I read two stories today, two stories that brought tears to my eyes, two stories of two men, one who died fulfilling his promise of service to his nation, and one trapped by a promise in a very public living hell, trapped there by the grief stricken and the zealots who exploit their, and his, grief.
Calvin Trillan’s description of his own tears, brought on by a story he heard on NPR as he drove to visit his grandson one day, related the first story to me.
Lost Son: Finding the Family He Left Behind, from the New Yorker, tells the story of First Lieutenant Brian Slavenas, a pilot who died in a Chinook helicopter in Iraq nearly a year ago, and the family and friends he left behind.
First Lieutenant Slavenas, I was informed by the voice of Bob Edwards, had been in command of a Chinook helicopter that was brought down by a missile as it ferried soldiers on the first leg of their trip out of Iraq for leaves. Sixteen people were killed and twenty injured-one of the first big casualty reports in the period when Donald Rumsfeld was still saying that the continuing violence in Iraq was being caused by a few dead-enders. Brian Slavenas had been a member of an Illinois National Guard unit that was deployed in April of 2003, just a couple of months after he got his degree in industrial engineering from the University of Illinois.
Haunted by the story, Trillan travels to Illinois to meet his friends and family, hoping to learn more about him and the people he left behind.
So many people came to Brian's funeral that the overflow had to be accommodated in the church basement. There were a number of military people attending in uniform, but there was no ceremonial military presence. The eulogies were about the civilian Brian Slavenas. From what was said at the funeral, it was obvious that Brian had an even broader spectrum of interests than I'd realized. He was a serious power-lifter, specializing in the bench press, but he was also a serious pianist, specializing in Chopin. He loved skiing, but he also loved chess. The friends who spoke said that despite Brian's range of competence he was modest and self-effacing. He was, by all accounts, embarrassed by attention and quiet with people he didn't know well. Jennifer Lasiowski, who had gone out with Brian for a year when they were at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in her eulogy that Brian was so shy it took him six dates to kiss her.
I learn along with Trillan about the military tradition celebrated by Brian’s father, and the equally strong anti-war tradition carried on by his mother. Two parents who may not share the same perspective, but insist on focusing on the son they lost, a man who did his best to keep his promises, and the promise he kept to his country led to his death at the controls of a helicopter on the other side of the world.
Among the people I talked to-the Slavenas family, the friends who visited Brian at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, just before his unit shipped out to the Middle East-there is agreement that Brian would have been delighted if one of his options had been to stay in Illinois. After constantly shifting back and forth between college and the military, he'd finally received the degree he had sought for years; in Ron Slavenas's words, "The world was just opening up for him." On the other hand, there is agreement that, once it was clear that such an option didn't exist, Brian would have done what was expected of him, as he always had. The way Brian went about things, John Rossi said to me, was "If you're going to do it, you might as well do it full bore."
"The single most important thing for me is to keep his spirit alive in my heart," I was told by Rosemarie Slavenas, who in her letter to George Bush had described her son as "an honorable, restrained, talented, caring man."
If that wasn’t enough, I also came across another story about Michael Schiavo. For a change, this story wasn’t about the politics, or earnest descriptions of medical conditions, or quotes from sanctimonious activists or politicians.
A husband refuses to quit in the face of anguish, vitriol:
He has been vilified on Web sites and talk shows. He's been called a wife-abuser, an adulterer, a money-grubbing murderer.
Death threats have been left in his mailbox.
Throngs of protesters have waved signs and chanted outside his house in Clearwater, Fla., and they have gathered again.
Sometimes, even Michael Schiavo's friends have wondered why, in the face of all that, he didn't just walk away.
His side of the story hasn’t been heard much in the media, a media which often describes only her parents as “her family” or “her blood family,” as though that makes their connection more real. The courts have heard it, nearly twenty times, and have ruled consistently that as her husband, he has the terrible responsibility to carry out her wishes.
So why not give it up, leave Terri's feeding tube in, let her parents care for her? After all, he is living with another woman now and they have two children.
"Because he's sticking by what he promised," Scott Schiavo, Michael's brother, said in a recent interview. "He wants to honor the last thing he can give to her."
Sadly, this possibility, that he’s a grieving husband trying to be faithful to a promise, is given short shrift in most stories about this tragic case. I read years ago, in a series of stories written by John Ostrander, that friends are the family we choose, and there is no closer friend we make in life than a lover, than a spouse, and no greater promises we make in life that the ones we give freely when we let somebody into our lives. Sadly, we seem to have lost faith in this country that people can make and keep these kinds of promises. For all the hell he’s gone through, it seems apparent that Mr Schiavo is trying to keep his.
Many of the defining moments of Michael Schiavo's life have revolved around death.
In 1988, his grandmother was hospitalized with a serious illness. She had signed a "do not resuscitate" order, Scott Schiavo said, but when she worsened in the middle of the night, no one looked at her records.
"It took them I don't know how long to get her breathing again. They stuck a ventilator down her throat." To little avail. "She was brain-dead," Scott Schiavo recounted.
All the family could do was wait until medications that kept her heart beating wore off. It took a day and a half, he said.
After the funeral, the family went to the Buck Hotel in Feasterville, Pa. Scott and Terri were sitting next to each other at a large table, where the conversation turned to how upset their grandmother would have been at her final hours.
Terri turned to him, Scott Schiavo said, "and she said, 'Not me, no way, I don't want that.' She says, 'If I'm ever like that, oh, don't let me. Pull that tube out of me.'" Scott Schiavo said he testified about the incident in 2000.
I read the stories today of two men, a gentle and gifted man who died on foreign sand, and a quiet and private man tormented by the grief stricken and the zealous. I read the stories of two men honor bound to be faithful to their promises, and I sat at my desk and cried.