Newswire

Funeral Fight Over Cremation

Cremation Uproar

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. - Terri Schiavo's imminent death won't end the bitter public family battle over her wishes. Indeed, it will only get worse.

Michael Schiavo has already made plans to have his wife cremated and to place her ashes in his family plot near Philadelphia, where they met and married.

Her parents are appalled: They want a wake, an open-casket Catholic funeral service and burial near them in western Florida so they can visit the grave.

"Even in death, he isn't going to allow them a shrine, a place to go talk to her," said Paul O'Donnell, a Franciscan monk designated to speak for the family. "He's taking her from them. Won't he at least give them her dead body?"

Another spokesman for Bob and Mary Schindler put it more bluntly. "He's a bastard," said abortion activist Randall Terry. "It's sheer spite. He's moved on with his life. Why can't he give them this?"

Ratcheting up the already ugly battle, the Schindlers, who have never allowed the possibility that their son-in-law could be acting in good faith, accuse him of wanting to cremate Terri to cover up evidence they say actually caused her brain damage.

Like the controversy over whether Terri would have wanted to die or not, the two sides are diametrically opposed about what she would have wished for her body.

"She never wanted to be put in the ground with bugs," Michael Schindler told The Tampa Tribune in 2002, the first time his wife's feeding tube was removed before her parents won a bid to reinsert it. "She always told me that."

The Schindlers say she was a practicing Catholic who would not want to be cremated. The cremation was okayed by the courts in 2002. Numerous appeals were denied.

In a desperate bid to overturn the court rulings, the parents sent a petition to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in 2003, charging that Terri's catastrophic collapse was not caused by bulimia, as doctors testified, but that "Terri was possibly strangled."

"The Schindler family believes Terri's cremation is a maneuver her husband will utilize to destroy evidence of his criminal acts," the family told Bush.

George Felos, Michael Schiavo's lawyer, said that after being so thoroughly vilified by the Schindlers, Schiavo has no compunction about flouting their wishes.

"This is a man who's been called a murderer and an abuser. These are false charges, and they know they're false charges," Felos said. "Can you imagine how Mr. Schiavo feels?"

Felos said he didn't know if Michael Schiavo, who has spent the past 10 days and nights at his dying wife's bedside, was planning a private or public service. "Frankly, I don't think he's thought that far ahead," he said.


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Posted by Editor at March 28, 2005 06:10 AM