Love, Honor, and Kill

From Liberty Files in response to the inscription on Terry Schiavo’s tombstone that says "Departed this Earth on February 25, 1990"

I can understand if someone has an inappropriate or controversial message on their own gravestone. Sometimes people are hopelessly screwed up and want to leave stupid messages that will preserve their image as a boob into perpetuity. But doing it to someone else’s gravestone when you are widely believed to have unclean hands in their treatment is grotesque.

Michael Schiavo lists her date of death as the date of her collapse on February 26, 1990, and that she finally met peace in 2005, after being "peacefully" dehydrated to death, of course. So is Michael admitting that the few years he kept her alive in order to collect on a medical malpractice verdict was a deliberate denial of peace to make some money? And just so it’s clear, you get more money if the person is alive and incapacitated than if they are dead, because you can recover the future costs of care, which are exorbitant, especially when you promise that you will completely rehab the patient.

The final line on the marker states "I Kept My Promise." But to which promise is he referring? The one mentioned above that he made to the jury which was the basis for their award? The promise to remain faithful to her in sickness and in health? All that twaddle about love, honor, cherish? If anyone has a clue which one of those, or any other I may have missed, was kept, please let me know so that I can appropriately credit him.

This obscene placard is Michael’s final insult to Terri and to her parents. And it confirms that Michael is truly possessed of a depraved heart, capable of singularly unfathomable acts of evil that defy comprehension. It’s like allowing Scott Peterson to write the epitaph for Laci.

But it a fitting epilogue to this very sad story. Because Terri’s story was never really about her. It was, like this marker, about Michael Schiavo. Terri was unloved in health, abandoned except for her financial value to Michael in sickness, a memorial to Michael’s neglect in her decline, and a snicker to her family who loved her in her death.

The Schindlers need not visit the gravesite where their daughter’s ashes lie and where a cruel marker mocks the open wounds of their hearts. Terri is not there. She is elsewhere. Far from the grasp of the man whom she condescended to marry.

May her soul leap with joy in the presence of her Creator. And may Michael repent. Because I’d hate to face that same Creator giggling about that barbaric inscription. He’s not laughing either. [Source]

Fr. Pavone also responds:

"Michael said, ‘I kept my promise,’ and therefore convicts himself of having killed Terri. Moreover, to say that she ‘Departed this Earth’ on February 25, 1990 illustrates the dualistic philosophy that Schiavo and his attorney Mr. Felos have. That statement shows no regard for the fact that a human person is just as much a body as a soul, and this hyperspiritual way of thinking justifies all kinds of physical violence.

"Such dualism has been condemned by the Catholic Church as a heresy. Any Catholic who does not renounce the kind of thinking demonstrated by Mr. Schiavo has ceased believing as a Catholic." [Source]

Using a tombstone as a polemic against her parents and then going so far as to make the tombstone a monument not to Terri, but to himself with the "I kept my promise" is unbelievable. Anybody viewing the tombstone in the future without knowledge of this sad episode would think the phrase was in regards to the person buried there not to the person responsible for putting here there. Since when do murderers get to write the epitaph? He should hope that his own tombstone doesn’t read "Here lies a *$*# Jerk."