For Terri

I don’t have a living will — and, if you’re like most college students, I bet that you don’t, either.

There should be no better inspiration for each and every one of us to get one, however, than the woman at the heart of a story that took America on a political and emotional rollercoaster ride about this time two years ago.

That story, of course, is the Terri Schiavo story, and Terri’s brother — Bobby Schindler — came to campus yesterday to tell it.

Terri’s is a tale that I have long thought to be so tragic for so many reasons. Before passing away in a Florida hospice on March 31, 2005, Terri would transform from a beloved wife and daughter into a polarizing figure caught in the middle of a very bloody battle of beliefs that would end up ripping both a family and a nation apart.Sun Podcast: A podcast is available for this column. Click here [1] to listen to or to download it.

The blame for that, however, lies not with Terri, but with all of us; the fact that the events surrounding her played out as they did, in other words, is not a reflection of her character, but of our own.

She had no control over those events. We did.

In the early morning hours of Feb. 25, 1990, Theresa Marie Schiavo had a heart attack. She collapsed in her home, going into respiratory and cardiac arrest. Paramedics soon arrived and tried to resuscitate her, defibrillating her repeatedly in a series of attempts to get her to begin breathing again. They were unsuccessful. All totaled, Terri would go without oxygen for several minutes until the ambulance carrying her reached a nearby hospital where doctors were finally able to get her to a ventilator.

Because of this experience, the wife of Michael Schiavo and daughter of Robert and Mary Schindler was left with an irreversible brain injury. She could perform only the most basic of human functions, required the use of a feeding tube to live, and, years later, an autopsy would show that the incident had even left Terri blind. Thus, four months after her nearly fatal collapse, Michael would take on a new role as Terri’s legal guardian, and Terri would move from one healthcare facility to another.

For the next couple years, Michael and his in-laws had a very cordial relationship. Their shared tragedy, far from breaking them apart, had actually succeeded in bringing them closer together. Michael took advantage of their offer to live with them rent-free, and they, in turn, encouraged him to move on with his life and begin dating other women. This he did, but not without expressing his continued devotion to Terri.

“I believe in the vows I took with my wife,” Michael said at the time, “through sickness and health, for richer or poor[er]. I married my wife because I love her and I want to spend the rest of my life with her. I'm going to do that.”

To signal that he meant what he said, he began studying nursing and would later receive a degree in it, a step he claimed to have taken in the hopes of one day being able to bring Terri home to care for her.

As the years went by, however, Michael felt more and more that the woman he married had already left him, and that no amount of care could bring her back — that she, as he would later have inscribed on her gravestone, had “departed this earth” in 1990 and would then be forced to wait 15 years to be “at peace.” For Michael, granting Terri that peace meant letting nature take its course by withdrawing her life support.

To be sure, this is where things got messy. Terri’s parents asserted that what their son-in-law wanted for their daughter was a far cry from what she would have wanted for herself; Michael shot back just the opposite, saying that his wife had made him promise never to keep her alive on a machine. They debated everything, from whether or not Terri was truly in a persistent vegetative state as the courts had concluded, to whether or not Michael was actually telling the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about her wishes. The Schindlers held that, as a Roman Catholic, Terri simply would not have asked her husband to make the promise Michael described.

Because Terri did not have a living will, it was impossible for anyone to know for sure what she would have wanted. But that didn’t stop a plethora of both pundits and politicians from having their say about it.

Michael Schiavo, many screamed, was out to kill his wife — and so, for some reason, were the judges that sided with him. Not even Judge George Greer, a staunch Republican and an even stauncher Southern Baptist, was spared; his rulings in favor of allowing Terri’s feeding tube to be removed garnered him nasty threats and even nastier comparisons.

“Are you related to [Josef] Mengele, or just a student?” the St. Petersburg Times reported one man asking Greer.

I have alluded many times in this column to the fact that I am a proud and dedicated pro-lifer. I believe, for instance, that abortion is nothing short of a violation of the very natural laws on which this country was founded. I see no reason why the first inalienable right with which our Creator endowed us — according, that is, to Thomas Jefferson and John Locke before him — should not extend to the unborn.

The question of Terri Schiavo is not as cut-and-dry. I am, however, more than certain of at least one thing: the invective which individuals on different sides of the case hurled at one another was unbecoming both of her memory and the ideals of the country she called home.

I say with every ounce of honesty I can muster that I empathize with both Michael Schiavo and the Schindler family.

I fully believe in erring on the side of life; I mourn for Terri along with her parents and her siblings. But I also believe that the bond between a husband and wife is one that goes beyond judges, diamonds and taxes — and that, if I made the same promise Michael says he made to the woman for whom he pledged his love under God, I would have fought just as hard and just as unapologetically.

The moral of this story is, in my opinion, a very simple one: the biggest honor we could pay Terri is making sure that we take every step in our own lives, beginning with writing up a living will, to ensure that a tale like hers will never have to be told again.

Mark Coombs is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at mpc39@cornell.edu. If You Can Keep It appears Thursdays.