The sights and sounds of Pinellas Park

By Helen Valois

Palm trees, swimming pools, and a sudden, blessed release from the gripping chill of mid-March in the north would normally spell "vacation!" to the American psyche. Our times, however, have long since ceased to qualify as what was formerly called normal. Our family had arrived in Florida to protest the starvation/dehydration of Terri Schindler Schiavo, instead.

People have asked me to write down some of my experiences there, for the benefit of those who were not able to attend but who were present in spirit. I am happy to try to do so. Perhaps, in years to come, I will be able to articulate systematically the mind-throwing horror of all that went on. At the moment, though, still prone to crying jags and long spells of zombie-like silence, I can only begin to pull together the jumble of impressions assaulting one's sensibilities at and around Woodside Hospice in Pinellas Park, our own little Auschwitz tucked away in the heart of America's playground.

Sure, the surrounding area matches neither one's carefree childhood memories, nor the exaggerated recreational ecstasy hyped in the vacation commercials, in the first place. Nature's beauty is blemished by "adult pleasure" stores on practically every block, while billboards exhort the exploitably indolent to "Find Your Inner Gamer." Still, living in this decaying culture as all of us have been providentially called upon to do, one is used to expunging such things from one's mind, and moving on.

It was in the relatively prosaic surroundings of Kmart's clothing department that, searching for an outfit more suited to the temperature, I began to come to grips with the reality of Terri's situation. To the staring embarrassment of the other shoppers, I began to weep openly at the interior question I had posed to myself: "What does one wear to a starvation, anyway?" I settled on a pair of tan pants and a tee shirt reading, "Faith, Hope, and Charity," all decorated with little flowers.

There is a Winn Dixie at the corner of 66th and 102nd, and I stopped there for some supplies on my way to the hospice. "Have a nice day," chirruped the baggers, despite the sign reading "MURDER IN PROGRESS" on a nearby telephone pole, with an arrow underneath the words. "You, too," I murmured robotically. Like every other thoughtful denizen of the post-World War II world, I have wondered, often and urgently, how the Germans were able to go about their daily lives while their countrymen were dragged from their homes and butchered in plain sight of the whole country. Now, I know.

On past the little stand in the corner of the parking lot, where the locals refill their gallon jugs ("Would you people stop parking here? We need our water!" a woman would yell at me on one occasion, completely without irony on the conscious level). Cross the street, down the sidewalk, and there you are. Media on your right, protesters and policepersons on your left, while inside a woman lies dying wretchedly, needlessly, with the appeals of her tormented mother broadcast instantaneously to the four corners of the earth. "This is surreal, totally surreal," we "crazies" remarked to one another within our taped-off areas of confinement, while the policepersons joked among themselves about Pinellas Park's "fifteen minutes of fame."

As the minutes dragged into hours and hours into days, as hope for Terri's survival and the survival of decency in the western world dwindled into nothingness, there were images that stood out. There was Bob Schindler, smoking and looking haggard, yet taking time to shake hands with Terri's supporters and to joke with the children among them, my daughter included. When I approached him to say that many of us in Wisconsin were fasting and praying for his family, he gave me a bear hug I will never forget, wherein I sobbed weakly while he comforted and encouraged me.

There was Paul O'Donnell of the Franciscan Brothers of Peace, whose steadfast presence — never hostile, never compromised — provided an incarnate example of all that Christianity means, in the face of all that opposes it.

There was my friend's Dalmatian, "arrested" and evicted from the premises for donning a sign that read, "Treat Terri Like Me."

There was the local reporter who shoved a microphone in my seven-year-old son's face and asked him why he was standing out in the rain. "Because everyone should know what's happening to Terri, and that it's wrong," that intrepid (and dripping) youngster replied.

There was the sunburnt afternoon on which I was obliged to ask a CNN cameraman if I could sit down for a while, since hours of holding up manila envelopes (Winn Dixie was out of poster board) reading "George 'Pontius' Bush" and "Jeb 'Pilate' Bush" was starting to bother my back. The cameraman kindly complied. In fact, he was elaborately polite about it all, as though he considered it magnanimous of him to share his plastic lawn chair with one of the sign-toting caste.

The day came when the protesting died down and even Mr. Schindler, for understandable reasons, ceased to appear. We knew then that it was only a matter of time. And even now, when everyone knows the end of the story, so few people seem to genuinely understand it.

Perhaps my mentioning something that I heard, rather than saw, beneath the palm trees of Pinellas Park will help. It came from the cracked window of a police car that was parked in the hospice's horseshoe driveway. The car was marked "K-9 Unit" on its door. The sound was the growl of a German Shepherd, rumbling into the crescendo of a full-throated bark.

© Helen Valois