Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (23 page)

Chris and Dana did find a religion that reflected their humanist values—Unitarian Universalism—and by the turn of the new millennium were attending services regularly. Dana shared Chris’s abiding belief that “God is love,” and they both were fond of cit- ing Abraham Lincoln’s answer when he was asked about his re- ligious affiliation. “When I do good I feel good. When I do bad I feel bad. That,” said Lincoln, “is my religion.”

Hollywood was so impressed with the good Chris and Dana had done that half of it turned out to honor them at the annual Christopher Reeve Foundation benefit held on August 16, 2000 in Beverly Hills. Ben Affleck, Samuel L. Jackson, George Clooney, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Goldie Hawn, Michael

J. Fox, and then–First Daughter Chelsea Clinton were among those who showed up to help raise more than $2 million.

The next morning, Dana and Chris arrived at the UCLA Med- ical Center, where he started several days of aggressive physical therapy. Held up by a harness and with electrodes stimulating in- voluntary contractions in his legs, Chris was able to “walk” on a treadmill. The operating theory: that “activity-dependent training,” as it was called, could awaken dormant pathways in the spinal cord. Four days later, while he was being lifted from his wheelchair, Chris fell yet again. This time, he slammed his body against a table. Because he was now suffering from severe osteoporosis, the impact was enough to shatter his left thigh. Using the alias Christopher Johnson, Chris checked into Suite No. 8 in the west wing of UCLA Medical Center’s Intensive Care Unit. His nurse and personal assistant were on hand, but it fell to Dana, as it al-

ways did, to bolster his flagging spirits. “She was telling him everything was going to be OK, that he was going to be back on the treadmill in no time,” said one of the UCLA nurses. “But then they’d let their guard down for a minute, and seeing the dis- appointment in their eyes just made you want to cry.”

Five days after the doctors had fastened Chris’s left femur us- ing pins and a metal rod, the Reeves flew back home to Bed- ford. Undaunted, Chris resumed his grueling physical therapy regimen. With Dana cheering him on, he improved rapidly. By October, he was fit enough to hit the presidential campaign trail on behalf of his old friend and fellow environmental activist Al Gore.

Then, as Dana sat chatting with Chris late one afternoon in November 2000, she noticed something odd: As he was em- phatically making a point, the index finger on Chris’s left hand was moving.

“Are you doing that on purpose?” she asked. “No,” he replied.

“Well,” she said, reaching down to pet their yellow Labrador retriever Chamois, “
try.
”

If it had been anyone other than Dana, Chris would not have tried. It had been five years since he was able to move anything below his shoulders, and as he often admitted, “I don’t like to fail.” Instead, he looked down at the finger and concentrated on es- tablishing a connection with it. He focused on the finger for a long time, and Dana waited patiently. But when it looked to him as if she was about to “get up and go into the other room to make dinner,” Chris commanded his finger to move. It did, tapping on

the armrest until he shouted “Stop!” And it did.

Dana jumped up and ran over to Chris, staring down at his hand. Chris did it again. A third time, Dana gave the order to move—and again it did. Then Chris did it with his eyes closed.

Dana grabbed Chris and held him tight, her eyes filling with tears.

“Where is this coming from?” Dana asked, incredulous. “How is it possible?”

They called for Chris’s head nurse, Dolly Arro, who started shouting when she saw Chris move his finger. “No way! No way!” she yelled, and got on the phone to one of his physicians, Dr. Harlan Weinberg.

Chris turned to Dana. “At least,” he said, “it’s good for a party trick.”

Not long after, Chris was in New Orleans to give the keynote speech at the annual Symposium of Neuroscientists. While there, he spotted his old friend Dr. John McDonald, medical di- rector of the Spinal Cord Injury Program at Washington Uni- versity School of Medicine in St. Louis. When McDonald asked how he had been doing, Chris said, “I want to show you some- thing you might find interesting.” Then he matter-of-factly moved his finger.

“You would have thought,” Chris recalled of McDonald’s re- action, “he would not have been more astonished if I had just walked on water.” Actually, McDonald soon added aquatherapy to Chris’s routine. Dana and the nurses cheered as Chris, held up in the water by aides, was able to slowly kick his legs and move forward in the pool. “That was an incredible experience for me,” he later said. “The fact that I actually took steps forward . . . reaf- firmed my belief that I am going to walk again.”

Now Chris was spending up to four hours a day on his activity- dependent workouts, spending longer periods of time on his Stim- Master and his stationary bike. He was also devoting more time to practicing his breathing off the respirator. Within a year, he would be able to move the fingers of his left hand, raise his right hand ninety degrees, breathe independently for up to ninety minutes— and wiggle all the toes on both feet. He could also feel pinpricks over 70 percent of his body, and tell the difference between hot and cold.

Most important, he could now feel it when Dana and the chil- dren hugged him. Now when Will put his hand on his father’s hand, Chris could feel it just the way he used to. “To be able to feel just the slightest touch,” he said, “is really a gift.”

“No one who has suffered an injury as severe as Chris’s,” Dr. McDonald said, “and not had any initial recovery, has regained the amount of motor and sensory function he has—not even close.” Chris’s progress was indeed astonishing, and he described it all in a new book,
Nothing Is Impossible,
as well as in an ABC-TV documentary,
Christopher Reeve: Courageous Steps,
directed by his

son Matthew. It all made it possible for Chris to face the arrival of his fiftieth birthday on September 25, 2002—the day by which he had vowed to be walking again—with hope rather than dis- appointment.

To mark the date, Chris’s friends threw a “Magical Birthday Bash” for Chris in New York. The celebrity-packed auction, which raised $2 million for the Christopher Reeve Foundation, was attended by several friends who shared the same birthday, including Barbara Walters, Michael Douglas, and Douglas’s wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones. Yet, once again, it was Chris’s old pal Robin

Williams who stole the show. “Bid five thousand dollars!” he said, pointing to Chris. “See him move his leg!” The hirsute Williams then told the black-tie crowd that he was still praying for a cure for unwanted body hair. Chris chipped in with a joke of his own: “What’s the difference between Christopher Reeve and

O. J. Simpson? O. J. walked.”

Dana supplied the most touching moment of the evening. Uti- lizing Matthew’s film editing skills and with Will doing the voice- over, Dana had prepared a video tribute to her husband that moved many in the audience to tears.

Throughout his private struggle to regain feeling and move- ment, Chris never stopped his public crusade for spinal cord re- search. “It’s not a job I would have chosen,” he said, “but one that I fully embrace because there are so many people suffering and I want to do everything I can to help.” Chris continued lobby- ing Congress for insurance reform—he became a familiar figure, racing down the long hallways of the Capitol in his wheelchair— and pushed for pioneering rehabilitative therapies.

At the top of his agenda: stem cell research, which involved us- ing embryonic cells to replace damaged cells. Chris’s outspoken support of this research put him in direct conflict with President George W. Bush, who restricted research to those stem cell “lines” that had been created prior to August 9, 2001. In 2002, Chris, with Dana at his side, testified before the Senate on behalf of a bill allowing the research to go forward.

Dana, meantime, focused her attention on helping those who, like herself, were faced with the day-to-day burden of caregiving. “I was the one who figured out ‘Is there a wheelchair ramp so that

our family can get into this movie theater?’ I thought if that’s hard for me, it’s got to be much harder for the majority of people out there.”

“When people are first injured or as a disease progresses into paralysis, they don’t know where to turn,” Chris explained. “Dana and I wanted a facility that could give support and information to people.” Added Dana, “I wanted there to be one place you could contact and ask, ‘What do I do now?’ and find answers.”

Toward that end, they established the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Resource Center in May 2002. Dana would ad- mit to having “a soft spot” in her heart for this and the founda- tion’s quality-of-life grants aimed at helping paralysis victims and their families get the equipment and the services they need.

It was a theme Chris would bring to the small screen in April 2003, when he appeared on ABC’s
The Practice
as a quadriplegic whose burned-out caregiver wife is accused of murder. Incredi- bly, only four weeks earlier Chris had undergone experimental sur- gery in Cleveland to have electrodes implanted in his diaphragm that would stimulate his breathing and make it possible for him to breathe off his ventilator. Chris was only the third person ever to undergo the surgery. “What do I have to lose?” he replied when asked if he was worried about the risk. “There’s not much more you can do to me.”

The following month, Chris was awarded the prestigious Lasker Award for Public Service “for his perceptive, sustained and heroic advocacy for medical research in general and victims of disability in particular.” The jury awarding the prize went on to say that his dedication to educating himself about the scientific

and political aspects of research “and his renown as an actor has allowed him to wield tremendous influence with both govern- ment officials and the public.”

Chris’s influence extended far beyond the borders of the U.S. Early that year, Chris and Dana had taken their first overseas trip since his accident, to Australia, where he pushed for government funding of spinal cord research Down Under. They also found time to unwind at the beach in Sydney, where Dad watched as Dana and Will frolicked in the surf.

Later, Chris would make a similar trip to Israel, where he met with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and drew admiring crowds wherever he went—at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, the Western Wall, and the hospitals where he spent time with med- ical researchers and the victims of terrorist attacks. Many were sur- prised at his appearance. The alopecia that had plagued him since his teenage years had returned with a vengeance, compounded by a reaction to medication. He disguised his patchy scalp by simply shaving his head—“My Lex Luthor look,” he smiled.

Increasingly, the Reeves wanted to spend time working at the craft they loved. Chris had never stopped pushing Dana to pursue her show business career (“Go! Take the job! I’m fine. It’s OK!”), and in 2003 she did four episodes of the PBS historical series
Free- dom: A History of Us.
That same year, she acted in Donald Mar- gulies’s play
Two Days
at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater and off-Broadway in
Portraits,
portraying the wife of a World Trade Center office worker killed during the September 11 terrorist at- tacks. “She’s a terrific actress and she also can bring some other el- ements to this role because of her own life,” said the play’s author, Jonathan Bell. “She identifies with this woman in a lot of ways.”

Chris, meanwhile, acted in the role of Dr. Swann in the pop- ular television series about the young Superman,
Smallville
—a role he would reprise the following year. But the project that most fascinated him was the story of a young woman named Brooke Ellison. Chris had told Dana that he wanted to direct the story of someone facing a spinal cord injury “just once,” and that Ellison’s was the story he wanted to tell.

Ellison became a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic when she was struck by a car in 1990 at age eleven. A decade later, she graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in cognitive neuroscience. “I knew Chris would be able to tell my story with a sensitivity nobody else could bring,” El- lison said. “To be disconnected from your ventilator and the panic that you feel, I don’t think you can understand that un- less you’ve lived it.”

All the Reeves were enthusiastic about another of Chris’s film projects, an animated feature called
Yankee Irving.
The Depression- era tale of an eight-year-old with a talking baseball named Screwy,
Yankee Irving
(later retitled
Everyone’s Hero
) was to be directed by Chris and feature Dana in the role of Irving’s mom.

Behind the scenes, the real-life drama that was the life of Chris and Dana Reeve took another turn when he was hospitalized with severe pneumonia in December 2003. Chris would recover, but only to begin battling a series of infections.

By the spring of 2004, he was no longer able to get onto his bicycle or into a pool for those exercises that had kept his mus- cles toned and had given him an overall sense of physical well- being. To make things worse, the huge amounts of calcium he was taking had caused massive bone growth in his hips. As a re-

sult, he could not lie on his side for more than twenty minutes at a time—all of which was making it impossible for him to sleep. “My recovery,” he admitted to a British journalist, “appears to have plateaued.”

Between their occasional acting and directing jobs, the speeches and the books and the medical symposia, testifying before Con- gress, the fund-raisers and the medical crises, Chris and Dana still made time for Will. As obsessed as Chris was with the latest ad- vances in spinal cord research, he and Dana had one important rule when they sat down to dinner each day at 7
P
.
M
.: “We never talk about medical issues at the table. That’s strictly family time.”

Dad had somehow managed to teach Will how to ride a bi- cycle “just by talking him through it,” and coached him in base- ball and hockey. He also made most of Will’s games; Dana made them all. “Will had a strong relationship with Chris,” Dana would later say. Because of the accident, Will grew up knowing his fa- ther as the courageous man he really was, “and didn’t just see a framed photograph of Superman.”