BY SANDY BAUERS KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
PHILADELPHIA -- He has been vilified on Web sites and talk shows. He's been called a wife-abuser, an adulterer, a money-grubbing murderer.
RELATED CONTENT # Wednesday's developments in the Schiavo case
Death threats have been left in his mailbox.
Throngs of protesters have chanted outside his house in Clearwater, Fla.
Sometimes, even Michael Schiavo's friends have wondered why, in the face of all that, he didn't just walk away.
It would have been easier for him to relinquish guardianship of his severely incapacitated wife, Terri, to her parents.
So why not give it up, leave Terri's feeding tube in and let her parents care for her? After all, he is living with another woman, and they have two children.
"Because he's sticking by what he promised," Scott Schiavo, Michael's brother, said in a recent interview. "He wants to honor the last thing he can give to her."
Physicians have testified that Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state and will never improve. Michael Schiavo has said his wife told him she would not want to live like that.
Her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, say she is responsive and can be helped. They say that as a Catholic, she would choose life at all costs.
Throughout the protracted legal battle, the Schindlers have made their religious views, anguish and mistrust of Michael Schiavo a public cause.
Intensely private, according to his family and friends, Michael Schiavo rarely has spoken publicly about the matter, out of respect for his wife. Through his brother, he declined to be interviewed for this report.
However, in recent days he has gone on national television to reiterate that his wife would not have wanted to be kept alive artificially and criticize politicians for getting involved in a personal matter.
His brother and friends also have decided that it's time to speak up. The mudslinging, they said, has become too ugly, too nasty.
"I have a friend who I think has been maligned," said Russ Hyden of Gainesville, Fla.
"We're tired of it. We're done. It's time people know who he is," said Scott Schiavo, who lives in Levittown, Pa., near where the brothers were raised.
The thing is, even if Michael Schiavo wins the final court battle, he really hasn't won at all, his brother said.
"He's already lost," he said. "He's already lost Terri."
Holding on to Terri
Michael Schiavo's brother and friends describe him as social within his circle but otherwise almost reclusive. Except for the No Trespassing sign on his front lawn and the armed guards he occasionally has hired to protect his home, he has tried to grasp whatever shreds of normalcy he can.
His friends don't see the demon that protesters who have hurled insults at him do.
Wilma Mackay, a 65-year-old retiree from Palm Harbor, Fla., who watched her husband and brother die of cancer, sees a man who is "the epitome of loyalty."
Bonnie Rowley of Largo, Fla., a friend for about a decade, sees someone who "stands strong on what he believes in, and that is Terri Schiavo. If I needed a health care advocate, he'd be my first choice. I know he'd be there till the end, and he'd give it one hell of a fight."
Michael Schiavo, 41, is the youngest of five boys. Six-foot-seven, athletic and model-handsome, he met Terri Schindler at Bucks County Community College near Philadelphia in 1982.
Married two years later, they moved to Florida, where, early on the morning of Feb. 25, 1990, Michael Schiavo has testified, he awoke to the sound of a thud and found Terri on the floor in the hallway, unconscious. They had been married a little over five years.
He has spent three times as long -- the last 15 years -- first trying to bring her back, then trying to let her go, his friends and brother say.
In the beginning, they say, Michael Schiavo was relentless in his search for his wife's cure. She underwent various therapies.
He rented a house large enough for him and her parents, who had moved to the area.
He made sure she was dressed every day. He applied her makeup and dabbed on perfume, Rowley said.
He went to school to become a nurse "because he wanted to take care of Terri," Scott said. "He swore that he could get Terri better. ... One doctor said, 'Mike, you know what? There's nothing else we can do. ... Why don't you just let nature take its course?' And Mike wouldn't do it."
Many of the defining moments of Michael Schiavo's life have revolved around death.
In 1988, his grandmother was hospitalized with a serious illness. She had signed a "do not resuscitate" order, Scott Schiavo said, but when she worsened in the middle of the night, no one looked at her records.
"It took them I don't know how long to get her breathing again. They stuck a ventilator down her throat," Scott Schiavo recounted. But it was to little avail. "She was brain-dead."
All the family could do was wait until medications that kept her heart beating wore off. It took a day and a half, he said.
After the funeral, the family went to the Buck Hotel in Feasterville, Pa. Scott and Terri were sitting next to each other at a large table, when the conversation turned to how upset the grandmother would have been at her final hours.
Terri turned to him, Scott Schiavo said, "and she said, 'Not me, no way. I don't want that.' She says, 'If I'm ever like that, oh, don't let me. Pull that tube out of me.' " Scott Schiavo said he testified about the incident in 2000.
In the years since Terri's collapse, the Schiavo brothers lost both their parents. Eventually, Scott said, his brother realized he would have to let Terri go, too.
The Schindlers -- who did not respond to a request for an interview made through their lawyer -- have distrusted Michael Schiavo's motives partly because, they have said, no one mentioned their daughter's wishes until years after her collapse.
But, Scott said, "it's not something you think about while Mike's trying to save her life. ... It's something that people do when there's nothing left to do."
Trying to move on
Michael Schiavo met his girlfriend, identified in court records as Jodi Centonze, about a decade ago.
The couple have two toddlers -- a daughter and a son. Michael Schiavo works in the medical unit of the Pinellas County Jail.
Centonze has been a flashpoint for Michael Schiavo's critics who think it is a reason to disqualify him as Terri's guardian. His living with Centonze "abrogates the covenant of marriage," said Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council, who was among the demonstrators outside the hospice last week.
Centonze and Michael Schiavo had to face "their own moral dilemmas as far as having children out of wedlock," said Rowley, who was Centonze's friend when the couple met. "But the two of them weren't getting any younger. ... So does that make him a bad person because he did that? Did he fluff his responsibility to Terri at any point? No."
It is Centonze, Scott Schiavo said, who does all of Terri's laundry. "She's been unbelievable. She supported Mike in everything he did. ... She's gone with Mike to visit Terri. She's helped Mike clean Terri up."
Looking back on it now, Scott said he thinks his brother "just wanted somebody to love him." He equated it with a widower who remarries, "but it doesn't mean that that person stopped loving their spouse that passed on. Mike was very lonely. I mean, he was a 26-year-old kid" when Terri collapsed.
In a way, Michael Schiavo has said he can sympathize with Terri's parents. "I have children, and, you know, I couldn't even fathom what it would be like to lose a child," he said in an interview on ABC's "Nightline" last week.
But, he said, "they know the condition Terri is in. They were there in the beginning. They heard the doctors. They know that Terri's in a persistent vegetative state. They testified to that at the original trial. Fifteen years -- you've got to come to grips with it sometime."
He said Terri would "always be a part of my life."
"And to sit here and be called a murderer and an adulterer by people that don't know me, and a governor stepping into my personal, private life, who doesn't know me either? And using his personal gain to win votes, just like the legislators are doing right now, pandering to the religious right, to the people up there, the antiabortion people, standing outside of Tallahassee?
"What kind of government is this? This is a human being. This is not right."
Much of Michael Schiavo's world still revolves around Terri. He calls every day and visits several times a week, Scott Schiavo said. He can still talk to her, even if she doesn't talk back.
Michael Schiavo told CNN on Saturday that he had a "sense of relief" now that the feeding tube had been removed and he promised to "stay by her side" till the end.
"This is her time," he said. "I will love her, and I will hold her hand." -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>