Beloved Wife and Daughter Became Face of a Public Debate

Michael Schiavo, visiting his wife in 1990, won part of a settlement in a medical malpractice suit. He petitioned in 1998 to have her feeding tube removed. (Joe Walles -- St. Petersburg Times)

Terri Schiavo celebrated her last ray of sunshine in 1990. She loved the Florida sun so much that she spent her days off lying by the pool with a glass of iced tea and a radio. She was a clerk for Prudential Life Insurance and drove a Toyota Celica. Then early one morning when she was 26, she collapsed in the hallway of her St. Petersburg apartment. Her husband, Michael, called 911, but she went without oxygen for several minutes and never regained consciousness.

For the next 15 years, home was a bed with rails. Beyond her room, courts battled over her life, Congress and the president intervened and protesters rallied, all in an operatic climax that gripped the nation in the final days of her life.

"Persistent vegetative state" is how she was often described in medical reports. She could breathe, sleep, arch her eyebrows and even smile. Her brown eyes would scan her room. She opened and closed her mouth. She turned her head. Contractions caused her fists to ball up so hard that nurses put padding on her hands.

Her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, played music in hopes of stimulating a response. The staff was instructed to leave the TV on at night because the sound might stop her from moaning. Stuffed animals were perched on the window ledges.

Schiavo lived in at least five facilities, most of them in Pinellas County on the west coast of central Florida. At Palm Gardens in Largo, Schiavo's room faced a retention pond. At Hospice House Woodside in Pinellas Park, the lobby had plastic plants and green carpet like a budget hotel, but the homey touches gave way to polished corridors and a nurse's station. At one facility, Schiavo shared a room with a woman who barely survived a car accident.

She was usually one of the youngest residents. The places were nice, but they were always the same. "People moaning and just sitting in the hallway in wheelchairs," her friend Jackie Rhodes said. "It was very depressing."

Her family would visit often. Her husband took her laundry home. He dabbed her with perfume and played audiotapes of family members' voices through headphones. Her parents sang her songs. All three tended to Schiavo with devotion. In a 38-page report prepared in 2003 by Jay Wolfson, Schiavo's court-appointed guardian, he wrote, "It is notable that through more than thirteen years after Theresa's collapse, she has never had a bedsore."

But bitterness descended, and the family that brought her new blouses or placed a barrette in her hair became divided. In 1993, the Schindlers tried to have Michael Schiavo removed as the legal guardian, but a judge ruled against them. In 1998, Michael Schiavo filed the first legal petition to remove his wife's feeding tube. The Schindlers accused him of wanting to end their daughter's life so he could keep the money she was awarded in a medical malpractice suit.

Throughout the legal battle that ensued, Schiavo was always in the middle. Back and forth she went to the hospital, multiple times, to have her feeding tube removed and then reinserted when the courts or Gov. Jeb Bush (R) intervened.

The irony was that food had been a central tension in Schiavo's life before her collapse.

She grew up in suburban Philadelphia, the oldest of three children in a middle-class Catholic family. Her father owned an industrial equipment company, and her mother, a homemaker, attended Mass on Saturday evening. As a girl, Schiavo was chubby and hated clothes-shopping. Her junior year at a Catholic high school, she was 5-foot-3 and weighed more than 200 pounds. She liked dreamy TV stars and wrote them fan letters. She did not attend her prom. She signed up with NutriSystem her senior year and lost more than 50 pounds.

At Bucks County Community College, she caught the eye of Michael Schiavo, who was tall, blond and handsome. One of five brothers from an athletic family from nearby Levittown, he was Schiavo's first boyfriend. They were engaged after six months. The bride was 20. Years later, he would tell CNN: "She had this presence, this aura, that just attracted you. She was shy and outgoing at the same time."

When the couple moved to St. Petersburg in 1986, Schiavo became thinner still. She went from brunet to blond and started wearing a bikini. She drank between 10 and 15 glasses of iced tea a day to lose weight. When she visited relatives in Pennsylvania, someone noticed her large plate of food. She boasted that she had a good metabolism. She weighed 110. She had begun seeing a fertility specialist about her inability to conceive.

No one ever proved that Schiavo suffered from bulimia, the practice of eating and then purging. Her parents have said they do not think their daughter had an eating disorder, and for the longest time Michael Schiavo simply said his wife had strange food habits. In 1992, two years after Schiavo's collapse, the couple won a $6.8 million medical malpractice suit after a jury found that Schiavo had been the victim of substandard medical care that led, in part, to her coma. The jury reduced the verdict to $2 million after also finding Schiavo partly at fault. Legal fees and other expenses left Schiavo with $640,000 and her husband about $360,000.