There was no relief for Bell. His wife’s best friend lived next door to Michael Schiavo. Sometimes, when the friend’s children were coming home from school, they had to get off the bus up the block so as to avoid the storm of picketers on the sidewalk, calling the besieged husband a murderer. Bell’s wife told him that her friend had organized an escape route for Schiavo in case the crowd tried to take his house. Her friend had removed a panel from the fence that separated their properties. If he needed to, Schiavo could slip through the fence, sneak into the neighbor’s garage, and escape in a car that had been secreted there for the purpose.
One night, exhausted from another day of the siege, another day of being called a Nazi and an angel of death, Mike Bell drove home in his car, the one whose Florida license plate read “Hospice—Every Day’s a Gift.” The main roads were clogged with traffic, so he took his usual alternate route, zigzagging along back roads through residential neighborhoods.
“It was one of those days where, in the e-mail, we were all being condemned to hell, and I’m driving home, and this car is just a little too close, and it just seemed to be doing it the whole way. For some reason, at a traffic light, it just very vividly in my mind went, ‘I have a hospice license plate.’ And it was crazy, I thought, ‘They used to bomb abortion clinics, you know, and if they think we have a side in this, and they’re out to get us because we’re the angels of death—’ And it just struck me, and I didn’t like it, and I didn’t stay in that place. But I was very aware that everywhere I went [my car] said, ‘Hospice,’ and that I couldn’t, even for a minute, turn that off.”
It galled them all—Mike Bell and Louise Cleary, who ran the hospice’s media relations, and especially Annie Santa-Maria—to see their work being fashioned simultaneously into a weapon of political advantage and an engine of media frenzy. It had become plain that the least important factor in all of this was the health and well-being of Terri Schiavo. There were political and religious agendas. There was apparently a bottomless national desire for a televised freak show. There were advantages to be gained, and money to be made, in the fashioning of “hospice” into the kind of buzzword that is central to the vocabulary of a lunatic national dialogue. In such a dialogue, there is no debate, because debate admits at least the possibility of eventual synthesis between the opposing positions. The manufacture of a buzzword requires the reckless unleashing of a noisy public frenzy that does not so much defeat the opposition as simply exhaust it. There is no more debate present at those times than exists between a rock and a window.
Nobody knew better than did the people inside the hospice the delicate and painful questions that revolve around end-of-life issues. They knew the debate. They’d seen the debate in the eyes of the people who came every day to say good-bye, the people who came up to them now and wondered what would happen to their loved ones, what with hospice being compared daily on national television to Auschwitz. Those people wept with the concern that Woodside would be closed. The real debate was in all the families, grouped in knots in the hallways, talking in low voices, sometimes fiercely, about the decisions that had to be made. The debate was in the people taking long walks out back along the stone paths, in a deep and silent place within them where the murmur of the brook and the music of the wind chimes did not reach. The quiet moments were the real debate, when the room grew still and breathless. Bringing peace to those moments was what hospice was about.
They knew the debate and they knew that what was going on around them in the glare of the lights was not the debate. Instead, it was something that reduced the debate to the counterfeit currency of a performance argument. They knew—oh, God, how they knew—that a lot of the people across the street wouldn’t last long doing the kind of work they did every day inside the hospice.
Yet those people were believed. The louder they yelled, the wilder their claims, and the more brutal their rhetoric, the more the outside world seemed to believe them. The people inside the hospice knew the truth, but truth was different now. Truth also was anything anyone was willing to say on television. Truth also depended on how fervently you performed for the cameras, how loudly you were willing to pray, how many droplets of blood you painted on your sign, and how big your papier-mâché spoon was. Enough people believed and were willing to act fervently on behalf of those beliefs, so those beliefs must be as true as any others. The Great Premises of Idiot America were all in play.
Events began to run in a pattern. A court would rule in favor of Michael Schiavo. The Schindlers would appeal. There would be a delay. The appeal would be denied. The Schindlers would file another motion. Another court would rule. The Schindlers would appeal. Some legislature would get involved. The crowd across the street would grow. The TV lights would grow brighter. At every juncture, there would be new characters introduced into the ongoing drama. A judge to be vilified. A bold legislator with wet eyes and a golden tongue, channeling the thoughts of a woman whose brain was dissolving. The tube would be removed. The tube would be replaced. Someone inside the hospice would have to do it.
On October 21, 2003, at the encouragement of Governor Jeb Bush, the Florida state legislature passed “Terri’s Law,” a measure specifically giving Bush the unilateral power to replace Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube, which had been removed, for the second time during the endless litigation, six days earlier. The law was nakedly, almost hilariously, unconstitutional, in part because it directly contradicted a law the legislature had passed during a less frenzied time several years earlier.
It seemed to Annie Santa-Maria that she had become hostage to a situation detached from any familiar reality. She knew the issues involved in the actual debate, knew them backward and forward. Hell, she’d helped develop the procedures going all the way back to her volunteer days with AIDS patients. But, now, in this one case, it seemed that her life and her work were following a script written by someone else. This was the way she remembered living in Cuba.
“I was watching this”—Annie laughs—“and I’m thinking, ‘Surely, they’re not going to pass this. They’re going to overturn the self-determination act they passed years ago.’ And they did. They created a law that was so narrow, that was just for this case, that it was unconstitutional. And when that didn’t work, they went to the Florida Supreme Court, and then to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“When they went to the [U.S.] Supreme Court, and they needed other attorneys to help write the briefs, none of the local attorneys would work with Michael Schiavo. So they were forced to go to the ACLU because the president had so much power, and his brother, the governor, had so much power, that the lawyers were afraid it was going to kill their practice if they touched it because this was a political firebomb to promote the Republican and the Christian agenda that the president and his brother had and nobody wanted to get in the middle of that and ruin their career over that.”
Annie argued with the lawyers. They were throwing away their own rights to self-determination because they were afraid of politicians and preachers. “I told them, ‘Look, you want to be tied to technology against your will because somebody’s afraid that their religious views will be damaged?’”
Annie began to monitor the newscasts, as Mike Bell did, trying to discern the outline of the next day’s story. She stopped concerning herself with whether the story might have anything to do with what actually was going on in the hospice. “We had things happen here and then the [Schindler] family would come out and tell us something totally different than what had happened and the press would run with it. And whatever story they created that night, that’s how we knew what to prepare for the next day. It was always based on whether or not they thought they were doing well. And when they knew the media would be here, there would be more of them doing the carnival circus. You know, it was time for their press releases and their messages of hate and disruption, and yelling at the staff as they drove by, and holding out signs, and calling them murderers, and asking us to repent and not work for hospice, and ‘You d
on’t have to do this.’”
Annie turned down police protection, although she’d gotten death threats. “They offered me police, but I didn’t need it,” she says. “There were so many other people they wanted to kill.”
“ANNIE?” says Captain Mike Haworth. “Annie rocks.”
It was Haworth’s job throughout the siege to coordinate security in the neighborhood of the hospice on behalf of the Pinellas Park Police. It was Haworth whose men had busted the fake deliveryman who’d been bribed to smuggle in a camera. It was Haworth who’d have to tell Jesse Jackson’s driver that there was no room nearby in which to park the reverend’s limousine. Shortly thereafter, while Jackson was giving a press conference down the block, a man sprinted across the street and made it all the way up to the driveway of the hospice. He was going to rescue Terri Schiavo from the people inside who were killing her.
“He made it right to about here, where he engaged one of my canine officers,” says Haworth, pointing to a spot not far from the front doors. “The good news for him was that my canine officer had left his canine in the cruiser. The bad news was that the officer deployed his Taser. And that was our only Tasing out there.”
Haworth is a native Floridian, a brawny serious man with a signifying crew cut and a steady gaze. He is the kind of cop who asks you politely to do something, and is willing to do so repeatedly, always politely, but with something formidable there in reserve. The son of a police chief in Dunedin, Haworth went away to Texas for college and did five years in the Air Force before returning to Florida, where he worked his way up through the ranks at the Pinellas Park department from traffic officer, through narcotics, until he was placed in charge of the department’s SWAT team. He and his men were sent to the neighborhood around the hospice on three lengthy deployments.
“It was always about Michael, Terri, the legislators, the governor, the president,” he says. “It was about everybody but us. We did not want to be the story. We wanted everything else to be the story.”
From the start, Haworth was aware that his job was to be at least as much a diplomat as it was to be a policeman. Anything his police did they were going to be doing on national television. “‘Pleasant’ is not the right word. But it was accommodating,” he says. “We were very accommodating. I mean, my direction to my troops through my lieutenants was ‘Look, they [the protestors] have a job to do. We have a job to do. Okay?’ It’s hot. It’s miserable. It’s nasty out here, you know? And we’re all just waiting, literally, for this woman to pass away.
“From a legal standpoint, we did it in the beginning. We established that this is where we’re going to allow you to protest. We’re not going to allow you to be on the sidewalk. We’re going to keep that clear because we’ve got a school down there.”
Haworth’s third deployment to the neighborhood came in March 2005. At the end of February, Pinellas-Pasco County Circuit Court Judge George Greer again had ordered the removal of Terri Schiavo’s PEG tube. Absent a successful appeal, his order would go into effect on March 18.
(At this point, Greer had been the judicial point man on the case for over five years, consistently ruling in favor of Michael Schiavo and against his in-laws. Greer’s rulings were just as consistently upheld in the state appeals courts. As a result, not only was Greer asked to leave his church but a North Carolina man offered to kill Greer for $50,000. The same man set the price on Michael Schiavo’s head at five times that. The FBI arrested him.)
Around the hospice, and out on the police lines, there was a sense that the endgame had been reached. Haworth sensed a desperation among the demonstrators. “They would grasp onto anything,” he recalls. “If Jesse Jackson came, maybe he could save the day. If there was a federal subpoena, maybe that could save the day. Maybe, if there was a piece of federal legislation that everybody flies back from [George W. Bush’s ranch in] Crawford, Texas, to get done, that’ll be it, you know? They kept waiting for it and, you know, our whole position was that she’s in the dying process and we were there to keep the peace. That’s what our job was.” Haworth personally spent several hours on duty in Terri Schiavo’s room on Beech Street.
“We always,” he says, his voice catching just a bit, “had someone on her.”
Haworth struggled for control as much as anyone else did against the heedless momentum of the events around them. The event of the thing seemed totally unstrung. After three years of seeing their children walk a gauntlet every morning, school administrators finally evacuated the Cross Bayou Elementary School. The last straw was a threat that came in through the FBI. A man had warned that he would take the school hostage and kill a child for every ten minutes that nourishment was withheld from Terri Schiavo. The decision to evacuate was made on Easter Sunday. To Marcia Stone, the principal at Cross Bayou, it felt like a surrender.
She’d come to education because being a stewardess had seemed too dangerous. Flying for National Airlines, Stone had broken her foot when the flight she was working had flown through a hurricane. A career in education had seemed like a safe and sane alternative. Now, she was being forced to abandon her school in the face of a threat that she was not allowed to communicate fully to her staff because of security concerns.
“That Saturday night, I sent out the message to my staff that I want you to trust me on this, that we must vacate the school,” she recalls. “So, the next day, Easter Sunday, the staff met me here and I still couldn’t give them any details even then.” On Monday, Stone talked to the parents of her students, and she couldn’t give them any details, either.
One thing that Haworth and Stone shared was affection for Michael Schiavo. “I like Mike a great deal,” Haworth says. And Stone had a connection to the case because her son-in-law, Patrick Burke, had worked at Palm Gardens Nursing Home, the first place Terri had been taken after her cardiac arrest. Burke had been the first physical therapist to work with her.
“Michael was just incredible, my son-in-law said,” Stone explains. “My son-in-law said, ‘I can save her,’ you know, with the therapy. Eventually, he worked through the reality of ‘She’s never going to get any better,’ and Patrick said that this was the first real incident where he realized, no matter what he did, no matter what anyone did, that there was brain death.”
All of these people—Haworth, and Stone, and the people working at Woodside—watched in amazement as the detachment of the coverage from the actual facts reached a mad crescendo. Hospice officials, forbidden by law to discuss the specifics of the case, watched medical professionals with only the most tangential connection to the case trotted out to convince the nation that Terri Schiavo could walk and talk and was demanding to be freed from her captors. They watched as people accused them of letting Terri’s lips crack and bleed, as though there weren’t an entire protocol for mouth care for people in her situation, and as though the hospice staff weren’t following it just as they followed it for every patient. Some of the families of the other residents wanted them to respond, angrily and publicly, to defend hospice care against the slanders of people who didn’t care what damage they did. They could not.
“There were people in our community who got a little mad at us,” says Louise Cleary, the hospice’s spokesperson. “They wanted us to come out stronger. They wanted us to defend ourselves. They wanted us to say, you know, ‘We’re the good guys.’ But we really did stick to the story that this is not our story to tell, that we just happened to be the hospice where Terri was.”
Almost everyone involved inside the hospice was frustrated beyond endurance. Elizabeth Kirkman, whose volunteer work had been so extensive that she had been congratulated personally by both presidents Bush and by Governor Jeb Bush, wrote the governor a scathing letter condemning his meddling. “It was unsettling to us,” Elizabeth said. She and her husband went out of their way to make sure their living wills were ironclad.
Annie Santa-Maria had to work harder than most to keep from lashing out. “To have the staff here listen to the Schindler family l
awyer, and the Schindler family out there, saying, ‘Oh, Terri. We’re going to have you home by Thanksgiving. You’re going to be eating turkey with your friends and family,’” she recalls. “They would be saying they had these yuck-it-up conversations with someone who’s not responding. We’d be aghast. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t move. She didn’t blink. But nobody knows that. But that’s what the country’s hearing—that we’re killing somebody who has limited dialogue ability. And none of it was true.”
Ultimately, the Columbia Journalism Review published a study that concluded that “coverage of the Schiavo case [has] consistently skewed toward the emotional over the factual…. With its performance to date in the Schiavo case, the press is displaying a tell-tale tendency for tabloid-style exploitation in the guise of serious reporting.” The Gut, faith-based as always, was in the saddle and driving events.
Bizarre, almost otherworldly slanders flew through the air. A nurse named Carla Sauer Iyer appeared on both Fox and CNN, claiming that Michael Schiavo had poisoned his wife with insulin. She also claimed she’d heard him shout, loudly, “When is the bitch going to die?” Neither network noted that Judge Greer had nearly laughed the woman out of his courtroom almost two years earlier. (On CNN, an anchor named Kyra Phillips breathlessly reported the complete canard that Iyer had come forward for the first time that day.) However, nobody frosted the people at the hospice more than did Sean Hannity of Fox News. “He’s a peculiar piece of work,” says Cleary. “He’s not the kind of journalist who’s interested much in the truth, let’s say.”
Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free Page 17
