Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (21 page)

Chris hosted the “Paralympics” for disabled athletes in Atlanta that August, and then went on the
Today
show to proclaim that he not only expected to walk by the time he was fifty, but that by then he fully intended to be playing tennis—and winning. Later that same day, with Dana looking proudly on from the presidential box next to then–First Lady Hillary Clinton, Chris gave the opening night speech at the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Again, the audience of several thousand was moved to tears as the actor who once soared as Superman made an emotional plea for the government to do more for the disabled.

Urging his country to “take care of our family and not slash programs people need,” Chris invoked the name of another fa- mous wheelchair-bound American to drive home his point. “President Roosevelt shows us that a man who could barely lift

himself out of a wheelchair could still lift a nation out of despair.” During Chris’s emotional twenty-minute-long speech, the crowd leaped to its feet cheering more than a dozen times.

Two days after the convention ended, the Reeves were back home when they learned along with the rest of the world that Princess Diana had been killed in a Paris car crash. Chris and the princess had danced at the party following the London pre- miere of
Superman II
nearly two decades earlier, and he treas- ured her letters of support. “I’ll always remember dancing with you,” Diana wrote Chris just weeks after his accident, “and I hope someday we’ll dance together again. If anyone can do it, you can.”

Chris and Dana both kept up with the latest research by invit- ing the leading experts to visit them at their home in Bedford. “Most important, Chris has brought a new enthusiasm to the sci- entists,” American Paralysis Association president Mitchell Stoler said. “He’s inspired them.”

For his part, Chris did not shrink from his new role as a cham- pion of the disabled. Not that it was a task he would have sought out. “It seems,” he told Dana, “I’ve become president of a club I never wanted to join.”

It was in that capacity that Chris narrated the Emmy-winning
Without Pity: A Film About Abilities,
part of HBO’s
America Under- cover
series. He declined to appear on camera, fearing that his pres- ence might distract from the stories of the disabled people profiled in the documentary.

Chris felt almost as shy about showing up for the first Christo- pher Reeve Foundation fund-raising gala in his hometown of

Princeton. On January 12, 1997, some twelve hundred people showed up at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre—the very theater where Chris first appeared in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
The Yeoman of the Guard
at the age of nine—to honor Chris. Among the per- formers: Carly Simon, Mandy Patinkin, John Lithgow, and Chris’s Princeton Day schoolmate Mary Chapin Carpenter.

“I think God sent Chris to be the man to do this,” Patinkin said of his old Juilliard classmate, “because of his heart and courage and awareness and fight. The ironies are unbelievable. He’s more than Superman.”

Perhaps. But Chris felt somewhat uneasy about appearing be- fore his childhood friends and neighbors. “While I have very wonderful memories of growing up in Princeton, I’ve not been good at staying in touch . . .” Besides, he added, “people have gone to so much trouble for me. I’m grateful for it, but I get a little embarrassed.”

Still, he admitted that Princeton “absolutely formed me. It set me on a path that brought me great, great happiness.” When all the stars gathered onstage and Dana took the microphone to lead the audience in singing “Getting to Know You” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
The King and I,
Chris was “floored. I guess the prerequisite to living in Princeton,” he said of the crowd’s spirited performance, “is that you have to be able to sing.”

At the party afterward, Dana, wearing a simple gold wedding ring and diamond solitaire earrings (a Christmas present from Chris), placed a shawl around her shoulders and went in search of fruit juice for her husband. She returned moments later and bent over Chris, gently placing the straw in his mouth. After a few sips,

he nodded that he had had enough. With that, she knelt down and placed her face against his. They both closed their eyes for a mo- ment. “Mmmmm,” he said, smiling sweetly, “warm cheek.”

Three days after his emotional Princeton homecoming, Chris was sitting in his family room watching Will and Dana play floor hockey with plastic golf clubs and a large bottle cap for a puck. As usual, at various points in the game the players stepped aside as Chris and his wheelchair became the Zamboni, carefully resur- facing the “ice.” It was then that Chris noticed that his left leg was beginning to swell. Dana rushed him to the emergency room at Northern Westchester Hospital, where doctors raced against time to save him from a life-threatening blood clot behind his left knee. Chris was promptly put on blood thinners designed to break up up the clot, which could have proved fatal if it had trav- eled to his lungs.

Throughout the ordeal, said one of the nurses, Dana was “clutching Chris’s hand and praying. We were all praying.” After a week, he was released from the hospital—only to be readmitted when the clot reappeared.

Not long after he returned home from his second hospital stay, Chris was being lifted from his exercise bicycle back into his wheelchair by two aides when suddenly he crashed to the floor. Dana, who had been talking with Chris while he sat on the ex- ercycle, rushed to help put him back in his wheelchair. When she did, she noticed that his left arm was now dangling oddly. “That doesn’t look good, hon,” she said with a sympathetic wince.

X-rays soon revealed that Chris’s upper arm had suffered a clean break in the fall—so clean (“like a matchstick,” Chris said) that surgeons would have to insert a titanium rod inside the bone

to join the two pieces. During the successful operation, Chris would nevertheless wind up losing a considerable amount of blood—in this case four pints, or about 25 percent of the body’s normal supply. Nevertheless, two days later he showed up at a special screening of
In the Gloaming
at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

No sooner had he recovered from this latest setback than Chris received word that he would be receiving a star on the Holly- wood Walk of Fame—the result of pressure from INSITE, the 10,000-member-strong International Network of
Somewhere in Time
Enthusiasts. On April 15, 1997, Reeve’s
Somewhere in Time
costar Jane Seymour joined Glenn Close in paying tribute to Chris at the dedication. While Dana stood next to her husband in the broiling California sun, Will rested his head in Chris’s lap. Whenever the crowd applauded, Will slapped his hand against his dad’s.

By this time, Chris had begun to regain some faint sense of feeling in his arms, hands, and back. That meant Chris could “feel Will’s hand on mine. I feel his arm on mine . . . The thing I want more, though, is to be able to put my arms around him. That’s what he’s entitled to. That’s what Dana is entitled to.”

That spring, Dana watched proudly from the sidelines as more honors were heaped on her husband. On May 18, Chris deliv- ered an emotional commencement address to the Boston Uni- versity School of Medicine’s graduating class. Paraphrasing the famous line from
Jerry Maguire,
Reeve, who was awarded an hon- orary doctorate by the prestigious institution, demanded, “Show us the cures!”

At a fund-raiser in Puerto Rico that same month, Chris

showed a film clip of laboratory rats that had had their spinal cords completely severed and were then given an experimental drug. Incredibly, within a month the nerves had regenerated to such an extent that the rats were scampering about. “Oh, to be a rat,” Chris told the audience.

“They laughed,” Dana said, “but he meant it.” When asked if he was willing to participate in the first human trials for such drugs, he answered unhesitatingly, “Of course. Are you kidding?!”

In the meantime, Dana marveled at her husband’s stamina. “He is the most energetic and involved person I’ve ever known,” she ob- served. “He wakes up every morning ready to tackle the world.” Not that he didn’t have moments when he just wanted to shut the door and tell everyone to go away. “I liked it better,” he of-

ten said, “when my life was shallow.”

Chris’s characteristic exuberance and unbridled enthusiasm be- lied the perilous state of his health—and Dana’s keen awareness that at any moment disaster might strike. On Memorial Day week- end, exactly two years after Chris’s near-fatal accident, the Reeves decamped to Williamstown. A few days later, Dana noticed that one of Chris’s shoes had caused a small irritation on his left ankle. Within a month, the irritation had become so badly infected that it traveled to the bone; doctors feared that, in order to save his life, they would have to amputate Chris’s foot. After surgery to remove the infected tissue, Chris was given massive doses of antibiotics, to which he promptly developed an allergic reaction. It would be seven months after Dana first spotted the small red irritation on Chris’s ankle before doctors could finally stop treating it.

On June 30, the Reeves paused to mark a special anniversary. “It’s hard to believe we’ve been together as a couple for ten years,”

Dana said, “because we’re still so in love. It’s nice to honestly feel I have no regrets. A terrible thing happened. I wish it hadn’t. But would I change who I married? Never.”

Still, as they ricocheted from one crisis to another, Dana never let on to Chris just how worried she was. “My problems are very different from his,” she once explained. “Mine are the problems of someone who is married to a man who is paralyzed. But he is the one who has to sit in that chair.” She was not, she contin- ued, “going to add to his troubles by looking upset.”

Toward that end, she had also given up horseback riding in the wake of Chris’s accident. “I rode my whole life,” she said, “but he loved it so much, it really would have been painful for him if I was going off riding and he wasn’t able to.”

What he was able to do physically—what Chris and Dana both believed he needed to do—was to go through his punishing ex- ercise regimen to maintain muscle tone. “If a breakthrough in spinal regeneration comes,” he said succinctly, “it won’t do me any good if my muscles have atrophied.”

“Atrophy” was the last word anyone would have applied to either Chris or Dana during this challenging period in their lives. In early 1998, they both appeared with such celebrity friends as Tom Hanks, Paul McCartney, Meryl Streep, Willie Nelson, and Stevie Wonder in
Christopher Reeve: A Celebration of Hope,
an ABC-TV prime-time variety special benefiting the Christopher Reeve Foundation.

Chris was suffering from laryngitis and an upper respiratory in- fection, but he smiled gamely as each star took to the stage. None would have more of an impact on the audience—or on Chris— than Dana. After she sang “The Music That Makes Me Dance,”

she explained its significance. “It’s special for us,” she said wistfully as Chris looked on. “It’s the song I sang the night Chris and I met.” Soon after, Chris and Dana hit the road together to promote
Still Me,
the memoir he had started working on three years ear- lier at the Kessler Institute. Each day at the Reeves’ gray-shingled house in Bedford, he would dictate his thoughts to an assistant as he stared out the window at the small pond they shared with their neighbor. “I had no notes,” he said, “but the odd thing is how sharp my memory has become. Since I can’t move and have so many fewer distractions, my memory is keener . . . It’s easier to focus my thoughts because I haven’t other things to do.” The book wound up spending eleven weeks on the
New York Times
Best Seller List, while the audio version earned Chris a Grammy

for Best Spoken Word Album.

It marked the last time Dana would ever talk in detail about Chris’s accident. “It’s such a stark before-and-after—the point at which our lives really changed,” she mused. “It’s so painful—really, really painful—that I only talked about it that one time. I won’t ever do it again.”

It was while promoting the book that Chris and Dana—who inscribed thousands of copies of
Still Me
on her husband’s behalf with the words “Christopher Reeve by Dana Reeve”—reluctantly came to the conclusion once and for all that they would not try to have more children. “If things were different,” Dana said, “we probably would have another child, but they are not. I really want to make sure that the kids who are around are OK.”

For Chris, the reason for not having a child was simple. “I’m not sure I could handle having a little baby,” he told Dana, “that I will never be able to pick up and hold.” After all, it had been three years

since Chris had been able to put his arms around Will. “And there are times when he
needs
a hug from me. But the best he can do is come over and lean on my shoulder.”

In truth, Dana would harbor some concerns about Will after he enrolled in the first grade. “There are times when he has real separation anxiety, and wants me around,” she acknowledged. She enlisted the help of Matthew, now a sophomore at Brown University in Rhode Island, and Alexandra, who would soon be attending Yale, in shoring up Will’s self-confidence. Soon Will would be using the nickname both Matthew and Alex had be- stowed on Dad. To them, he was “The Big Cheese.”

In the wake of what had happened to Will’s father, Dana and Chris were determined to resist the urge to be overprotective. Understandably concerned about any activities that might result in a spinal cord injury, they warned Will about diving into shal- low water and prohibited him from playing on trampolines. Be- yond that, however, they encouraged Will to play team sports like hockey. “The more skilled you become at something, the safer you are,” Dana reasoned. There was an added benefit: watching baseball, basketball, and hockey on television became a favorite father-son pastime.

Unable to do many of the standard things a dad does with his son—play catch, kick around a soccer ball, or simply rough- house—Chris seized every opportunity he could to be part of Will’s life. He parked his wheelchair near the pool to give Will swimming tips (“Now lift your arms up out of the water more . . . Now don’t forget to keep kicking.”) and in the drive- way to teach him how to ride a bike (“Keep your feet on the pedals . . . Look out for that tree!”).