PINELLAS PARK, Fla. -- In the pre-dawn hours, when sleep is futile and death has not yet arrived, Charles Young and Tom Saviano find common ground in a kitchen permeated by the smell of fresh coffee and stale popcorn. Each is waiting to bury a child.
In rooms less than 25 feet apart, Young's 27-year-old son and Saviano's 48-year-old daughter are near the end. Like Terri Schiavo, the woman who died here about two months ago, they will live out their final hours in Hospice House Woodside. And like Schiavo's parents, the two men are struggling to grasp the inconceivable.
"I can't believe this is happening to me," says Saviano, tears welling up, learning firsthand what hospice is when it isn't on the television, when it isn't in the courts. When hospice is your own private agony. "My wife and I are both wondering what we did wrong."
He is wearing the same navy slacks and golf shirt he arrived in 19 hours ago, back when he was speaking optimistically of bringing his eldest daughter, Debra, home, back when he still thought she had a chance at beating the cancer now overtaking her. After a couple of fitful hours on a pullout couch, Saviano is up again, prowling the near-deserted halls. It's 4:20 a.m., and except for the constant whoosh of oxygen machines and the occasional hacking cough, the single-story red-brick building is quiet.
"We always helped other people," Saviano tells Young. "That's what we can't understand. Anybody who was sick -- friends, neighbors -- we were right there."
Young nods, pouring coffee into a foam cup. He arrived from Ohio two weeks ago when doctors confirmed they were running out of options for treating his son's tongue cancer. Dressed in blue striped pajamas, a pack of Kools tucked in the breast pocket, he, too, has been up most of the night, shuttling between James's room and the smokers' porch just off the kitchen.
"You wanna do something, but there's just nothing to do," he replies. "All you can do is just wait."
Two months after the Schiavo case exposed an entire nation to one family's bitter battle with death, the hospice has returned to its normal rhythms. In the past 60 days, 129 new patients have arrived, 19 memorials have been held and 88 residents have died, each departing the way Schiavo left -- on a gurney, face uncovered, showing that at Woodside, death is not hidden.
Unlike this routine day, the staff has a name for the Schiavo period. They call it The Siege. The two-week sideshow of demonstrators, bomb threats, court rulings and political interventions.
Now -- liberated of the television cameras and police checkpoints, the pastor with the bullhorn and the life-size Jesus on a cross, Jesse Jackson and Randall Terry, the juggler and the monks -- the people of Woodside are back to the everyday business of dying. For all the chaos and emotion the Schiavo case elicited, it did not alter the fundamental nature of Woodside and the 3,200 hospices across the country. For 15 years, they have been the place where anyone, regardless of age, wealth, handicap or history, can find company on the way to death.
Today, the only visible reminder of it all is a three-foot-tall angel watching over the nurse's station on Beach Avenue, the wing where Schiavo lived for five years.
"To our angels at hospice who cared for us," reads the statue's brass plaque. "Thank you, Mike & Terri Schiavo."
