On March 18, Michael Schiavo eluded the protesters camped outside his Clearwater, Fla., house by climbing over a fence and slipping into an unmarked police car a block away. At the Hospice House Woodside in Pinellas Park 10 miles away, he waited outside his wife Terri's room while a doctor removed the feeding tube that goes directly into her stomach. Though Michael has fought long and hard for Terri's right to die, "he didn't want to be in the room when it was happening," says his friend John Centonze. "He thought it would be too emotional." Then, as Michael, 42, has done most days for the past 15 years, he tended to his wife's comfort, making sure that Terri, 41, was surrounded by the stuffed animals, photographs and jazz music she once loved.

At 4 the next morning, Terri's father, Robert Schindler, awoke in a cold sweat and drove to the hospice. "He felt he had to check on her," says Terri's mother, Mary, who with her husband is fighting to have Terri's tube reinserted. "She was sleeping, which put him a little bit at ease, so he came home." But only for a few hours. Later that morning, Mary girded to see her daughter without her feeding tube. "A part of me is dying with her every day," she says. At the hospice, Mary says, she was surprised to see that the gifts she'd brought the day before—stuffed Easter toys, a guardian angel statuette, flowers—were still on Terri's nightstand. Michael, she says, "usually takes them out."

Since 1998, when Michael Schiavo first petitioned a court to have Terri's tube removed, he and his in-laws have been locked in an increasingly bitter dispute about whether she should live or die. The question of whether to remove the feeding tube that keeps her alive has been reviewed by 19 judges in six courts, including the Florida Supreme Court—and has become the subject of fierce protests on both sides of the issue. Three days after the latest state court ruling led to the tube's removal for the third time in four years, Congress, in a stunning and swift turn of events, intervened at the Schindlers' behest and ordered a federal court review of Terri's case. With that, one family's agony and acrimony spilled onto the national stage, leaving the two sides combative and emotionally drained. "I can't even find my shoes I'm so tired," said Robert Schindler as he prepared to return to the hospice on the weekend. "This is tough on all of us."

As for Michael, "I've cried many tears, trust me," he told CNN's Larry King. "She said, 'No tubes for me.'... I made a promise to Terri. I'm going to stick by her side and I'm going to do this for her.' "

What Terri wants right now is undecipherable. As the Florida Supreme Court recognized last year after digesting voluminous evidence from her doctors, most of her cerebral cortex—which controls such functions as thinking and reasoning—"is simply gone," replaced by spinal fluid; she has lapsed into a "persistent vegetative state." According to many experts who examined her, she is not capable of deliberate action but may have reflexive motions such as smiling and following movement with her eyes. The courts have accepted this diagnosis; her parents do not. "She tries to talk," Mary says. "She needs speech therapy, she needs all kinds of help [Michael] won't let her have."

The Schindlers have been showing videos of Terri in which she seems to respond to them. "My daughter is not as they portray her," Mary told FOX News in early March. "She's not in a coma. She's not on any life support. She's a viable...human being.... She knows who we all are and I have a lot of hope that...she will be fine." Given that belief, Robert told CBS Evening News, "I see it as judicial homicide. I see it as murder."

With no living will to guide the family's decision, the two sides trade anecdotes to buttress their convictions. Michael's brother Scott Schiavo says that Terri expressed horror in 1988 after his grandmother was briefly hooked to a respirator, declaring, "Not me, no way. I never want to be hooked up to a machine; I never want to be a burden on anyone." The account is dismissed by Terri's brother Bobby Schindler: "It would be totally out of character for Terri to make a death wish." He and his parents maintain that while discussing the 1975 case in which Karen Ann Quinlan slipped into a coma after mixing drugs and alcohol, Terri said it was wrong for the family to take her off a respirator.

Things were different in 1990 when Terri was first hospitalized with severe brain damage following a heart attack—possibly brought on by bulimia—that robbed her brain of oxygen for about five minutes. Friends and family on both sides say Michael and the Schindlers pulled together, sharing a house while Michael returned to school to study nursing and respiratory therapy to help care for Terri. "Mrs. Schindler was like a second mom to him," Diane Meyer, a friend of Terri's since preschool, says of that period. "She truly loved Michael." All three shared the burden of Terri's care. Gloria Centonze, who was one of Terri's caregivers at the time (and would later marry Michael's friend John), recalls that the Schindlers came on weekends. Michael, she says, visited daily and made rigorous demands of the staff. "He was a pain in the ass. Terri's makeup had to be put on a certain way. She wore Paloma Picasso perfume."

In '92 Michael filed a malpractice suit against Terri's gynecologist, charging the doctor with failing to give blood tests for a potassium imbalance that led to her collapse. "[The Schindlers] said Mike was a wonderful son-in-law, and that throughout this ordeal he was their rock," says his brother Scott. After Michael won a $1 million settlement—$700,000 for Terri, $300,000 for himself—that picture changed radically. Michael has long contended that the fallout resulted from his refusal to share the money with his in-laws. The Schindlers, who want guardianship of Terri, claim Michael won't relinquish it because he wants to inherit her remaining money—money that Michael's camp says is long gone. "It's just a pot of debt for Michael," says friend Matthew Schad. "He has to pay for all those tests that Medicare didn't pay for." Recently, Michael declined two offers from individuals for $1 million and $10 million to surrender care of Terri to the Schindlers. "He wouldn't do that for any amount of money," says his attorney George Felos.

Following a bitter fight in 1993, the two sides stopped talking. Two years later, when Schiavo began dating Jodi Centonze, relations grew even chillier. (Michael, who now has two children with Jodi, won't discuss the relationship, and Jodi's brother John will say only, "You're alone for five years, you need some sort of comfort. That's what happened.") Initially, Jodi visited Terri with Michael, and even laundered her clothes. But these days she keeps her distance from the hospice. The Schindlers regard Michael's home life as evidence that he is no longer focused on Terri's care. "I get so mad and frustrated when the press refers to Michael as family," says Terri's brother Bobby. "Michael has his own family now."

On March 22, a federal judge declined the Schindlers' petition to have Terri's feeding tube reinserted, prompting the Schindlers' attorney to file an appeal, which was subsequently denied. What happens when a feeding tube is removed? In such cases, "starvation is not a cruel way to die," says Dr. David Lipschitz, a geriatric specialist at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. "The person drifts into a coma and dies a peaceful death." For the Roman Catholic Schindlers, who believe their daughter is still with them in fundamental ways, this is irrelevant. If Terri is permitted to die, Mary warns, "she will become a poster child for euthanasia." If Terri is forced to live, Michael told ABC's Nightline, "you better call your congressman, because they're going to run your life."

Meanwhile Michael and the Schindlers continue to visit Terri daily—careful to avoid one another—and the battle continues to exact its terrible toll. "She's sitting there dying," Mary says of her daughter. "How would any mother feel?" For all Michael's bravado, his friend John says, "people calling you a murderer—it wears you down."

Whatever the outcome, the friends of Terri who remember a shy girl with a vivacious laugh are certain of one thing. "She would hate this attention," says childhood pal Joe Shannon. "She would never want them fighting over her."

Jill Smolowe. Jeff Truesdell in Pinellas Park, Lori Rozsa in Miami, Kate Arcieri and Macon Morehouse in Washington, D.C., Mary Green, Diane Herbst and Lisa Ingrassia in New York City and Steve Barnes in Little Rock

More From This Article

Who Is Terri Schiavo?
Shy, reserved and, friends say, a tad gullible. Theresa Marie Schindler saved her infectious giggle for the people who knew her best. Growing up in the Philadelphia suburb of Huntingdon Valley, she was passionate about friends, family and animals. "When her dog Bucky died, she tried to give him mouth-to-mouth," recalls Sue Pickwell, who met Terri when they were 12. As they progressed into high school in the late '70s, the 5'3" Terri didn't date and battled a weight problem, at one point tipping the scale at 200 lbs. Schiavo indulged her romantic streak by reading Danielle Steel novels, listening to John Denver and writing fan letters to the stars of Starsky & Hutch. "I think we saw An Officer and a Gentleman six times in one day," says her friend Diane Meyer. By 1982, when she entered Bucks County Community College, Terri had shed 70 lbs. There she met Michael Schiavo, her first love. Neither graduated, but in 1984 they married. Five years later, she suffered her heart attack.

What America Thinks...
59% of Americans say they would remove Schiavo's feeding tube if they were responsible for her care (FOX News Poll, March 2)

70% say it was inappropriate for Congress to get involved (ABC News Poll, March 20)

65% support doctor-assisted suicide for patients in pain and dying of an incurable disease (Gallup Poll, 2004)

Living Wills
Living wills—which specify an individual's wishes in the case of an incapacitating illness—are accepted everywhere in the U.S. but vary from state to state. For assistance in drafting your own directive, the following Web sites offer useful information and forms: www.caringinfo.org www.agingwithdignity.org

How Did Congress Get Involved?
It may be time to rewrite the history books: The move by Congress to pass a special law allowing Terri Schiavo's parents to take their case to federal court was apparently a first "In recent history this is without precedent," says Allan J. Lichtman, a historian at American University in Washington, D.C. But is it a good idea for lawmakers to meddle with decisions made by courts?

Why not, responds Rep. Dave Weldon (R.-Fla.), who introduced the bill on March 8. "Terri Schiavo and men and women like her deserve the same due process rights that death row inmates are granted." But others point out that a law like this opens Congress to appeals from every family—or individual for that matter—who is unhappy with a decision of the courts. "It's hard to imagine families in similar disputes not now calling their local congressman as they file their law suits," says Craig Crawford, a political analyst and columnist for Congressional Quarterly. "It gets Congress into the family-dispute resolution business."

So how did it happen? For a couple of years now, powerful conservatives and right-to-life groups have helped Terri's parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, lobby for support among lawmakers, including the President's brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush, who ordered Schiavo's feeding tube to be restored when it was briefly removed by court order in 2003. When a Florida judge set a March 18 deadline for Schiavo's tube to be removed again, pro-life lobbyists and Republicans who had been following the case pushed for a congressional intervention and won. But a federal judge in Tampa ruled in favor of Michael Schiavo. The Schindlers will appeal. And the case is back where it began: in the courts.