She was a girl who laughed easily at her uncle's lame jokes. A girl so naive that she wrote to John Denver, asking him to come sing at her wedding, who went to Disney World for her honeymoon and believed that a good life meant that one day she'd be able to vacation there every year with her kids.
She was a girl who loved animals and worshiped cute television stars, paying homage to heartthrobs Starsky and Hutch by naming two gerbils after them. She daydreamed about working for a veterinarian when she grew up, or maybe just being a dog groomer.
She was a shy girl, always overweight as a child, with big glasses, but shiny hair and perfect skin and a tendency to collapse into fifth-grade giggles. Her first car -- a black-and-gold Trans Am with a T-top roof -- exuded the flash and confidence that she herself never did.
She was a girl who married the first man she ever kissed.
"She was quiet," says childhood friend Sue Pickwell, who was a bridesmaid the day Terri Schindler married Michael Schiavo. "She didn't like the limelight. How ironic is that?"
Terri Schiavo is everywhere. There are pictures of her on the front pages of newspapers, on the Internet, on every news network on TV. A four-year-old videotape of Terri with her mother is played over and over and over again.
Who is Terri Schiavo?
The fight over her life -- and death -- is being played out, in this Easter week, as a uniquely American Passion play. Congress passed emergency legislation. The president signed it in the middle of the night, in his pajamas, after being awakened. There are picketers, prayer services, angry invective, impassioned appeals. The Vatican has weighed in. The Supreme Court has refused to do so.
For seven years now, Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers -- primarily, Terri's parents, Bob and Mary -- have been locked in a grueling war, a war over money, over control, and, in the end, over Terri's future. Schiavo wants his wife to be allowed to die. That, he says, was her wish. The Schindlers want someone -- the government, the courts, anyone with any possible authority in this situation -- to restore the feeding tube that was removed, by court order, last Friday. They want their daughter, in whatever state she is, to live.
It has been an extraordinary situation, marked by extraordinary efforts and circumstances that have dominated the national consciousness.
And all of it, her friends and family say, is about a truly ordinary girl with simple dreams and an uncomplicated life.
Who is Terri Schiavo?
Again and again, the courts recognize that she is a woman who has been in a "persistent vegetative state" since the day she suffered heart failure 15 years ago. She cannot communicate, she is not cognizant of what is happening around her, her movements are nothing more than neurological tics.
The Schindlers argue -- thus far unsuccessfully in courts of law -- that she still gets pleasure from seeing her family, that she might have a chance at some semblance of recovery, that she is still a real person somewhere inside the body she cannot control.
But who was Terri Schiavo?
That is another question altogether.
Teresa Marie Schindler had a purple-and-white bedroom in her family's home in the Philadelphia suburbs. White wicker furniture. Endless stuffed animals. Posters of '70s television stars; she liked David Cassidy more than Shaun. Her brother, Bobby, was two years younger, her sister Suzanne two years younger than that.
Her first friend was Diane Meyer. Her dad had been pals with Terri's dad forever. The girls became friends at age 2 and did family celebrations together, took annual summer vacation trips to the same hotels on the Jersey shore. Diane's little brother, Stephen, was best friends with Bobby. The boys tortured the girls regularly, in that little-brother way. Water pistol attacks. Food fights. Obnoxious public behavior designed to embarrass. That made Terri nuts. She hated to stand out.
"To those who knew her -- her friends, her family -- she was vivacious, outgoing, funny," Meyer says. "But in a crowd, she was the quiet one."
She never sought out friends, but welcomed them eagerly if they made an overture. It was in her seventh-grade classroom that she first bonded with Pickwell; they both broke up laughing over something silly that was said.
"I don't remember what it was," Pickwell says, "but everything's funny in seventh grade, I guess."
They became fast friends. There was a sleepover almost every weekend. Terri went on Pickwell family outings and vice versa.
"There was nothing extraordinary," Pickwell says. "No trying to change the world type of thing. It was your typical teenagers, watching movies, eating junk food, that kind of thing."
They were mall rats. The day Pickwell got her driver's license, that's the first place they went. It was, in their vocabulary, huge. Once Terri got her license, she and Meyer -- who went to a different school -- started hanging out frequently. They watched sappy TV movies, especially love stories and anything adapted from romance novelist Danielle Steel, Terri's favorite author. They went to the Magic Pan for crepes.
Terri's weight reached more than 200 pounds, and late in her senior year, she went on the NutriSystem diet and lost more than 50 pounds. She continued to live at home and enrolled in Bucks County Community College. On weekends, she took her Trans Am on road trips to visit Meyer, who went away to college at the University of Scranton. Meyer was a sorority sister at Gamma Phi Beta. Terri, she says, was like an honorary sorority member. She'd go to the parties, hang out, make friends.
"I don't know if it was the weight loss or maturity or all of it combined, but she started to put herself out there a little bit more," Meyer says. "And once she did, she got more success in social situations. Terri is the kind of person, you meet her, you love her."
'Her first everything'
A few months later, Terri met a guy at school. His name was Michael Schiavo.
"Michael was her first everything."
Pickwell is keeping her voice neutral. She disagrees vehemently with the decisions Michael has made about Terri's future. But that is now. This was then.
She remembers how excited Terri was. How she lit up. Michael was the first boy who ever really looked at Terri. The first boy to ask her on a date.
"I remember she called me, and she asked me to come home for the weekend," Meyer said. "She wanted me to be there."
The first date was dinner, a movie, and that first-ever kiss. On the second date, Terri took Schiavo to meet Pickwell and her family. Pulling aside Pickwell and her big sister, Terri confided that Michael wanted to marry her.
"What? Are you crazy?" Pickwell remembers telling her then.
But Terri was giddy with excitement. "Everything happened so fast and it was such a good feeling for her," Pickwell says. "He was good-looking and it felt good to have someone pay attention to her. I think she was overwhelmed."
In one of his rare interviews, Michael Schiavo talked about how hard he fell for her. "She had this presence, this aura, that just attracted you," he told CNN. "She was shy and outgoing at the same time."
He introduced her to his big, boisterous family -- Michael is the youngest of five sons -- at a family birthday party. She hung back at first, but surprised the brothers by engaging in their games of sibling grief. All those years of water fights. All those years of little-brother abuse.
"She fit right in," says Scott Schiavo, one of Michael's brothers. "Mike was always a happy kid, but when he met Terri he just perked up tenfold."
Quick engagement
Terri and Michael were engaged relatively quickly, and Terri began making plans for an elaborate wedding at Our Lady of Good Counsel, the Catholic parish the Schindler family attended. She was still a month shy of her 21st birthday when the big day came. In that interview with CNN, Michael Schiavo said when he first saw Terri come down the aisle, he thought she was "just gorgeous. All I saw was this big smile."
Their first dance was to "Tonight I Celebrate My Love," by Peabo Bryson and Roberta Flack.
After the wedding, Terri drifted apart from her close girlfriends. She and Meyer had a falling-out and never really spoke again. Terri remained friends with Pickwell, but, Pickwell says, "they were newlyweds. You wanted to give them space."
Meanwhile, Terri was folded into the big, tight-knit Schiavo family. Karen Schiavo, a sister-in-law, says that she instantly became one of them, and that Michael and Terri were "deeply in love."
A few years later, the Schindlers decided to move to Florida, and Michael and Terri followed. She got an office job at an insurance company, he went to work managing a restaurant. Their hours were opposite -- Terri on days, Michael on nights -- so they didn't see a lot of each other.
At work, Terri made friends with some co-workers, including Jackie Rhodes. They went shopping together. Visited Terri's grandmother at a nearby nursing home. Went swimming at the pool where the Schindlers had their condo. Terri loved watching the dolphins in the Intracoastal Waterway.
She also started to lose more weight. If she had developed an eating disorder -- medical experts have said that complications from bulimia may have led to her heart failure -- she hid it well. Scott Schiavo remembers sitting next to her when the couple came back to Pennsylvania for a family funeral. Terri was eating a huge plate of food, but she was thinner than ever.
"I asked her how she could eat like that and still be so thin," Scott remembers. "She laughed and said she must just have a good metabolism."
By 1989, Rhodes says, Terri and Michael were having marital problems. The Schindlers have suggested the same in recent years. The Schiavos dispute that claim. Still, both Rhodes and Michael Schiavo (in an interview with CNN) say that the couple had been trying to conceive a child. Terri went to see a gynecologist to address problems with an irregular menstrual cycle.
The last time she spoke to Terri, Rhodes says, she had just gone to get her hair done. Terri was toying with going back to her natural color, so Rhodes called that Saturday to ask what she had decided. Terri, Rhodes says, was in tears; she and Michael had had a fight over the cost of the salon visit.
Early the next morning, in February 1990, Terri collapsed in the hallway in her house. Michael heard her fall, found her there. She was 26 years old, weighed 110 pounds and was in heart failure because of a severe potassium imbalance.
Inside Woodside Hospice, Michael Schiavo likes to hold his wife's hand, according to his brother Scott. Today will be the seventh day Terri Schiavo has gone without the feeding tube that sustained her. Her husband sits vigil with her most of the day, his brothers Brian and Bill on hand to support him. Michael adjusts Terri's positions, moves her, makes sure there will be no bedsores. And he talks to her -- talks to her the way one talks to the headstone of a loved one at the cemetery.
"You know how that is?" says Scott, who calls his brother's cell phone multiple times a day for updates. "How you do it because it makes you feel better, even though you know they can't hear anything you say?"
The Schiavos leave the room when the Schindlers come to visit. They, too, take turns trying to make Terri comfortable. They stroke her hands, kiss her hair. And they, too, talk to her.
"We talk to her about getting her out and taking her to lunch," says Mike Tammaro, her uncle. "We tell her we're working hard to take her to lunch. The other night, we said, 'We're taking you out to breakfast tomorrow, Terri.' "
The family's vigil, Tammaro says, is tense and tearful. They watch carefully for signs of decline.
"I believe she's hearing some of this," Tammaro says. "I really do. I don't know how much. I don't know what state her mind is in. It doesn't matter. We just want her alive and home."
For Michael, Scott Schiavo says, the days are filled with sadness and frustration and anger at the politicians and their attempts to intervene in what he considers a very personal decision. Michael, Scott says, wanted this to be a private moment.
The Schiavos are grieving, too, he says. He says Terri wasn't a sister-in-law to him, she was a sister. He breaks down.
"It's so sad that they've turned this wonderful person into a sideshow," Scott says, his voice shaking. "Into a media circus. It's such a shame. It really is. The one that's hurt the most here is Terri. Her memory. They're taking away whatever dignity she had left. They're taking it away. And it really stinks."
And so they take turns in the room, two sets of family, each with their own version of who Terri Schiavo is now.
Perhaps there will be some last-minute intervention. More likely, her life is coming to an end. In her hospice room, she is surrounded by stuffed animals. The world has fast-forwarded 15 years. Terri Schiavo is 41 years old. But who she was -- a shy little girl, a woman still able to find joy in a simple stuffed bunny -- will forever be suspended in time.