Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [91]
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In 2005 the country was mesmerized by the last battle in the terrible family war over the life and death of Terri Schiavo, in which her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, fought her husband, Michael Schiavo, over control of her life, or what remained of it. “It is almost beyond belief, given the sea of distance between them now, that Terri Schiavo’s husband and parents once shared a home, a life, a goal,” wrote one reporter. Of course, it is not at all beyond belief to students of self-justification. At the start of Terri and Michael’s marriage, the couple and her parents stood close together at the top of the pyramid. Michael called his in-laws Mom and Dad. The Schindlers paid the couple’s rent in their early struggling years. When Terri Schiavo suffered massive brain damage in 1990, the Schindlers moved in with their daughter and son-in-law to jointly take care of her, and that is what they did for nearly three years. And then, the root of many rifts—money—was planted. In 1993, Michael Schiavo won a malpractice case against one of Terri’s physicians, and was awarded $750,000 for her care and $300,000 for the loss of his wife’s companionship. A month later, husband and parents quarreled over the award. Michael Schiavo said it began when his father-in-law asked how much money he, Robert, would receive from the malpractice settlement. The Schindlers said the fight was about what kind of treatment the money should be spent on; the parents wanted intensive, experimental therapy and the husband wanted to give her only basic care.
The settlement was the first straw, forcing parents and husband to make a decision about how it should be spent and who deserved the money, because each side legitimately felt entitled to make the ultimate decisions about Terri’s life and death. Accordingly, Michael Schiavo briefly blocked the Schindlers’ access to his wife’s medical records; they tried for a time to have him removed as her guardian. He was offended by what he saw as a crass effort by his father-in-law to claim some of the settlement money; they were offended by what they saw as his selfish motives to get rid of his wife.2 By the time the country witnessed this family’s final, furious confrontation, one inflamed by the media and opportunistic politicians, their reciprocally intransigent positions seemed utterly irrational and insoluble.
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In January 1979, the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, faced with a growing public insurrection against him, fled Iran for safety in Egypt, and two weeks later the country welcomed the return of its new Islamic fundamentalist leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whom the shah had sent into exile more than a decade earlier. In October, the Carter administration reluctantly permitted the shah to make a brief stopover in the United States on humanitarian grounds, for medical treatment for his cancer. Khomeini denounced the American government as the “Great Satan,” urging Iranians to demonstrate against the United States and Israel, the “enemies of Islam.” Thousands of them heeded his call and gathered outside the American embassy in Tehran. On November 4, several hundred Iranian students seized the main embassy building and took most of its occupants captive, of whom fifty-two remained as hostages for the next 444 days. The captors demanded that the shah be returned to Iran for trial, along with the billions of dollars they claimed the shah had stolen from the Iranian people. The Iran hostage crisis was the 9/11 of its day; according to one historian, it received more coverage on television and in the press than any other event since World War II. Ted