A Life That Matters (20 page)

“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 arguing 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.

All this took several hours, with Terri still without food or water, but finally the tube was reinserted, and Terri received water that night, food the next morning.

Still, Michael and Felos were doing their best to torment us. Here’s Bobby:

“They were playing hide-and-seek with her. The feeding tube was reinserted at Morton Plant Hospital, and I went to see Terri right afterwards. She wasn’t there. They wouldn’t tell me where she was. I called Mom and Dad and said, ‘I don’t know where Terri is. They won’t tell me anything.’

“It was just harassment. I ran outside with Pat Anderson. There were press everywhere who had been waiting for Terri to come out. They didn’t know where she was, either. So Pat let Felos have it. ‘These people are tormenting this family,’ she said. And I added, ‘I don’t know where my sister is. I don’t know her condition. They won’t tell me anything.’

“Soon after that, they told us she was back at the hospice—so we went there to see her.”

To me, these bedevilments were minor. Happiness filled my heart like sweet nectar. Terri was being fed, and while Michael had barred us from seeing her at Morton Plant and forbade any of the staff from giving us any information whatsoever, we knew that for the moment she was safe.

The tube was reinserted the day before Bob’s birthday. It may have been the best present he ever received.

CHAPTER 18

Aftermath

There was little relief.

After Terri’s feeding tube had been reinserted, Dr. Hammesfahr took Bob aside. “This is a dangerous time,” he said. “You went through a severe crisis. But it’s often
after
the crisis that trouble comes.”

With my brother, Mikey, I took Bob to Hammesfahr’s office for an examination. Hammesfahr took his blood pressure and literally went white. “It’s off-the-wall,” he said. “I mean, completely off-the-wall.”

In our forty-two years of marriage, I couldn’t remember its ever being so high. Between them, Bob’s regular doctor and Dr. Hammesfahr managed to get it down, but he was inactive for a while, and my brother acted as his surrogate, especially escorting me to the hospice, where perhaps two dozen people remained to keep up a vigil for Terri.

Dr. Hammesfahr also told us what to look for when we visited Terri. “You have to find out if the time off the feeding tube affected her organs,” he said. “Liver and kidneys. Try to take her pulse to see if it’s steady, and find out if she’s urinating.”

But getting information from the hospice people was impossible. Never in all our dealings with them were they this mean, this ornery. So we didn’t know how she was tolerating her feeding, if the hydration was making her sick, if she’d suffered any internal damage. As Bob said, it was almost as if they were mad because they weren’t able to kill her.

But Suzanne was encouraged. “I thought Terri looked really good. She bounced back really quickly. Her face filled out. She was fine. And after that, we were more convinced than ever that she didn’t want to die. Not that there was ever a doubt, but we said to ourselves,
You know what? This is Terri. Just fighting for everything she had.
She was amazing. And healthy. That’s the thing that killed us when Michael kept on trying to end her life. She was
healthy
!”

We had the fear of God in us because we thought Michael would try, underhandedly, to kill her. I remembered the rushed feeding, the blankets and sweaters to make her sweat when she was getting no water, the order not to medicate, and vowed such tactics would never be used again. But that meant a family member had to be with Terri 24/7, obviously an impossibility, and my anxiety was overwhelming when Terri was alone.

“I was still trying to work,” Suzanne says, “and the idea of somebody not being with Terri was haunting me. I kept thinking,
Oh, God, what if we go there and they’ve done something to her?
The pressure was unbelievable at this point.”

“The stress got so bad that it even affected our family dynamic,” Bobby says. “Dad and I had a terrible fight, just screaming at each other as though we were enemies. I don’t remember what we were fighting about, just the fight itself. It shows how on edge we all were. The family might have crumbled if Mom hadn’t kept us together.”

Meanwhile, Felos was waging his own fight—to have the courts declare Terri’s Law unconstitutional—and our attorneys were uncertain what the courts would do. The suspense added to the pressure.

“Pat Anderson was telling us, ‘We don’t know how long we can keep Terri alive,’ because she believed the courts were against us,” Bob says. “We didn’t know if the stay was going to last a month, two months, a year, forever—we just didn’t know because Felos and his army of attorneys were doing everything they could to ramrod the system to act faster. Not knowing if Terri was going to be alive for long, the way the hospice was treating her and treating us, the media still hammering us for interviews—psychological torture. Here Terri was, reprieved, and it was just about the worst time for me in the whole affair.”

On December 3, 2003, some friends of ours threw a party to celebrate Terri’s fortieth birthday. They set up tables in front of the hospice and invited the fifty or so supporters who had kept up the vigil for Terri to attend. It was a lovely gesture, another reminder that in this world, good people outnumber the bad.

We gave slices of cake to the hospice nurses, not differentiating between those who’d been obstinate with us and those who were kind. Then the family went to Terri’s room, which I had decorated with cards and ribbons, and we hugged her and kissed her and sang “Happy Birthday.” Terri enjoyed it—so did we.

Terri had hardly aged at all. There was some gray in her hair, but her skin was still beautiful and young-looking. There were no squint lines around her eyes, no furrows in her forehead. Suzanne was amazed that she had more wrinkles than Terri did. But I wondered how many more birthdays lay ahead of her if Michael and Felos prevailed.

CHAPTER 19

Dark Doings

From the fall of 2003 to the summer of 2004, Governor Bush and his attorney, Ken Connor, worked on defending Terri’s Law, while Pat Anderson attempted not only to have Michael removed as Terri’s guardian but to take Terri’s case away from the Sixth Circuit and Judge Greer’s jurisdiction.

Professor Jay Wolfson at the University of South Florida was appointed as the new guardian ad litem mandated by Terri’s Law. But his report, saying there was value in conducting swallow therapy and continued testing for Terri, went nowhere: Felos claimed that Terri’s Law was unconstitutional and that Wolfson’s appointment was therefore inappropriate. Judge Greer turned down Pat’s motion to transfer the case to a different court. And on May 5, 2004, Judge Baird of the Sixth Circuit Judicial Court, without a trial, issued a summary judgment declaring that Terri’s Law was indeed unconstitutional, but withheld action until the Second District Court of Appeals could hear Governor Bush’s appeal.

I felt I was living in a parallel world, where a different language—
legalese—spoke a set of incomprehensible rules. I felt no connection to this world, yet knew that Terri’s fate would be decided by those rules, and not by anything that governed
my
world, where humanity has less to do with law than with the heart. All I could do was care for and protect Terri as best I could, though it was becoming more and more difficult.

And Bob was worried because politicians on both sides were expressing opinions on the case, their often uneducated ideas duly reported in the media. If the case becomes a political issue between Republicans and Democrats, he said, the issue of Terri’s rehabilitation will be lost.

Woodside Hospice was undergoing a renovation, so in December 2003, Terri had to be moved, along with other patients, to the fourth floor of an assisted-living facility, Park Place in Clearwater.