As one would expect, the best newspaper in Florida is continuing to cover the Terri Schiavo case, even as the national and global media focus on events at the Vatican. Here is a direct link to The St. Petersburg Times website dedicated to the life and death of Terri. The news for today is that the precise location of her body and its immediate fate remain unknown. There also is a roundup of clergy views on the case, most of which are pro-life, and, from recent coverage, a profile of the other woman in Michael Schiavo’s life. As the pope story grows, this link is the one to keep for the aftermath of the Schiavo drama.

The St. Petersburg Times‘ detailed report on Terri Schiavo’s final hours is elegant and rigorously balanced. The article, which appears under a five-person byline, is a moving account of the grief felt by Michael Schiavo and his brother, by Terri’s siblings and parents and by the protesters who have demonstrated outside the Pinellas Park hospice.

Even amid the conflicts between Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers, we see two families saying goodbye with universally familiar rites of touch, storytelling and prayer:

In an interview late Thursday, Brian Schiavo said he and Michael had stayed up all night, sitting with Terri the entire time except when the Schindlers came in. As the night wore on, Brian said, he and Michael talked to Terri and rubbed her arms and legs, which were cold and mottled. They also traded stories about the old days with the girl they used to know.

Brian told the one about the time when Michael and Terri were dating and Brian went into the dry cleaner where she worked. He took off his pants and handed them to her. Said he’d wait. Brian stood there in his white briefs while Terri ran to the back, screaming and cracking up.

They told the one about Brian and Michael spoofing a synchronized swimming routine in the pool, and Terri laughing her huge, infectious laugh.

. . . Outside the hospice, Bobby Schindler was pleading with the police officer for another visit. The request reached Michael Schiavo. An officer knocked on the door of Terri’s room and said Bobby wanted to see her. Michael and Brian, groggy, got themselves together and said okay, then went to another hospice room down the hall where they’d been living for days.

Just after 7:30 a.m., Bobby Schindler and his sister Suzanne — accompanied by a priest, Father Frank Pavone — were led to Terri’s bedside. They stayed in the room for approximately an hour and a half.

According to Pavone, Terri could not focus her eyes and was breathing with difficulty. The hospice workers, he said, told him and the Schindler siblings that Terri wouldn’t make it through another day.

Pavone said they prayed over Terri, held her hand, stroked her hair. He sang hymns in Latin, including Hail Holy Queen, a chanted version of Ave Maria and Veni Creator Spiritus. They recited the rosary and delivered the chaplet of divine mercy, a series of prayers asking God’s mercy.

“For the sake of his sorrowful passion,” they said, “have mercy on us and on the whole world.”

The Times‘ restrained description of Terri’s dying moments, and the grief that followed, shows us the shared humanity in these battling families:

Michael Schiavo went to his wife and cradled her. Terri lay on her left side, wearing a pale nightgown. The covers were pulled over her. She had stuffed animals under her arms. Four hospice workers in the room were crying.

Michael held his wife and talked to her. Brian stood next to Michael, massaging his back.

“Michael,” he said, “it’s going to be all right.”

Almost immediately, Terri stopped breathing.

“We were there about 60 seconds,” Brian said, “and she was gone.”

The lawyers and nurses left Michael and Brian alone with her after a while. Terri’s hands were still wrapped around pads to protect her palms; Michael removed the pads and tossed them into the trash. Her hands, curled tighter and tighter into fists over the years, had relaxed a little. Michael took a red rose from a vase by her bed and put it in her hands.

By now, Terri’s parents had arrived at the hospice. Knowing they were on their way, Michael and Brian Schiavo went back to the room down the hall. Both of them were crying. Brian told his brother that he was happy for Terri, relieved that she no longer was living in such a state.

Terri’s siblings, waiting across the street in a gift shop, learned of her death from the family’s attorney, David Gibbs III. They waited for Terri’s parents at the hospice entrance. Mary Schindler, Terri’s mother, was the first to enter. Gibbs had the sense she knew her daughter was gone, even before a hospice worker spoke.

“Terri’s passed this morning,” the worker said.

Mary Schindler wept and walked down the hall to Terri’s room. Bob Schindler, about 30 seconds behind his wife, heard the news as he entered.

The Schindler family — Mary, Bob, Suzanne and Bobby — gathered around Terri’s bed. Gibbs stood in the hall, but could hear the family’s sobs.

Here is an important reminder that people are more complicated than they appear when they’re locked in an entirely public clash of worldviews, surrounded by klieg lights and TV cameras. Both Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers have become the iconic faces of the right-to-die and right-to-life movements. For those of us who have followed this story as something more than distant observers, it’s been tempting to assume the worst about one family or the other.

The debate about Terri Schiavo’s life and death remains inescapable, and the questions it raises matter immensely to those on both sides who realize that crucial matters are at stake. But the tears shed by both families as Terri Schiavo died also ought to touch something in our souls, and to prompt us to pray — not only for the comfort and strength of our allies, but also for God to shower mercy and grace into the lives of our opponents.

Earlier today, I tried to post a link to the very first New York Times article on the death of Terri Schiavo. However, the server locked up and I lost it. I did, however, save the URL for later.

Now, it appears that this story has been rewritten — no surprise — but the element of the story that most interested me is now gone. That first story had a very clear, well, blow-by-blow description of who was where at the time of Terri’s death.

Since I no longer have the text, let me reconstruct by memory. Basically, you had Terri’s siblings in the room up until just before the moment of death, then Michael Schiavo had them removed so that he could be there at the moment of death and then her parents were briefly allowed back in the room to view the body.

There just has to be more to this scene than that. Meanwhile, the re-rewritten piece by reporters William Yardley and Maria Newman now includes a version of the events that does not hide the family conflict, but also does not do as clear a job of what happened when. Here are pieces of the still-evolving text:

“Her husband was present by her bed, cradling her,” said George Felos, Michael Schiavo’s lawyer. “Mrs. Schiavo died a calm death, a peaceful death and a gentle death.” . . .

The bitterness was so intense that the two warring families could not even be in the same room with Ms. Schiavo at the same time. . . .

David Gibbs, a lawyer for Ms. Schiavo’s parents, said her brother and sister were with Ms. Schiavo until just before she died.

“While they are heartsick, this is indeed a sad day for the nation, this is a sad day for the family,” Mr. Gibbs said. “Their faith in God remains consistent and strong. They are absolutely convinced that God loves Terri more than they do.” . . .

Ms. Schiavo’s parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, came to the hospice shortly after they learned of her death and prayed at her bedside, said Brother Paul O’Donnell, a Franciscan Friar who has served as a spokesman for the parents. They left after a brief visit.

There are going to be, I predict, all kinds of rumors and secondhand accounts of how the brother and sister exited the room and precisely when the husband entered. I heard four different versions of this on the campus where I teach by the end of the workday.

For better or for worse, the blogs are going to wade in there. This is why I am disappointed that the clarity of the early Times piece seems to have vanished. Did anyone else see that early version?

Meanwhile, the Associated Press has moved on to the next battle. The burial:

Terri Schiavo’s ashes will be buried in an undisclosed location near Philadelphia so that her immediate family doesn’t show up and turn the burial into a media spectacle, a member of the Schiavo family said Thursday.

“If Mike knew they would come in peace, he would have no problem with it,” Scott Schiavo, Michael Schiavo’s brother, said during an interview at his home.

After an autopsy, Michael Schiavo plans to have his wife’s body cremated and her ashes brought to Pennsylvania, where she grew up. Scott Schiavo said the ashes would be buried in a plot left by an aunt and uncle, but the family does not plan on providing the specficic location for the burial — underscoring the bitterness of the dispute.

Her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, had fought for years to prevent her feeding tube from being removed, and they opposed cremation and wanted her buried in Florida.

On a personal note, the D.C. breau of Scripps Howard also asked me to turn an updated version of my column for this week — focusing on the Schiavo case and the current Roman Catholic teachings on cremation. If you want to see that, click here.

UPDATED: I think this is just getting started. Here is a television website report (strange coding on this thing) with a priest-said, lawyer-said debate about who offended who. Note the connection to the Priests for Life story elsewhere.

Howard Kurtz is already up with a roundup of the final media issues in the Terri Schiavo case. Lots of links to people on the right as well as the left, but the emphasis once again is on the pundits. It you want another blast of the “I know what Terri Schiavo would have wanted” opinion, then by all means click here and read it. I expect more and more coverage now on the pope’s feeding tube as the press moves on to the next story. Reporter Daniel Williams at The Washington Post is already listening to the Catholic debates and, no surprise, finds that some are already not-so-gently asking if this pope is being a good Catholic at this moment. The key: Please help GetReligion spot the good and the bad in the hard news coverage in the next 48 hours or so. Let us hear from you.

Boy was this ever a bad time for the Vatican to release the news that complications from the pope’s tracheotomy have made it so difficult to swallow that he must have a feeding tube inserted.

According to a story in The Times of London, the pope appeared at his study’s window today and visibly “struggled once more to bless thousands of pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square.”

He made the sign of the cross silently and then tried to speak, but his words “were not clear,” The Times reports. “It was a Vatican official who read out greetings and prayers.”

This followed his Easter appearance, when John Paul II attempted the address an audience, failed, and banged his fist on the podium out of anger.

Stateside, Terri Schiavo continues to linger. Who knew one could live so long without water?

Over at Reason magazine, Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young wrote that while she doesn’t think the Taliban and the “religious right” are a one-to-one match, the latter are “about as close to a Taliban as you can have in modern American society. These are people who really do want the state to enforce their vision of ‘what God wants.’”

This prompted Reason managing editor Jesse Walker to reply, “If anything, the forces of dehydration are even more of a headache. At least pro-lifers — not all of whom are from the religious right — know that they’re on a moral crusade.”

By contrast,

Much of the pro-death side pretends that they’re neutral bystanders who don’t want to “interfere” with a family’s private business, even as they actively argue for one side of the family dispute. They say they want to respect the woman’s wishes, even as [they] refer more readily to what they’d want for themselves in such a situation. And they warn gravely of a slippery slope to theocracy, without pausing to wonder whether there are any other slippery slopes to worry about.

He then linked to a piece in the Catholic magazine Voices in which a registered nurse offered a scenario that Walker judged to be “a lot more plausible than any American Taliban nightmare.”

The picture was of a soft, suffocating, ever-evolving consensus between doctors and medical ethicists to refuse to offer treatment to ever more patients whose chances they judge to be futile — and not in the classical understanding of the word.

“Instead,” the nurse wrote, some medical ethicists now “argue for a new definition of futility to overrule patients and/or families on a case-by-case basis based on the doctor’s and/or ethicist’s determination of the ‘patient’s best interest.’”

Regarding National Post columnist Colby Cosh’s latest fusillade on the Terri Schiavo matter, let me just say he reaches a remarkably churlish conclusion based upon one angry, misinformed e-mail.