Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (12 page)

Dana was still waiting for Will to stir from his afternoon nap when the phone rang in her room at the Holiday Inn. It was 3:20, and she thought for a moment that Chris might have fin- ished early and was calling with good news about his perfor- mance. She realized she was wrong the instant she heard the strange voice at the other end of the line. It was Peter Lazar, one of the riders who had driven down from New York with Chris to compete.

“Now, don’t panic,” Lazar told Dana.

Her heart sank. Before Dana could say anything, Lazar con- tinued, “Chris had a spill.” She could already tell by his measured tone and the careful parsing of words that this was more than a sprained wrist. “I don’t know why,” Lazar said mysteriously, “but they had to take him off in a stretcher.”

Dana was not prone to panic, although she knew she had to be at her husband’s side. She approached the situation the way she ap- proached everything in life: methodically, and with confidence. She scooped Will out of bed, asked for directions to the hospital, and drove herself there.

Carrying Will into the emergency room, Dana was surprised at how quiet everything seemed; she was, with the exception of one woman whose adolescent son was having a relatively minor cut stitched up, the only person in the waiting room.

“Hi, I’m Dana Reeve,” she said to one nurse who passed by. “My husband is here.”

“Oh, OK,” the nurse answered matter-of-factly. “Is my husband all right? Is he OK?”

The nurse looked at her blankly. “The doctor,” she said calmly, “will be out in a minute.”

She would not have to hear from the doctor to realize that something was terribly wrong. Outside the waiting room, Dana had a clear view of a white-and-red medical helicopter with the name “Pegasus” emblazoned on the side landing in the parking lot. “Look, Mommy,” Will said, pointing to the helicopter. “A horsy with
wings
!”

The young emergency room doctor on duty, William Maloney, had already ordered that Chris be airlifted the forty-five miles to the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville. As the chopper waited, Dana, still holding on tight to Will, was es- corted to Dr. Maloney’s office. With Will sitting in her lap and playfully “honking” Mommy’s nose, Dana was told the grim news: Chris had broken his neck, and only a respirator was keeping him alive. If he had any chance for survival, he would require the kind

of cutting-edge care that only a major medical facility like UVA Medical Center could provide. With each new, devastating state- ment about Chris’s condition, Dana merely nodded. By the time the doctor was finally finished running down the list of injuries and what they meant, Dana felt as if she had just been worked over in a boxing ring. All the while Will, oblivious to what was going on, kept honking Mommy’s nose.

There was no guarantee that Chris would even survive the hel- icopter trip. “Perhaps you should see your husband now,” Dr. Maloney told Dana. She knew what they were saying, but she had Will with her and did not want to upset the little boy. She handed Will to a nurse, and was taken to the room in intensive care where Chris was hooked up to a ventilator. According to a member of the hospital staff, Dana was “wide-eyed, obviously in shock, and it looked like she might just keel over. But then she put her hand on his shoulder, whispered ‘I love you,’ took a deep breath, and walked away.”

Dana called the one man she always relied on for sound med- ical advice: her dad. When she told him that Chris had broken his neck, Chuck Morosini did not even try to conceal his anxi- ety. “Oh God,” he blurted out. But his concern was also tempered by a belief that, with the best medical care, Chris was young and strong enough to overcome the odds. “Look, honey,” he told his daughter, “if anyone can beat this, it’s Chris.”

Dana certainly believed it. For now, however, she had a job to do. She and Will had to be there when Chris regained conscious- ness at the UVA Medical Center. Dana had her own coping method for situations like these, although she had to admit to her- self that there had never really been a time quite like this. Rather

than crumbling, she merely dealt with the situation head-on— calmly, efficiently, and without complaint. She carried Will to her rental car, drove back to the Holiday Inn, then packed up their things and checked out. She even managed a wan smile for an in- sistent fan who wanted to have her picture taken with Dana. She then strapped Will into his car seat and drove the forty-five miles to UVA.

During the drive, Dana prayed that Chris would survive his injuries. When she got to the hospital around four-thirty, she was taken aside by emergency room doctor Mohan Nadkarni.

“I had to break the news of what had happened,” Nadkarni said. “Dana was amazing. She was clearly upset but kept herself together. She was horrified, but she never broke down.”

“Mo,” as he insisted on being called, told her that Chris had been taken to an intensive care unit on the sixth floor in the hos- pital’s west wing. Mo thought Dana needed to know that there was a chance Chris might never again breathe on his own. For whatever reason, this was even harder to take than the news that Chris might die from his injuries. Dana reeled backward, then steadied herself.

Dana’s father was among the first to arrive at the hospital, and, according to Dr. Nadkarni, the two discussed whether Dana would give instructions to stop the ventilator. “They decided they wouldn’t do anything,” Nadkarni said, “until Matthew and Alexandra had had a chance to see their father.”

At this point, Dr. Nadkarni offered to spend some time with Will while Dana saw her husband. Mo and Will became fast friends, and over the next few days the doctor would frequently help Dana out by babysitting. Dana walked into the ICU, where

Chris lay unconscious. A metal device was attached to his head, holding it in place to prevent further damage to the spine. She sat down next to her husband, and began singing softly to him. Over the next few days, she would sing some of the songs they liked to harmonize on—including “Red River Valley” and “Home on the Range.” Another favorite, which they had taught to Will, was Tom Chapin’s “This Pretty Planet.”

“It was very moving to hear Dana sing that song,” said hospi- tal administrator Rebecca Lewis, who became a close friend of the Reeves. “Her voice had this gentle, soothing quality, yet it almost brought you to tears at the same time.”

Even as Dana sang to her comatose husband, family and friends began streaming toward the hospital. Matthew, Alexan- dra, and their mother, Gae Exton, were all struggling to contain their emotions as photographers snapped them at Heathrow waiting to board a flight bound for the United States. Half sib- lings, stepsiblings, parents, stepparents, and Chris’s brother Ben made their way to Charlottesville. They would provide a bulwark of support, but in the end no one came close to bearing the bur- den that would be carried by Dana from this moment on.

Dana listened patiently as Dr. John Jane, the hospital’s cherub- faced chief of neurosurgery, explained her husband’s condition. First, he told her Chris was fortunate to be alive at all. There was apparently no brain damage, but Chris was not out of the woods yet. The next step was an operation to reconnect his skull to his spine. It was something that had never been attempted before, and because there was a real possibility he might not survive the surgery, they needed Dana’s consent.

Dana, however, was not about to take Chris’s control over his own fate away from him. They would have to wait for Chris to regain consciousness and ask him what course
he
wanted to take. For the next five days, Dana sat by the bed and watched as Chris drifted in and out of consciousness. In addition to singing to him, she sometimes swabbed the inside of his mouth with fruit-flavored swabs—he was permitted no liquids or solids leading up to his possible surgery.

The first few times he regained consciousness, Chris launched into wild-eyed rants about the forces of evil who were out to get him—paranoid delusions caused by the drugs he had been given and the disorienting effect of simply being in the ICU. Chris’s bizarre behavior “threw me at first,” Dana later said. She worried that they were an indication that Chris might have suffered some sort of brain damage—until doctors explained that such halluci- nations were common, and temporary in nature.

Ironically, while a delusional Chris kept urging Dana to “get the gun” so they could fight off intruders, she was actually resisting ef- forts on the part of one family member to end his suffering. Al- most from the moment she was told her son would in all likelihood be totally paralyzed from the neck down and not even be able to breathe on his own—if he survived at all—Barbara Johnson lob- bied to have doctors remove Chris from life support.

With every passing hour, Barbara became more and more agi- tated. “You know Chris wouldn’t want to live like this,” she told everyone but Dana, who kept repeating that all decisions about his future were to be made by him and him alone. “I don’t know why,” Barbara went on, “we are doing some of these measures . . .”

Observed one hospital staffer, “Chris’s mom was very sweet, but, understandably, she was also very emotional. This was her first- born child.”

The argument over whether or not to allow Chris’s life to end at this juncture raged on out of Dana’s earshot, in hospital corri- dors and waiting rooms, and at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, where the family was staying. Barbara kept pushing the issue, talk- ing directly to Dr. Jane and his deputy, Dr. Scott Henson, and at one point consulting the hospital clergy. No man embraced action and excitement more than Chris. To be strapped, motionless, to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, breathing only with the aid of a machine—this would be a living hell for her son, Barbara argued. The humane thing, she said, would be to end his suffering now. It was what Chris would want.

Finally, Barbara reportedly decided to take matters into her own hands. She announced that, the following day, they were go- ing to take Chris off life support. She was told that perhaps she was letting the emotion of the moment get the better of her, and that now was the time for a little patience. Chuck Morosini was more blunt: Nothing was to be done, he said firmly, without the express consent of his daughter.

When Matthew and Alexandra finally did arrive from England with their mother, Exton walked directly up to Dana and handed her a dozen roses. “I want you to know,” Exton said, “that I care deeply for you, too.” Dana, moved by the gesture, embraced her husband’s former lover.

On Friday, June 1—fully five days after his fall—Chris seemed aware enough of his surroundings to give his consent to the sur- gery. But first he had to decide whether or not it was worth the

effort. Chris later confessed that simple embarrassment over his physical state and the burden it caused for others fueled thoughts of suicide. “Oh, I don’t want to cause you people trouble,” he would say to Dana, or “I don’t want to be a burden.”

Barbara Johnson, whom Chris later acknowledged was only acting “out of love” when she lobbied to take him off life sup- port, had correctly anticipated her son’s wishes. “At first, Chris wanted to die—no question,” Dr. Jane recalled. “He was very in- sistent about that. He was a smart guy. He knew what was go- ing on. Here was a man who got up every morning wondering whether he was going to sail his yacht or fly his plane or play ten- nis. Suddenly, he can’t move, he can’t feel. He didn’t feel this new life he was faced with was worth living.”

Finally, when he and Dana were alone, Chris confronted the issue head-on. “Maybe,” he said to her, “we should let me go.” Dana had been holding everything in until now, for Will’s sake.

But at this moment, she began to weep. After she regained her composure, she looked Chris in the eye and firmly told him where she stood. “Toph, I am only going to say this once,” she said. “I will support whatever you want to do, because this is your life, and your decision. But I want you to know that I’ll be with you for the long haul, no matter what . . . You’re still
you
. And I love you.”

It was the moment that saved Chris’s life, and the defining mo- ment in their relationship. There was not the slightest hint of pity in what Dana was saying. She was expressing her love and com- mitment to him, but also her need for him, and Chris felt it.

Dana did not, however, leave the issue there. She pointed out that he had not suffered brain damage, that once he emerged from

the fog of medication he would realize that he was as mentally sharp as ever. But if that wasn’t enough, then she made him a proposition: “We should wait for at least two years. Then, if you still feel it’s not worth it, we’ll both figure out a way to let you go.” (Later, Dana would confess that this maneuver was “just, you know, a sales technique.”)

Chris smiled wanly. “This is way beyond the marriage vows,” he half-joked, “in sickness and in health.”

“I know,” Dana replied.

Almost from the moment paramedics carried Chris off the field in Culpeper, reporters were frustrated by the lack of information being made available to them. The hospital, bowing to the fam- ily’s wishes, would only say that Reeve was in “serious but stable” condition. Actually Dana, still trying to sort out the facts herself, had decided the best course for the time being was a news black- out. Toward that end, she asked Chris’s publicist Lisa Kasteler to stonewall the press. After Kasteler repeatedly claimed not to know anything about Chris’s condition, she was asked just whom she was speaking for—Dana or Chris. Kasteler answered simply, “They are one and the same right now.”

At first, some news organizations, left to assume that Reeve had not been seriously injured and was on the mend, basically down- played the story or ignored it altogether. But as the mystery deep- ened, more than sixty reporters from around the world descended on Charlottesville looking for answers. Tabloid reporters staked out the hospital and worked their phones, offering cash to hospital em- ployees for inside information. TV camera crews gathered in the

parking lot, hoping to corner a family member or doctor. Aware that at least one reporter had been found wandering the hospital corridors in search of Chris, extra security guards were posted at the main entrance and just down the hall from his room.