A Life That Matters

by Terri's Family:

  “We were ushered into the kitchen of a demonstration house, empty except for a bunch of folding chairs set in a semicircle on the white tile floor. The governor arrived, along with two of his security men and Racquel ‘Rocky’ Rodriguez, his attorney, a short, no-nonsense woman I liked immediately. There were others in the room, but I never identified them. I was very, very nervous, and I started to shiver, though it was a warm, beautiful day.

  “We sat down and introduced ourselves. Dad shook the governor’s hand and immediately began to cry. He composed himself quickly, explaining that the tears were a sign of his desperation. We made small talk, then outlined the situation. It was very stiff and awkward. The governor seemed genuinely sympathetic, but he didn’t answer Dad’s question: ‘Is there anything you can do to save Terri?’

  “I didn’t say much at all in the beginning. In fact, I was getting restless. I thought, Here we have the governor of the state of Florida. Surely he’s in a powerful position. So I blurted, ‘Pardon me, Governor, but you have to know someone of your stature, someone who’s even more powerful than you are, who can help.’

  “A big smile came over his face. ‘You don’t mean someone in Washington that I might know?’

  “I had forgotten he was the president’s brother! It never occurred to me. I just thought, Come on, this guy’s got to know somebody. And then I realized what I said. I backtracked. ‘No, no. That’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean—’

  “By now, everybody was laughing, no one harder than Jeb Bush. The awkwardness was broken. In that moment, we were a team. Randall Terry stepped in. If I can find a way legally to save Terri, he asked, would the governor look at it? He said he would.

  “The meeting was over. The governor hugged me and hugged Dad. Dad said he had the utmost respect for Jeb’s father and his family, and tears welled up in the governor’s eyes. ‘So do I,’ he said. Dad said, ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,’ and started to cry again.

  “We tried to leave, but couldn’t because the doorway was blocked by a sea of cameras and reporters, not only those who had followed us from St. Petersburg but others from Orlando, which was also an hour’s drive away.

  “So we had to give a brief press conference before they let us go back to the car and, an hour later, to the hospice and the continuing fight.”

  The crowds were suffocating. Well-meaning strangers came up to us in the trailer to offer advice on how we could prolong Terri’s life after the feeding tube was removed. Women rushed up to me to ask how we were going to feed all the people outside.1 It was as though they wanted me to be the hostess at a cookout—and my daughter was dying.

  When I get upset, I can’t swallow, so I wasn’t eating. Food was the least of my concerns. “Listen,” I told one of the women who expressed concern about the food situation, “that’s not my problem. If those people want to be out there, they can feed themselves.” Not very gracious, I’m afraid.

  Lawyers would barge in, telling us to fire ours and hire them—that they knew how to overturn Greer’s order. Doctors arrived telling us what to look for in Terri’s condition after the tube was removed. “Check her heart rate.” “Check her skin.” “Check to see if her eyes are dilated.” A woman told Bobby he should visit Terri with his mouth full of water and transfer it to Terri through a kiss. After he had visited Terri, she approached him again to see if he had followed her suggestion. He told her he had. Not altogether truthful, I’m afraid.

  Police were lining the streets around the hospice and guarding the hospice doors. Red mesh fences were set up along the streets for crowd control. There were some protesters making a nuisance of themselves, squabbling with the police and demonstrating with foul words and in exhibitionist ways that made us blush. (Father Malanowski kept making the sign of the cross, a subtle gesture we found endearing.) Some of them volunteered to form a human barricade so we could sneak Terri away. We told them to leave, and they did, but overall, it was difficult to distinguish our true friends from the attention-seekers. I felt that too many people were tearing at my flesh, wanting a piece of me for their trophy cases.

  Suzanne recounted the family’s position:

  “For the most part, within reason, our attitude was, You know what? All we care about is saving Terri. That’s it. Sure the media were using us, but so what? If the interviews were a chance to save Terri, if these people had a chance to save Terri, then so be it. We definitely had a line we wouldn’t cross—everything else we used.”

  We did interviews all day long, not only with Christian radio stations but with secular stations across the country. We were handed microphones and cell phones virtually every minute and told to talk. “Interview this guy.” “Interview that guy.” Most of the time, we didn’t know whom we were speaking to. Bob and Bobby were the major spokesmen. I tried to stay clear, but there were dozens of times I couldn’t avoid them.

  Bob was getting phone calls day and night, not only in the trailer but at our home. Nobody seemed to care whether he slept or not. He got calls from Massachusetts and Illinois militias who announced they were armed and ready to march on the hospice. A group of Australian mercenaries announced they wanted to fly in to take Terri out of the hospice. Of course we told them not to come.

  On the fifteenth, the day Terri’s feeding tube was removed, people held up a huge banner that said, “Gov. Bush where are you?” They had “Starvation Day 1” printed on it, and they’d cross it off to say “Starvation Day 2” and “Starvation Day 3,” etc. It was on the news all the time.

  Pressure on Governor Bush came from another ally as well. On the fourteenth, when Pat Anderson told us our legal options were exhausted, Bob contacted the Gibbs Law Firm after hearing from several supporters that they might be able to help. Shortly thereafter, Bob and I got a call from an attorney at Gibbs, who asked if we could come to his office at ten that evening.

  We had mixed emotions about seeing a lawyer that late. We were bone-tired and would have preferred to stay in the trailer. Besides, we were not familiar with the Gibbs firm and couldn’t imagine what the attorney had in mind. Yet Bob thought about how reluctant he was to do the TV interview in 2001. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have found Cindi Shook and Terri would be dead. So at ten o’clock on the night before Terri’s tube was to come out, we drove over to the Gibbs offices in Seminole, not far from the hospice.

  “The room was surprisingly large with a full-width glass wall overlooking a garden of flowers and tropical plants,” Bob remembers. “In the center was a conference table that comfortably sat eight attorneys. In fact, there must have been sixteen, eighteen lawyers, some standing around the perimeter of the room. The meeting was led by David Gibbs and his father. They asked us to sit down and tell them everything we could about Terri’s case. For the next couple hours, we reviewed the case, answering questions along the way. By the time we finished, it was after midnight. Mary was out-and-out spent, and I was pretty darn tired myself. But the attorneys were bright-eyed and full of energy.

  “Unbeknownst to me—and I only found this out recently—they stopped doing all their other legal work and for a week concentrated on Terri’s case. Gibbs was doing this out of his own conviction and the goodness of his heart. They had contact with the legislators and wrote the initial legislative bill that was eventually presented to the Florida Legislature. And they were also trying to get the governor to act. They wrote him letters explaining how he could use his executive powers to get Terri’s feeding tube reinserted by taking her into his own custody.

  “And still Bush hesitated.”

  After Terri’s feeding tube had been removed, Michael’s other lawyer, Deborah Bushnell, told us we couldn’t go into Terri’s room unless we were escorted by one of his representatives, and the police were on hand to make sure we didn’t disobey.

  One day when I went in—this was after the tube had been taken out and Terri was starving to death—Jodi Centonze’s mother was sitting there knitting. The mother of Michael’s fiancé
e knitting! Another time, Centonze’s sister was there, reading a magazine. They were so casual, cavalier, waiting for Terri to die. They ignored me. It was the coldest, most unfeeling behavior I’d ever seen.

  CHAPTER 17

  Another Reprieve

  Even after Terri’s feeding tube had been removed, I knew in my heart that something good was going to happen. And I kept saying every day when I woke up, “Today’s the day Terri’s going to have her feeding tube reinserted.” I just kept praying and praying and praying and telling God, “They can’t let her die. She doesn’t deserve to die. She just needs help because she’s handicapped. They can’t starve her to death.” This is insanity, I wanted to scream.

  What I saw was appalling. Even after they had removed Terri’s tube, they were trying to hurry her death. When I would go to the hospice at night to visit her, before I went back to the trailer, she would be lying on her bed dressed in corduroy pants and a turtleneck sweater, blankets up to her neck. And it was hot—hot!—and her sweat would be dripping off her.

  Don’t forget. She was given no water, no hydration, and whatever water was in her they were sweating out of her. I would pull down the blanket, and I’d be screaming, “Put her in a nightgown!” It happened three nights in a row, the same thing.

  The police in the room? They were there not to protect her, but to make sure we didn’t help her, even though she was sweating and miserable, and human decency should have been enough to ease her suffering. After a few days, Terri’s lips became chapped and dry, and I tried to put some Vaseline on them. I don’t remember which member of Jodi Centonze’s family was there, but I remember a policeman. He came flying across the room and stopped me. Stopped me from putting salve on my daughter’s cracked lips.

  The effect on my family was devastating.

  “I would go to bed at night,” Bobby says, “either in the trailer or at home, and sleep for a few hours. I’d just pass out, exhausted. There would be times I’d break down, crying. And when I woke up in the morning, I didn’t want any noise. No talking, no radio on—only silence. When I was getting ready to go to the hospice, I felt like I was getting dressed in slow motion. It was a weird, surreal feeling. You got up at five, six, after two or three hours’ sleep, and your head felt like it was going to explode. Your body felt like it had been in a boxing match with Tyson, and you had so much on your mind you couldn’t think straight. You weren’t doing anything, but the emotional drain seemed to slow everything down, and the smallest thing—shaving, pouring a glass of water, even walking—was an effort. But you had to run the gauntlet, face the press, do the radio interviews, go through the guards at the hospice to get to Terri, and so you forced yourself to go on. Every day, go on.”

  “I tried to get back to some sense of normalcy when I got home,” Suzanne says. “I had my ten-year-old with me. I helped her with her homework. I made sure she took her shower and brushed her teeth and went to bed on time. My husband, Michael, was there for me. The phone was ringing every minute, but I didn’t answer. Of course I was thinking about Terri, about Mom and Dad, about all those people trying to help, I found it difficult to sleep. When I got up in the morning and showered and took Alex to school, everything still felt normal. Even driving to the hospice was fine. Everybody along the way was going about their business normally. But as soon as I made a left onto that road in front of the hospice and I saw the gazillion media trucks and the hundreds of people, I felt like I was hit by a ton of bricks. It was like driving into this other world, a freak world, a world I lived in until I got back home. And then I was fine.

  “I started having physical problems. I was having chest pains and couldn’t breathe. I actually drove myself to the hospital, and I was in the ER for several hours. They took all sorts of tests, but—no surprise—the cause was anxiety.

  “When I was little, I was afraid of airplanes, afraid to fly, and we flew a lot. I’d look at Dad and say, ‘Dad, I’m scared.’ He’d answer, ‘Listen, I promise I’ll tell you when you need to worry.’ And I’d say, ‘Are you scared?’ And again he’d say, ‘No. I’ll let you know when I’m scared.’

  “He never did say to me, ‘Now’s the time,’ but looking at him during these days, I knew he was worried and he was scared. But during those times, he was stronger than he was afterwards. He was a rock.”

  “What was worst for me,” Bobby says, “was seeing my parents having to watch their daughter. Of course your own heart is breaking for Terri. But every time my mom went to visit her, she would come out in tears. It ripped my heart out. I was enraged that I couldn’t do anything to help and that they were doing this to her. And then seeing my dad so upset that Mom was upset, it was unbearable. Unbearable! And extremely, extremely stressful. The stress never let up.”

  It was terrible for Bob, too:

  “Mary and I used to leave Terri’s room. After those visits, she could barely walk. And the media was outside, with all those cameras lined up, waiting for us to come out the front door of the hospice. So I would help her sit down just outside the entrance—there was a little bench that was behind a column and we couldn’t be seen. And we’d sit there and she’d cry.

  “She’d sit there bawling and saying, ‘I don’t know if I can do this anymore. I can’t handle this anymore,’—watching Terri die like that. And we’d stay there for maybe five minutes, until she got her strength back. Then we’d get up and have to fight our way back through the media, who were asking all kinds of questions like, ‘Well, what did Terri look like?’ and ‘Is she dead yet?’ I mean, we’d be bombarded with these unbelievable questions, until I’d get her through the media and back to the trailer, her comfort zone, where for the moment she was able to breathe.”

  With Terri, I’d break down. Otherwise, I tried to be calm. Suzanne was having these stress symptoms, Bobby was frantic—frantic and angry—and Bob was in torment. I felt that it was my job to take care of the rest of my family, to be strong for them. I wanted them to come to me if they needed help, and that I would be able to give it to them.

  My brother, Michael “Mikey” Tammaro, came down from Corning, and he was the one who took care of me. Really, without family, not one of us could have gotten through that time.

  And every night and every morning that Terri was starving and dying of thirst, I continued to pray. And I believe God heard me.

  One of David Gibbs’s attorneys, Matt Davis, drafted a bill in the hopes that the Florida State Legislature would pass it and that Jeb Bush would sign it, but there was no telling if the Legislature would even consider it.

  Bobby, who’d been lobbying for Terri in Tallahassee, was closest to the situation. He, too, feels that God was listening.

  “In the middle of all this chaos in and around the trailer,” he remembers, “the week that Terri was getting starved to death, we heard that there was already a special session of the Legislature scheduled. It was divine intervention. If the legislators hadn’t been in town, Terri would have died the next week.

  “I had gone to Tallahassee a couple of days prior to Terri’s feeding tube being removed. And I met with a friend of mine up there, Victoria Zepp—she knows the governor, and she’s involved in a lot of political activity.

  “I asked her, ‘Vic, is there anything our family can do right now to save Terri?’ And she says, ‘Bobby, I’m going to be honest with you. It’s over. There’s nothing you can do.’ I believed her. I despaired.

  “But now we’re hearing about this special session, and we knew what Gibbs and Davis were trying to do, and we heard news that the Florida Legislature’s thinking of bringing up a bill about Terri. The e-mails, phone calls and faxes were working. The voice of the people was being heard.

  “On the night of October 20, 2003, the Senate began debating the bill passed by the House.”

  “We were in the parking lot, watching the debate on the government’s Web site,” Suzanne says. “Each of the senators was coming up to give their opinion. Some were arguing for the bill, some were a
rguing against us. ‘Oh, no!’ we’d say. ‘Oh, it’s horrible!’ And the next senator would argue for us, and we’d shake our fists and give each other high fives and shout, ‘Yes!’ The debate went on past midnight. After a while, realization dawned. ‘My God! It’s really going to happen!’

  “When the bill passed, I remember we all started to cry and we hugged each other. The crowd erupted in cheers. The media was all around us and the lights blazed and the crowd was cheering. Everybody erupted. It was like winning the Super Bowl, only much better.

  “Several hours later, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement came. That was an incredible sight. After she had gone almost one week without food or water, they were taking Terri to Morton Plant to have the feeding tube reinserted. We saw the ambulance carrying Terri driving off with this police escort.

  “I thought at that point we were done. Jeb Bush called Dad to congratulate him. The case was over. We had won. Our Terri would be allowed to live.”

  We thought the feeding tube would be put back in immediately, and we planned to go to Morton Plant to see Terri as soon as the procedure was over. Governor Bush signed the bill named “Terri’s Law” and issued an executive order restoring Terri’s nutrition and hydration. But we hadn’t reckoned with Felos, who immediately sued Governor Bush arguing that the bill was unconstitutional. Judge Douglas Baird, of the Sixth Circuit Judicial Court, denied the motion.

  Despite Baird’s ruling, Felos had beaten us to the hospital and told the doctors there that anyone who participated in reinserting Terri’s feeding tube would be sued. One of Gibbs’s associates, Rex Sparklin, was at the hospital, too, and he called Dr. Jay Carpenter, who used to be the chief of staff at Morton Plant, and they told the doctors that if they didn’t reinsert the tube, not only would they be sued, but they would be criminally charged for disobeying the law.