April 11 benefit concert to celebrate life of Terri Schiavo

Bobby Schindler, right, talks with Little Sisters of the Poor Judith Meredith, left, and Elizabeth Kleibusch during a Feb. 12 visit to the St. Augustine Home for the Aged in Indianapolis. He is the younger brother of the late Terri Schindler Schiavo, and the director of Terri’s Foundation, which helps families protect their relatives who have suffered brain damage. (Photo by Mary Ann Wyand)

By Mary Ann Wyand

“Where there is life, there is hope.”

Ironically, the late Terri Schindler Schiavo offered that inspirational advice to a friend years before it became a symbol of her own neurologically compromised medical condition.

On Feb. 25, 1990, Schiavo collapsed and suffered profound brain damage from oxygen deprivation, which left her unable to walk, talk or care for herself. The cause of her illness was never determined.

Her name became known around the world through media reports when her estranged husband, Michael Schiavo, sought and was granted a court order in 2005 to have her gastric feeding tube removed at the nursing home in Florida where she was a patient.

As a result, Shiavo was legally deprived of nutrition and hydration.

Despite her family’s prayers and frantic legal efforts to reverse the court ruling—as well as countless prayers and protests from pro-life supporters in the U.S. and around the world—she starved to death on March 31, 2005.

“Terri wasn’t dying before the court order,” her younger brother, Bobby Schindler of Tampa, Fla., explained during a Feb. 12 interview at the St. Augustine Home for the Aged in Indianapolis. The Little Sisters of the Poor had prayed for Terri Schiavo.

“She was profoundly brain-damaged, but she didn’t need any machines to stay alive,” he said. “All she needed was a feeding tube” to receive food and water.

“Euthanasia happens every day, every single day,” he said, in the United States and other countries.

“It’s quite frightening,” Schindler said. “There are a lot of tragic situations like Terri’s.”

After Schiavo’s death, her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, and siblings, Suzanne Vitadamo and Bobby Schindler, founded Terri’s Foundation in St. Petersburg, Fla., to help families with the legal and medical assistance they need to keep loved ones with brain damage alive in health care settings.

Bobby Schindler visited Indianapolis in February to promote the first Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Concert at 7 p.m. on April 11 at the Murat Theatre in Indianapolis.

The concert is scheduled 11 days after the fifth anniversary of Schiavo’s death, and will be a celebration of her life.

Country music stars Randy Travis and Collin Raye will perform their award-winning songs during the fundraiser, which benefits the pro-life work of Terri’s Foundation.

Travis is one of the top best-selling solo country artists in the U.S., and Raye has produced five platinum albums and 15 No. 1 hits.

Concert tickets are $75 a person, Schindler said, but a discount code number—TC411—will enable people to purchase tickets online at a reduced rate.

Terri’s Foundation is a non-profit, tax-exempt organization established to educate people, and help families to better protect the rights and lives of their cognitively disabled loved ones.

“We started the foundation when we were trying to defend Terri’s life back in 2000,” Bobby Schindler said. “When she passed away, we had to change the name legally because it wasn’t just about Terri anymore. We were now dealing with the issue at large, and what happened to her on a much-larger scale, helping other families protect the lives of loved ones in similar conditions.”

Schindler said the Grace Project and other organizations are advocating for the use of advance directives at U.S. health care facilities, especially for elderly patients, which are “pro-death” in their legal content.

“Terri’s situation wasn’t anything close to being end-of-life,” he said. “The doctors believed that she would have lived a normal life span. … A speech therapist from a prominent institution examined Terri, and said she was trying to speak—she was definitely communicating—but her vocal chords had atrophied. The therapist thought she could have been taught to eat [with help] without a feeding tube.”

He said photos and video images of Terri with her parents clearly indicated that she was aware of their loving presence.

The late Pope John Paul II, who died three days after Schiavo, spoke on behalf of her right to life during the Schindler family’s legal struggle to save her.

Father Frank Pavone, the founder and national director of Priests for Life, and Father Thomas Euteneur, the president of Human Life International, also helped the Schindler family publicize Terri’s tragic story during the weeks before her death.

“People in the Midwest have been a tremendous amount of support for Terri and the foundation,” Schindler said, “so we wanted to have the first concert in Indianapolis. We thought this was a good place to start this fundraiser. We plan to move it to other cities in future years. Indianapolis also worked well for Randy Travis because he was already going to be in the area in April.”

Watching Terri die was excruciatingly painful for their family, Bobby Schindler said, and they couldn’t even give her any fluids because food and water have been legally defined as medical treatment.

“She struggled to live for 14 days without nutrition and hydration,” he said. “It’s a simple procedure to insert a feeding tube. You’ll never convince me that providing food and water is a medical treatment. It’s not.”

He said Terri’s slow death by starvation “is what nightmares are made of” because it was obvious that she was visibly suffering and very frightened.

“Having to watch my parents watch their daughter die this way was almost as bad as having to watch Terri die,” Bobby Schindler said. “It was equally as gut-wrenching. When we realized that Terri wasn’t going to make it, I was more worried about my parents at that point because I saw what they were going through.”

His father suffered a cardiac arrest and died on Aug. 29, 2009, he said, obviously of a broken heart.

“There’s no doubt this killed my father,” he said. “My dad never got over the fact that he wasn’t able to protect his daughter, and wasn’t able to do anything to stop this from happening. He lived with that until he died, and he suffered terribly.”

(To purchase concert tickets, log on to www.lifeandhopeconcert.org. For information on Terri’s Foundation, log on to www.terrisfight.org.) †