary?” she asked.
    “What obituary?”
    “Michael’s mother died.”
    “I’m sorry to hear it.” I was. I’d always liked Claire, though I hadn’t spoken to her since the rift between us and Michael.
    “You know how in obituaries they always mention the siblings?”
    “Of course.”
    “Well, this one says, ‘survived by Michael Schiavo and his fiancée, Jodi Centonze.’”
    I was appalled. Not only did the obituary not mention Terri, to whom Michael was still legally married, 5 but now he had a “fiancée.” It made me sick at my stomach. We’d heard that Michael was living with another woman, and it made me sick. But to announce in the newspaper that he was going to marry her? That was too much.
    All I could think of was how happy Terri was on her wedding day. Then I remembered Michael’s using his wedding vows to make an impression on the medical malpractice jury. How hurt Terri would have been if she had known!
    Michael’s handlers were busy on the legal front as well.
    On August 23, 1997, we got a letter from a lawyer named George Felos announcing that the “court in your daughter’s guardianship” had employed him “in the issue of withdrawal and/or refusal of medical treatment for your daughter.” Felos quickly became Michael’s champion. It is un-Christian not to love him, but I cannot do so. Felos might have been following Michael’s wishes during the ensuing years when he argued for him, protected him, schemed for him, twisted truth for him. But we believe that it was Felos’s strategy, not Michael’s, that dictated the course that led to the death of my daughter. Maybe he had a political agenda—to become a spokesman for the euthanasia movement—and used Michael as his willing tool.
    In 1995, some two years
before
he sent us the letter, Felos and Michael’s guardianship lawyer, Deborah Bushnell, began to work out a legal strategy, almost surely for the removal of Terri’s feeding tube. We know this because a court document (Bushnell’s accounting of her costs) records at least one call between the two of them “
re
assistance with the analysis of life-prolonging procedures.”
    Ignorant of the Bushnell-Felos conversations, which might have superseded all other issues, we hired an attorney named Alan Grossman to argue to the courts that we should be able to obtain Terri’s medical records, which had been cut off to us since 1993.
It took him several months, but he finally prevailed, and the
court granted us access to the medical information, though not to Terri’s finances. That was the deal: medical records, yes; financial records, no.
    It did us no good. I went to Palm Gardens armed with the court order and asked for the records. “I’m sorry,” they said. “We can’t release them without Mr. Schiavo’s permission, and Mr. Schiavo says you cannot have any medical information.”
    I brandished the paper. “But I have a court order—”
    They were implacable. “Sorry.”
    Bob called Grossman. “They’re not honoring the order,” he told the lawyer.
    “That’s terrible!” he said. “We’ll have to file a suit and set up a hearing.”
    “A suit? A hearing? How much time would it take? How much would it cost?”
    Grossman named a figure. I forget the exact amount, but we couldn’t afford it.