Terri Schiavo's husband and her parents made plans today for separate memorial services, as the family's bitter division over her fate endured beyond the brain-damaged Florida woman's death.
Ms Schiavo, center of a wrenching legal dispute that drew in the US Congress and President George W. Bush, died yesterday, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed under order from a state court.
Forensic experts were conducting an autopsy on the 41-year-old woman's body at the district medical examiner's office in Largo, Florida, and the body could be released later today.
The long legal wrangle over Ms Schiavo's fate wound its way through countless appeals in state and federal courts - and it it took a court order to rule that as her legal guardian, husband Michael Schiavo could proceed with plans for a cremation, followed by burial of the ashes in his home state, Pennsylvania.
The parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, fought the courts and their son-in-law to keep their daughter alive and wanted to bury her in Florida without cremation. They planned a memorial service in the St Petersburg, Florida, area next week.
Ms Schiavo died five years after a state court first ruled on the side of Mr Schiavo that she fell into a persistent vegetative state after a cardiac arrest in 1990, with no consciousness of her surroundings, and would not have wanted to live.
The Schindlers, believing that their daughter responded to them and had a chance of improving with treatment, fought to prolong her life in a struggle taken up by conservative Christians, anti-abortion and disabled rights activists.
Schiavo's parents and brother and sister implicitly rebuked Michael Schiavo in a statement yesterday, saying she was at rest "after these recent years of neglect at the hands of those who were supposed to protect and care for her."
Michael Schiavo's brothers defended him. "These people have done nothing but twist and turn and spin this thing. ... They've made my brother out to be a demon, vilified as a murderer," Brian Schiavo told CNN's Larry King Liveyesterday evening.
Another Schiavo brother, Scott, was asked whether there could be eventual peace between the families. He replied, "I think if the Schindlers apologize to him there could be."