Dead woman’s friends remember the real person behind the headlines

FOR those multitudes who never knew her, it was easy to forget that Terri Schiavo was a real woman who led a real life. But for her friends and family, it was impossible to forget.

Debbie Meyer, for instance, remembers the time more than 20 years ago when an excited Terri Schindler called her at college. She had a date - the first date this once overweight girl had ever had.

The boy was tall and handsome and he had kissed her. The boy was Michael Schiavo. She had met him at a sociology class at Bucks County Community College, and they married a little more than a year later.

She did not go to her senior prom. She adored Danielle Steel romances, poured over Tiger Beat magazine with her friends, debated who was cutest - Starsky or Hutch. She liked Starsky, and with her friend Sue Pickwell wrote scores of letters to Paul Michael Glaser, the actor who played her favourite.

Her shyness may have had something to do with her weight. Just 5ft 3, she weighed 200 pounds in high school.

“She cried a lot when she went to get clothes,” said her mother, Mary.

The Schindlers - Mary and Robert and their children Theresa Marie, Bobby and Suzanne - were a tight-knit family.

After she and Michael were married - on November 10, 1984, the couple lived in the Schindlers’ basement.

In 1986, they moved into a condominium her parents owned in Florida.

“Terri has always been beautiful from the inside out,” Ms Meyer said. “And then when she lost all the weight, she really became quite beautiful on the outside as well. What was inside she allowed to shine out at that point.”

In Florida, Terri was an office worker for Prudential insurance. “Everybody liked her. She was hardworking,” said Jackie Rhodes, a co-worker and friend.

Her friends and family say she was unhappy with Michael. He was controlling, they say, and tried to keep her away from them.

By this time, she weighed less than 120 pounds, and her ribs were visible.

Her family doubts that she had a real eating disorder and her doctors are not sure whether anorexia or something like it was the root of the potassium imbalance they say probably caused her heart to stop on February 25, 1990, when she collapsed in the hallway outside of her bedroom.

She was 26 years old, an ordinary woman about to be thrust into an extraordinary drama. She died 15 years later, a symbol to millions around the world, a person to those who knew and mourned her.