At Schiavo's Hospice, a Return to Routine

They have discussed their options, know Debra's wishes.

"I don't want her suffering no more," Corrine says. "If she can't live comfortably, I will let her go."

In the kitchen across the hall, Charles Young is fixing a late supper, buttering two slices of toast. Two days ago, the staff advised Young to "make arrangements" for his son. "There's no reason for him to still be here. His will to live is just incredible. If it were me, I'd let go."

Burying Your Children

"Morning," Charles Young says, emerging from his son's crowded room at 2:15 a.m. In addition to James, six family members have crashed on the sofa bed, air mattress and lounge chair. Charles Young gets up periodically to suck mucus from his son's breathing tube, or just to have a smoke.

"I know it sounds weird, but you want your children to bury you," he says. "You don't want to bury your children."

Two hours later, Annie Santa-Maria, director of inpatient and residence services, enters her pitch-black office.

"Since the Terri thing, I've had trouble sleeping," she says. "So I just come in. I get e-mail done or read."

Like many of the staff, Santa-Maria is only now processing the Schiavo episode. Her nightmares are the what-ifs. What if one of the bomb threats was real? What if someone had broken past the barricades and given Schiavo a sip of water?

"If they had given her a cup of water, she would have choked to death," Santa-Maria says, her frustration bubbling up. "I just wanted to yell at them, 'We have people die with feeding tubes all the time.' "

Some of her devout Catholic siblings disapproved of her role in the Schiavo case. The Catholic police chief peppered her with questions of ethics and morality. Congress subpoenaed her.

Santa-Maria opens her laptop to a PowerPoint presentation. The working title is "Woodside: A Fortress of Caring." Unlike the television images beamed around the world, the photos depict The Siege from the inside. Police in camouflage patrolling the verdant back grounds, people in wheelchairs pressing against orange mesh fencing, and the signs:

"Feed Terri! For God's Sake."

"Stop the Murder."

"Auschwitz Woodside."

"I would watch volunteers feeding and bathing our patients day and night, and they're out there calling us murderers," she says, her voice piercing the 5 a.m. silence.

As this 24 hours draw to a close, Santa-Maria walks the corridors. She pauses in the kitchen on Magnolia long enough to shake hands with Tom Saviano and Charles Young, who have just discovered their painful bond.

"I wish you could have seen her two months ago," Saviano is saying of his daughter. Even loaded up with half a dozen drugs, Debra always kept her wits about her. "What's the prognosis on your son?"

"He's a fighter," Young replies.

Saviano's mind is reeling -- to the doctor's appointment he forgot to cancel, to the final hours with Dorine three years ago, to the call he got late last night from his other two daughters.

"They want to come. We told them not to. We don't know how long it will be," he says, the tears returning to his tired eyes. "They want to see their sister while she's alive."

The cycle of death at Woodside, somehow both heart-wrenching and mundane, continues. Young, his family still asleep in the room next door, heads for the smokers' porch.

"Hang in there," Saviano tells him. He turns and crosses the hall to Debra's room. The vigil goes on.

Editor's note: Debra Saviano and James Young died subsequent to the reporting of this story.