A Life That Matters (3 page)

Suzanne, whose arrival provided a bit of solace, was in shock. “I couldn’t imagine what had happened to Terri,” she says. “She was fine last I’d heard. But when I got to the hospital, I was in a panic, scared to death. Especially seeing my family’s faces and the fear in their eyes.”

Then came the frustrating wait for a doctor to bring us news. Every time we’d hear “Code Blue, Code Blue” over the loudspeaker, we’d all jump out of our seats and rush to the ICU, jamming together in the doorway like the Four Stooges, to be told that Terri was all right, that it was a different patient in trouble. But the shock of those announcements was nightmarish; I still cringe when there’s an announcement of any kind over a public address system.

Throughout the morning and the next few days, people came to keep us company and to lend support. Michael’s parents lived in Pennsylvania and came down as soon as they could, along with one of his brothers. Otherwise, the visitors were all friends of ours or members of our extended family. I called Muriel Wextrom, Terri’s friend at Prudential, and all Terri’s friends from work came in a steady stream: Jackie Rhodes, who was Terri’s best friend, and Leuretha Gibbons, her supervisor, and Fran and Sherry and Judy and Roger. Chris Adams, Bob’s second cousin, came every day, even though he and Bob had met only once or twice previously. Chris’s mother had died suddenly, and Terri’s misfortune hit him in the heart. He was a driver for Roadway who’d go home, get up, go to work, and come back to the hospital. All of a sudden, he was family, and true to the unspoken code of the family: every time there was a crisis, every relative would offer support.

Bob’s niece, Kathy Brown, came down from Pennsylvania. Her father and Bob’s brother, Fred Schindler, had been in a coma after a car accident several years earlier and, contrary to his doctor’s negative prognosis, had progressed remarkably after undergoing months of rehabilitation, to the point where he was able to live on his own. Kathy was a nurse and had a lot of knowledge from working with patients in Terri’s condition. “Don’t listen to what the doctors say, because they’re going to paint the worst scenario possible,” she said. “There is a good chance, if she makes it through these early days, we can get her better. We can give her rehabilitation and we can get her better.” Terri’s doctors were in fact somber and discouraging, doubtful that Terri would ever come out of her coma, but Kathy’s words gave us hope, and we clung to them.

At one point, Bob and Suzanne went together to the hospital chapel. They knelt in prayer. Bob told his younger daughter, “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be okay. If she can just hang on and get through the crisis, everything’s going to be fine, we’ll get her fixed.” And he believed it. After all, he’d seen his brother’s recovery.

We went home to change after the second day, then returned to the hospital. Bob stayed through the first week, at one time finding himself in the hospital morgue at 3:00 a.m., having lost his way in a search for a cup of coffee—“eerie and creepy,” he described it. I stayed through the second week. I slept in the waiting area on chairs that were pushed together to make beds. Bobby went back to work but came every night. After a few days, we tried to persuade Suzanne to go back to school, promising to call her if there was any change in Terri’s condition. But she stayed for at least a week, until Terri was out of immediate danger.

Before Suzanne left, there
was
a change—for the worse. Terri developed a staph infection and had to be put in isolation. Now only her immediate family—the four of us and Michael and his mom and dad—were allowed to see her, and we’d have to put on robes and masks before we went in. This crisis passed, but it was only after two weeks that the doctors told us they were pretty sure that Terri would live—in what state, though, they could not say.

Elation mixed with sadness. We had our girl with us, and if by nothing else than force of will, we would get her better. Perhaps for the first time since Terri collapsed, we allowed ourselves to remember her as she had been.

CHAPTER 3

Terri

Terri was enchanting—warm and mischievous. She loved her family, both immediate and extended, and her close friends, and she was loved in return. Bob’s mother Catherine Schindler adored Terri, showering her with affection, and she was particularly close to her maternal grandparents, whose home she visited over many summers. My father, Michael Tammaro, whom the kids called “Pepa,” was typically Italian, kind, loving, generous to a fault. We learned never to ask him for things because he would rush to provide them. My mother, Cecilia, or “Mema,” stout and stouthearted, shared his kindness. Cooking was her specialty. Terri once said there was no better food in the world.

When Pepa passed away, Terri wept so long and so hard Bobby remembers that he fled the house. “I had to leave because she was crying so much,” he told me. “She was devastated. I remember sitting on the front porch and I closed the door and I could still hear her crying. And I had to walk out to the street to get away from her crying because I couldn’t—because I knew, you see, how she felt.”

When the family dog, Bucky, died in Terri’s arms, it was almost as terrible. (She had once given him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.) Her heart was pure and her selflessness legendary. Everyone else came first, whether from sharing food at the dinner table, doing chores, or caring for her beloved grandmother, her Mema, after Pepa died. Terri visited her countless times at the nursing home in St. Petersburg where we’d brought her when Mema was unable to live on her own.

Terri used to visit her five, six days a week. And she’d get on Bobby all the time about going more. I had done volunteer work at the nursing home when my mother was there in order to be with her. It made me sad to see her so unhappy, but if Terri shared my feelings, she never complained about going.

Bobby remembers: “Telling Mema about Terri’s collapse was the hardest thing we ever had to do. She was having health problems and her mind wasn’t clear, so I don’t know if she understood everything we said, but she cried and cried.”

I remember how beautiful Terri was as a baby. Whenever we would go, strangers would stop to look at her, complimenting us on her beauty.

Maybe Terri was so dear because her start in life was tough.

She was a colicky baby; it seemed she was always throwing up. She was a terrible sleeper, waking fretful and screaming. I think of how frightened I was, even when Terri only had a slight fever and her face would get beet red. She was my first baby and I didn’t know what was wrong. I’d call Bob’s mom and go through the litany of symptoms. She would always try to put my mind at ease, but nevertheless, I’d be at the pediatrician’s office as soon as the doors opened. Neither Bob nor I remember getting any sleep for three months after she was born. It got so bad we sent an SOS to my mother, who came and babysat for a weekend while we disappeared to a motel just so we could get some sleep. Then, just when we finally got her settled down, along came Bobby, whose cries woke Terri up, and our sleep deprivation started all over again.

One eye used to roll to the center, giving Terri a clownish look, and only at age two, when we got her glasses, did her gaze become normal. One of her eyes wouldn’t tear, and a doctor recommended surgery, but another said, “All you have to do is massage the eye and eventually it’ll open up.” We massaged it and put warm compresses on it, and finally her tear duct opened and she was fine.

Bobby was born thirteen months after Terri. As soon as he could crawl, Terri crawled after him like an obedient puppy, though she was able to walk by the time she was fifteen months old. She adored him from the start and followed him everywhere. Once, when she was two, our friend Jimmy brought his son over, and Bobby wanted one of his toys. The boy wouldn’t give it to him, so Terri grabbed the toy and gave it to Bobby. They were like that in their adult lives, too, each fighting for the other.

Terri moved at her own pace. Unlike our other kids, she was very hard to toilet train. As far as she was concerned, she could have worn the same soiled diaper for the rest of her life. Even her teeth were slow in coming, and her second set came in crooked. A first-rate orthodontist straightened them with braces, which she wore throughout her early adolescence, and when the braces came off, her smile could have been used in a toothpaste ad. She took good care of her teeth from that point on, which made it all the sadder when, in hospice, they began decaying in her mouth.

Bob was working for Day & Zimmerman, a firm of consulting engineers. (He was soon assigned to work with the Corning glass company in Corning, New York, which was where he met me.) His job required frequent moves, and Terri was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in December 1963. When Bob’s work took him to upstate New York, we lived briefly in my parents’ house in Corning, then came back to a house we had bought after Terri’s birth on Bloomfield Avenue in Philadelphia. That’s where Bobby was born.

In 1965, Bob left Day & Zimmerman to work as a material handling salesman for his brother, Fred, who had recently started a new business. His sales career was extremely successful, so right after Suzanne was born, in June 1968, we moved again, this time to a four-bedroom house Bob had built in Montgomery County in suburban Philadelphia. The name Schindler generated considerable respect in the area.

It was awfully nice there, but its Catholic school didn’t have a kindergarten, so for two years each, we enrolled the kids in public school, where I did volunteer work to be close to them. Most of our neighbors were Jewish, and we quickly became popular because we were the family with the Christmas tree and invited all the kids to watch the holiday TV specials, like Terri’s favorites,
The Little Drummer Boy
and
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,
a practice I started when the children were young and continued for seven or eight years. My children lived for those holidays, whether they involved going to Pepa and Mema’s house in Corning for Thanksgiving or were celebrated at home. Terri loved them. They meant presents, cookies, visits from uncles, aunts, and cousins, and staying up later than usual. Bobby and Suzanne remember the excitement of the days, their “specialness.” Not many people we speak to have such great memories of childhood; in that sense, our family was extraordinary.

After Terri collapsed, Christmas (and her birthday) were celebrated in Terri’s nursing or hospice room, and I would bring decorations and cards, but poignancy replaced joy, and our gaiety was for Terri’s benefit, not so much for ours.

While Terri was a generally passive child, she could fight her own battles and, if attacked, retaliate.

One of my most vivid memories was the day Bobby, aged three, locked Terri, aged four, in the large white suitcase we used when we went on trips. I found her, of course—her screams were fire-engine piercing. The blood vessels had broken in her face with the effort, and she was appropriately fire-engine red, but she calmed quickly after she was rescued and went to her room to recover. Two days later, Bobby was standing at the top of the stairs, and all of a sudden Terri was behind him, pushing him as hard as she could. He went flying down the stairs. I raced to Bobby, then, seeing he was unharmed (the stairs had been newly carpeted, which probably prevented serious injury), went up to Terri’s room. Our daughter had hidden behind her bureau, but she emerged when I came in.

“I’m not going to punish you or anything,” I said, “because you know what you did was wrong.”

Terri was bawling. “Is he hurt? Is he hurt?” she kept repeating. “Please go down to see if he’s hurt.”

“I think he’s all right,” I told her. “But that was a terrible thing for you to do.”

Terri knew it. Bobby knew that what he had done was terrible, too. From that time forward, none of our children attacked each other.

Bob and the kids teased each other all the time, and Terri’s laughter—everyone who knew her spoke about how
much
she laughed—replaced her tears.

Terri could get to Bobby in psychological ways, too.

“When I was a kid growing up,” Bobby told us, “I was deathly afraid of tornadoes because I’d watched
The Wizard of Oz
and saw what tornadoes did. So whenever Terri wanted to get back at me, she’d start screaming, ‘
Auntie Em, Auntie Em! There’s a storm coming!
’ It drove me crazy.”

Terri disliked school, and there was nothing we could do to encourage her. Bobby and Suzanne were B students, and both preferred summers to school days (they were more athletes than scholars), but Terri’s antipathy showed itself in a reluctance to do homework, reticence to talk about school activities at dinner, and a reluctance to take part in most special school events unless we forced her. She rarely appeared in pageants or plays, for example, and as for sports—well, she took part in them as rarely as possible.

Perhaps she shunned the out-of-doors because it meant danger. Once, when Bobby and Terri were at their grandparents’ house in Corning, Pepa took them for an outing in the countryside (my parents’ house, spacious and welcoming, was on a treelined street near the center of the city). They were crossing a bridge over a creek when they were attacked by a swarm of yellow jackets.

“We got stung probably a dozen times,” Bobby vividly remembers. “They were just everywhere, and they were biting us. Terri was going hysterical. I was crying, because I was little at the time, but nothing like Terri. Pepa was trying to grab us and get us back to the car, and I don’t think he knew what to do. We all ran back to the car. I remember we had calamine lotion, like dots, all over us, and that helped. But Terri was scared to death.

“When we were older, and Mom and Dad took us to the Jersey Shore, she was deathly afraid of the biting green flies. She hated going to the beach because of them, though she loved staying at the motel and lying on a deck chair to get a tan.”

Aside from horseback riding, which she loved, the only time we can remember Terri doing anything athletic was when she started high school. Two of her girlfriends, including her best friend, Sue Kolb, persuaded her to come with them on a school skiing trip. We sent her in the school bus—she looking a bit green—and went to pick her up at her school when the bus returned. The kids streamed out; no Terri. Finally our daughter emerged, looking like a stiff board walking. She couldn’t bend her knees, didn’t move her arms. All she did was clump down the stairs, wrapped in her snowsuit.