A Life That Matters

by Terri's Family:

  “Felos gave a press conference,” Bobby says. “One of the first things the press asked him was, ‘Why did you throw the family out of the room before Terri died?’ And Felos says, ‘Because Bobby Schindler started a disturbance inside the room and had to be forcibly taken out.’ It wasn’t true: I’d been outside the room. I had made a fuss because they kicked us out!

  “Then Felos starts describing Terri’s death—Michael supposedly at her side, cradling her with stuffed animals. ‘It was a peaceful, beautiful time,’ he said, mimicking the CBS obituary issued two days earlier. Father Pavone, who was furious, gave his own press conference, contradicting everything Felos said.

  “And Suzy called Mom and Dad to tell them Terri had died.”

  That was the end. The beginning was fifteen years earlier.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Collapse

  The phone call woke us. I watched my husband, Bob, stumble to the living room of our small condo, a matter of fifteen steps, where he picked up the receiver. It was around 5:30 a.m., February 25, 1990. Calls at that hour could only mean bad news.

  “Dad, it’s Michael,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “There’s trouble. Terri’s passed out. She’s unconscious. I can’t wake her up.”

  “Call 911,” Bob shouted, and slammed down the phone.1

  “There’s a problem with Terri,” he said, coming back to the bedroom. We decided to call our son, Bobby, right away. Bobby, aged twenty-five, lived in the same apartment complex as Terri and Michael, whose address was 12001 4th Street North, in St. Petersburg. Bob went back to the phone. “Something’s happened to Terri,” he whispered to Bobby, barely able to get out the words. “Michael called and said he can’t wake her up. You ought to get over there right away. Check it out and call me back.”

  Numb, too shocked to feel pain, Bob returned to the bedroom again. He has always had high blood pressure, and I was watching him with anxious eyes, close to panic over him and over Terri, yet half sure that nothing really bad had happened to our daughter. We had just had dinner with her that evening. Had gone to Mass with her that afternoon. None of us realized how ominous the news was. There was nothing for us to do for the moment except get dressed and wait for Bobby’s report.

  Over the years, Bobby never told us fully what happened when he entered Terri and Michael’s apartment. The memories were too vivid, his pain too great. But now, in tears, courageous, he told the story:

  “The apartment was only two hundred yards away, but I figured it would be faster by car. So I threw on some jeans and a T-shirt, drove over, got out, and went to the third floor. Michael answered the door. I went in. Terri was lying face down in the corridor between the bathroom and the living room.

  “I remember it like it was only hours ago. Her torso was on top of her arms with her hands up by her neck. I could see half the side of her face, and she was having trouble breathing, like almost a gurgling sound. I leaned down and shook her shoulders and said, ‘Terri, get up. Get up.’ There was no response. And it was at that moment that the paramedics knocked on the door.

  “Michael let them in, and actually I think he was behind me when I shook Terri’s shoulder, or to my side. At first, I wasn’t overly concerned. I’d seen Terri just a few hours earlier in my apartment. She was perfectly fine. I asked her to go out with me and my roommate, Craig Hicken, that night, and she said she didn’t want to because she had been fighting with Michael earlier that day and she was going to wait for him to come home. So I said okay, and I remember she ironed my pants.

  “So I wasn’t really concerned. I thought she had just passed out. But when the paramedics got there—as soon as they went down and assessed her condition . . . I mean, I knew it was serious. That’s when I became frantic.

  “They didn’t say much. The only thing I remember, they wanted to know if there were drugs. They were really hitting us hard about drugs. ‘Does your wife do drugs?’ ‘Does your sister do drugs?’ In fact, one of the paramedics got in my face and said, ‘Look, if you don’t tell us that she was doing drugs, you know we’re going to hold you responsible.’ I think they even threatened criminal charges against me. And I knew my sister. I never knew Terri ever doing drugs. I mean, she would drink—socially drink when we went out. But never drugs. And I was adamant. ‘No. She doesn’t do drugs.’

  “I remember the paramedics being young. I remember them hitting Terri with the defibrillators a number of times. I remember I called my dad. I went into the living room and called my dad. And didn’t know what to tell him, except that she would be taken to Humana Northside Hospital. I said it was serious, but they didn’t know what was wrong with her. My dad kept asking me over and over again, ‘What do you think is wrong?’ And I didn’t know. I didn’t know what was wrong. And we just waited. And they were working on her for upwards of a half hour.

  “In that time frame, the police arrived, and firemen, and more paramedics. They finally got Terri stabilized enough to put her on a bed, one of those rolling beds. I remember them taking Terri out, and I remember looking at the floor. I couldn’t believe all the stuff that was on the floor—trash that they were using. You know, something they injected her with, stuff they were using on her. There was just trash everywhere. Needles everywhere. So I knew there was something seriously wrong, terribly wrong, because they were injecting her with things, I guess to try to get her heart started.

  “I walked downstairs. Someone was left behind—I don’t know if it was a paramedic or policeman or firefighter. I said to him, ‘What’s going on? What’s wrong with my sister?’ And I remember him saying, ‘If she makes it to the hospital alive, it’ll be a miracle.’

  “Michael got in the ambulance with Terri. I said, ‘Michael, I’ll be there shortly.’

  “I was hysterical. I drove home, hands shaking. I called my girlfriend at the time, Julie White, to come and get me—I could barely drive, I told her. I walked in the door of my apartment and I fell to my knees and I just started crying. I woke Craig up. He was half asleep, didn’t know what was going on. I told him what had happened, and Julie got there a short time after, and then we drove to the hospital.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Hospital

  When Bobby called, he hadn’t told us how serious Terri’s condition was. He simply said that they were taking her to Humana, and we were left to guess the rest. Our guesses were grim.

  Bob and I had just seen her a few hours before. She was fine. We had dinner with her. She got in her car. She went home. We couldn’t imagine what could be wrong with her. I felt confused and frightened. It seemed unreal. This can’t be happening, I thought.

  Bob’s memory of that morning is strong. “We drove to the hospital. The hospital is probably a twenty-minute drive from where we live, but it felt like ten hours. It was getting light outside. But on the way up, I vividly remember seeing lights in a would-be shopping center that were brighter than the other lights. And it was strange to me that they stood out with all the night city lights or streetlights; that this cluster of lights was more illuminated.”

  When we got to the hospital, we went to the emergency room and asked about Terri. Nobody answered. Someone—a nurse or orderly—ushered us into a waiting room, and then a doctor came in. Dr. Samir Shah. He couldn’t tell us much, only that Terri was fighting for her life. Bobby arrived, shouting, “Is she dead? Is she dead?” and I said, “No. Settle down.”

  But of course none of us could settle down. The words “She’s fighting for her life” had blown us away. Bobby told us that they had to use “paddles” on Terri, and he may have said something about the paramedics and police. It was hard to listen. The words didn’t penetrate. I don’t remember whether Michael was with us—he may have been with Terri—but all we could do was wait. Dr. Shah told us that Terri had been taken from the ER to the intensive-care unit and that until they knew more about her condition, we wouldn’t be allowed to see her. Imagine! Not allowed to see our daughter.

  Dr. Shah left
; we were alone in the waiting room; we had no information. In the years to come, we would have many frustrations with hospitals and their staffs, but this was the worst—and it was nobody’s fault. Nobody had any information. Nobody knew what was going to happen to Terri.

  Around eight in the morning, I called Suzanne, who was at the University of Central Florida, and told her to come to Humana Northside. I didn’t want to go into details for fear Suzanne would drive like a maniac to get there, and UCF was about two hours away. “Please just take your time,” I pleaded. “Terri’s alive. She’s okay.” (Of course, as I suspected she would, Suzanne sped to the hospital, making the drive in an hour and a half.) Both Bob and I felt the same way: we were anxious for her to get there, but we dreaded telling her about her sister’s condition.

  Many hours later, we were allowed to see Terri in the ICU. The sight was wrenching, almost unbearable. She was on a respirator. She had an IV in her arm. She had a tube coming out of her shoulder—it was for her heart. She had something going in her nose. She had tubes in her mouth. Her skin was ashen, her eyes were closed. To Bob, it was almost inconceivable that his daughter would live. But I had faith. She’ll be all right. She’ll get through this. My daughter will not be taken away.

  Bobby didn’t want to go in at all. “I didn’t want to see her until I knew for sure she was going to live,” he told us. “And we didn’t know. That’s why I was scared to see her.”

  Suzanne, whose arrival provided a bit of solace, was in shock. “I couldn’t imagine what had happened to Terri,” she says. “She was fine last I’d heard. But when I got to the hospital, I was in a panic, scared to death. Especially seeing my family’s faces and the fear in their eyes.”

  Then came the frustrating wait for a doctor to bring us news. Every time we’d hear “Code Blue, Code Blue” over the loudspeaker, we’d all jump out of our seats and rush to the ICU, jamming together in the doorway like the Four Stooges, to be told that Terri was all right, that it was a different patient in trouble. But the shock of those announcements was nightmarish; I still cringe when there’s an announcement of any kind over a public address system.

  Throughout the morning and the next few days, people came to keep us company and to lend support. Michael’s parents lived in Pennsylvania and came down as soon as they could, along with one of his brothers. Otherwise, the visitors were all friends of ours or members of our extended family. I called Muriel Wextrom, Terri’s friend at Prudential, and all Terri’s friends from work came in a steady stream: Jackie Rhodes, who was Terri’s best friend, and Leuretha Gibbons, her supervisor, and Fran and Sherry and Judy and Roger. Chris Adams, Bob’s second cousin, came every day, even though he and Bob had met only once or twice previously. Chris’s mother had died suddenly, and Terri’s misfortune hit him in the heart. He was a driver for Roadway who’d go home, get up, go to work, and come back to the hospital. All of a sudden, he was family, and true to the unspoken code of the family: every time there was a crisis, every relative would offer support.

  Bob’s niece, Kathy Brown, came down from Pennsylvania. Her father and Bob’s brother, Fred Schindler, had been in a coma after a car accident several years earlier and, contrary to his doctor’s negative prognosis, had progressed remarkably after undergoing months of rehabilitation, to the point where he was able to live on his own. Kathy was a nurse and had a lot of knowledge from working with patients in Terri’s condition. “Don’t listen to what the doctors say, because they’re going to paint the worst scenario possible,” she said. “There is a good chance, if she makes it through these early days, we can get her better. We can give her rehabilitation and we can get her better.” Terri’s doctors were in fact somber and discouraging, doubtful that Terri would ever come out of her coma, but Kathy’s words gave us hope, and we clung to them.

  At one point, Bob and Suzanne went together to the hospital chapel. They knelt in prayer. Bob told his younger daughter, “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be okay. If she can just hang on and get through the crisis, everything’s going to be fine, we’ll get her fixed.” And he believed it. After all, he’d seen his brother’s recovery.

  We went home to change after the second day, then returned to the hospital. Bob stayed through the first week, at one time finding himself in the hospital morgue at 3:00 a.m., having lost his way in a search for a cup of coffee—“eerie and creepy,” he described it. I stayed through the second week. I slept in the waiting area on chairs that were pushed together to make beds. Bobby went back to work but came every night. After a few days, we tried to persuade Suzanne to go back to school, promising to call her if there was any change in Terri’s condition. But she stayed for at least a week, until Terri was out of immediate danger.

  Before Suzanne left, there was a change—for the worse. Terri developed a staph infection and had to be put in isolation. Now only her immediate family—the four of us and Michael and his mom and dad—were allowed to see her, and we’d have to put on robes and masks before we went in. This crisis passed, but it was only after two weeks that the doctors told us they were pretty sure that Terri would live—in what state, though, they could not say.

  Elation mixed with sadness. We had our girl with us, and if by nothing else than force of will, we would get her better. Perhaps for the first time since Terri collapsed, we allowed ourselves to remember her as she had been.

  CHAPTER 3

  Terri

  Terri was enchanting—warm and mischievous. She loved her family, both immediate and extended, and her close friends, and she was loved in return. Bob’s mother Catherine Schindler adored Terri, showering her with affection, and she was particularly close to her maternal grandparents, whose home she visited over many summers. My father, Michael Tammaro, whom the kids called “Pepa,” was typically Italian, kind, loving, generous to a fault. We learned never to ask him for things because he would rush to provide them. My mother, Cecilia, or “Mema,” stout and stouthearted, shared his kindness. Cooking was her specialty. Terri once said there was no better food in the world.

  When Pepa passed away, Terri wept so long and so hard Bobby remembers that he fled the house. “I had to leave because she was crying so much,” he told me. “She was devastated. I remember sitting on the front porch and I closed the door and I could still hear her crying. And I had to walk out to the street to get away from her crying because I couldn’t—because I knew, you see, how she felt.”

  When the family dog, Bucky, died in Terri’s arms, it was almost as terrible. (She had once given him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.) Her heart was pure and her selflessness legendary. Everyone else came first, whether from sharing food at the dinner table, doing chores, or caring for her beloved grandmother, her Mema, after Pepa died. Terri visited her countless times at the nursing home in St. Petersburg where we’d brought her when Mema was unable to live on her own.

  Terri used to visit her five, six days a week. And she’d get on Bobby all the time about going more. I had done volunteer work at the nursing home when my mother was there in order to be with her. It made me sad to see her so unhappy, but if Terri shared my feelings, she never complained about going.

  Bobby remembers: “Telling Mema about Terri’s collapse was the hardest thing we ever had to do. She was having health problems and her mind wasn’t clear, so I don’t know if she understood everything we said, but she cried and cried.”

  I remember how beautiful Terri was as a baby. Whenever we would go, strangers would stop to look at her, complimenting us on her beauty.

  Maybe Terri was so dear because her start in life was tough.

  She was a colicky baby; it seemed she was always throwing up. She was a terrible sleeper, waking fretful and screaming. I think of how frightened I was, even when Terri only had a slight fever and her face would get beet red. She was my first baby and I didn’t know what was wrong. I’d call Bob’s mom and go through the litany of symptoms. She would always try to put my mind at ease, but nevertheless, I’d be at the pediatricia
n’s office as soon as the doors opened. Neither Bob nor I remember getting any sleep for three months after she was born. It got so bad we sent an SOS to my mother, who came and babysat for a weekend while we disappeared to a motel just so we could get some sleep. Then, just when we finally got her settled down, along came Bobby, whose cries woke Terri up, and our sleep deprivation started all over again.

  One eye used to roll to the center, giving Terri a clownish look, and only at age two, when we got her glasses, did her gaze become normal. One of her eyes wouldn’t tear, and a doctor recommended surgery, but another said, “All you have to do is massage the eye and eventually it’ll open up.” We massaged it and put warm compresses on it, and finally her tear duct opened and she was fine.

  Bobby was born thirteen months after Terri. As soon as he could crawl, Terri crawled after him like an obedient puppy, though she was able to walk by the time she was fifteen months old. She adored him from the start and followed him everywhere. Once, when she was two, our friend Jimmy brought his son over, and Bobby wanted one of his toys. The boy wouldn’t give it to him, so Terri grabbed the toy and gave it to Bobby. They were like that in their adult lives, too, each fighting for the other.

  Terri moved at her own pace. Unlike our other kids, she was very hard to toilet train. As far as she was concerned, she could have worn the same soiled diaper for the rest of her life. Even her teeth were slow in coming, and her second set came in crooked. A first-rate orthodontist straightened them with braces, which she wore throughout her early adolescence, and when the braces came off, her smile could have been used in a toothpaste ad. She took good care of her teeth from that point on, which made it all the sadder when, in hospice, they began decaying in her mouth.

  Bob was working for Day & Zimmerman, a firm of consulting engineers. (He was soon assigned to work with the Corning glass company in Corning, New York, which was where he met me.) His job required frequent moves, and Terri was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in December 1963. When Bob’s work took him to upstate New York, we lived briefly in my parents’ house in Corning, then came back to a house we had bought after Terri’s birth on Bloomfield Avenue in Philadelphia. That’s where Bobby was born.