Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (25 page)

Obviously too devastated to return to the Broadway cast of
Brooklyn Boy,
Dana called the play’s author, Donald Margulies, to apologize. “Of course I understand,” he replied. “Will just lost his father. It would be terrible if he had to deal with you being absent from his life.”

Dana now focused on Will. The sudden death of his father was “a terrible, terrible shock,” Dana said. But Will proved as resilient as his father—a testament to his upbringing. Will understood that “life has a lot of joy and laughter even amidst pain and hardship,” she told her friend Larry King. “It’s a life lesson I wouldn’t have wished on him, but at the same time, he has coping skills a lot of twelve-year-olds might not.”

Dana did not face some of the everyday problems widows of- ten face; Chris’s accident had forced her to become self-reliant. “Luckily, I really do understand the finances,” she commented. “I know where the oil burner is, where the fuse box is.”

But rather than being somewhat in the background when it came to her husband’s efforts, she now dedicated herself to pick- ing up where Chris left off. “Suddenly, I feel like I don’t have a choice anymore. I have to carry on his mission.”

Four days after her emotional eulogy for Chris, Dana officially stepped into his shoes as chairman of the Christopher Reeve Paral- ysis Foundation. Determined not to be just a figurehead, she in-

sisted on reviewing every grant proposal and worked the phones lobbying senators and congressman just as Chris did. “Chris could be finessed,” Peter Kiernan said. “Some people tried to take ad- vantage of him. But nobody screwed with Dana. She was shrewd.” Her no-nonsense attitude in the boardroom notwithstanding, Dana brought an added personal touch to her dealings with foun- dation employees. “She was a very kind, warm person,” one said. “She always called staff members by name and pulled up a chair

so that she was never talking down to people in wheelchairs.”

With help from the family—particularly her parents, Charles and Helen Morosini—Dana and Will managed to get through their first Thanksgiving and Christmas without Chris. But on January 20, 2005, Dana’s dad called with the news that her mother had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

Dana was stunned. Coming so soon after Chris’s death, Helen Morosini’s illness seemed almost incomprehensible. However, Dana’s can-do spirit quickly kicked in. She did some medical re- search of her own and, confident that her mother was getting the best medical care, went ahead with plans to attend President Bush’s State of the Union address. There, seated in the gallery as a guest of Rhode Island Congressman Jim Langevin, she showed the flag in support of embryonic stem cell research.

Helen Morosini went into the hospital for surgery on Febru- ary 6, and died from complications four days later—just three weeks after her initial diagnosis. She was seventy-one.

Dana was devastated. “A grinding ten-year fight? Dana was up for that,” said Peter Kiernan. “But a fight that’s over in a couple of weeks? That was a leveling blow.”

Dana later remembered that her publishing executive mother

was, above all else, “a real mommy—a comfort and love. She was always there for me.”

Helen Morosini’s death was no less a shock for Will. “Will was
extremely
close to Helen,” recalled their friend Becky Lewis. “She was a very strong presence in his life. She used to say, ‘Will, you’re a wonderment,’ but she was a wonderment, too.” For the next several months, he grieved over the sudden loss of his grand- mother. As positive and resilient as he was, Dana admitted that her son was “reeling. It’s a huge shock.”

Dana would never get over either death. She would often tell friends that she wanted “more than anything” to pick up the phone and call her mother. With Chris, she was surprised to find that, months after his death, she was grieving about the accident all over again. “Wait a minute,” she told herself, “I’ve done that.” Strangest of all were the times when she forgot he was gone altogether. On one out-of-town trip, Dana checked herself and Will into their hotel and then automatically headed for the phone. “Gotta call Daddy,” she said brightly before reality struck.

“Ooh . . .”

As she had done a thousand times before, Dana used the for- mula she had devised for coping with hard times—“When you least feel like it, do something for someone else.” Soldiering on, she returned to Washington in April to lead a rally demanding increased funding for research into all forms of paralysis. A few weeks later, she helped promote a children’s book inspired by her husband,
Dewey Doo-it Helps Owlie Fly Again,
and an accompa- nying audio version with Mandy Patinkin narrating and Dana and Bernadette Peters singing. Dana also had plans for a book of

her own: That same month she signed a seven-figure deal with the Penguin Group to write about her relationship with Chris.

As the summer approached, Dana’s life seemed to be turning a corner. “She was,” her friend Michael Manganiello said, “ex- cited about the future.”

It was a future that included plans for a return to show busi- ness. That June, despite a persistent cough, Dana planned to re- launch her singing career with a two-night gig at Feinstein’s, singer Michael Feinstein’s posh nightclub in New York’s Re- gency Hotel.

During rehearsals, Dana’s coughing spells became so violent that she had to stop mid-song to catch her breath. When friends voiced concern, she assured them that she intended to consult her physician. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “I just can’t get rid of this thing. I’m going to get it checked out . . . Maybe next week.” On opening night, Dana somehow managed to banish the cough. For nearly two hours, she effortlessly glided through a se- lection of Broadway tunes and standards. Will, sitting in the front

row with several of his cousins, beamed with pride.

“Chris was very much a part of the show,” Michael Feinstein said. “Dana talked about him—about how they met and fell in love—and then she would sing . . . she seemed very strong and yet fragile at the same time. It was all very intimate and quite moving—people were crying—and there were moments when I felt I was intruding on something very private.”

At one emotionally charged point in the show, she dedicated “I’ll Be Seeing You” to Chris, and ended the song by blowing a kiss up to him. The evening ended with a standing ovation.

“You sensed,” Feinstein recalled, “that she was embarking on a new life.”

The cough that had been bothering Dana for weeks contin- ued, and by July she was no longer willing to brush it off as the result of allergies or the flu. When she finally did visit the doc- tor, he ordered a chest X-ray. No one was prepared for what the X-ray revealed: a mass in one of her lungs.

“It was huge,” she told her friend Kathie Lee Gifford. A biopsy and CAT scan confirmed that Dana, a lifelong nonsmoker, had advanced stage 4 lung cancer. Dana believed that at this point she had actually had the cancer for more than a year.

What she didn’t realize, Dana told Gifford, was that lung can- cer is in fact the number one killer among cancers. “I was always looking for breast, ovarian, and uterine,” she said, “and you think,
I’m a nonsmoker and I live in the country, so I’m good.
So I am com- pletely shocked.” She speculated that perhaps her earlier years spent singing in smoky nightclubs might have been a factor— “but I guess I’ll never really know.”

After she broke the news to her father, Dana told him she was not really up to telling her younger sister, Adrienne. Once the news had time to sink in, Dana summoned the courage to speak with Adrienne. “It’s a malignant tumor,” she said before blurting out, “Oy vey!”

“It was funny,” Adrienne later recalled. “But it wasn’t.”

The most important thing to Dana was finally knowing what was behind that nagging cough. “I’m glad to know the enemy,” she said, “because now I can fight it.”

What she dreaded most, of course, was breaking the terrible news to thirteen-year-old Will. She told him the tumor was in-

operable, that she would probably have to undergo chemother- apy and perhaps radiation treatments—but that, in the end, she was determined to beat it. Kiernan described the conversation as “extraordinarily difficult for her. But Will’s a smart boy and there was no point in sugarcoating it.”

Dana made the point that she wanted Will to go on as usual with his life, and he did. “The kid is fantastic,” she told Kiernan when he asked how he had taken the news of his mother’s can- cer. “It hasn’t affected his schoolwork. It hasn’t affected his hockey. I’m so proud of him.”

Determined to keep news of her illness under wraps, Dana qui- etly began her chemotherapy treatments at New York’s famed Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. When she canceled plans to sing on the popular daytime program
The View,
Dana even kept the real reason a secret from the show’s host, the Reeves’ dear friend Barbara Walters.

Dana would not be able to keep the secret for long. When she learned that a tabloid was about to break the story, she reluctantly went public on August 9, 2005. Coincidentally, her announce- ment came just two days after the startling lung cancer death of ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings at age sixty-seven.

“I have an excellent team of physicians, and we are optimistic about my prognosis,” she said in a statement. Then, displaying the sort of moxie she and Chris were so famous for, Dana added, “I hope before too long to be sharing news of my good health and recovery. Now, more than ever, I feel Chris with me as I face this challenge. As always I look to him as the ultimate example of de-

fying the odds with strength, courage, and hope in the face of life’s adversities.”

On a certain level, Dana was relieved that the world now knew. “You know what?” she told one of Chris’s oldest buddies. “I’m not going to hide.”

Between chemo and radiation treatments, Dana continued to play an active role at the foundation she and her husband founded. By this time, it had distributed more than $55 million in research grants and nearly $9 million in the “quality of life” grants that Dana had championed for paralysis victims and their families.

Dana had also embarked on a new campaign, this time to raise awareness of lung cancer, which kills more women each year than breast, ovarian, and uterine cancer combined. “Did you know that?” Dana asked her friends. “Because I sure didn’t.”

“I never saw someone who could be so strong and positive,” her friend Paula Zahn said, “in light of everything she went through.” When Zahn asked where she got her energy, Dana replied, “Either I can sit here and wallow in self-pity or I can turn what we’ve gone through into something positive.”

While only 5 percent of stage 4 lung cancer patients survive five years or longer, Dana’s family and friends clung to the hope that she would be among them. That anyone who had already endured so much could be struck down so cruelly seemed in- comprehensible.

Even as she fought the cancer with aggressive chemotherapy, Dana could still find humor in her situation. Calling Donald Margulies, Dana said, “Yeah, can you
believe
this?” She joked that she was losing her hair, but didn’t have to “break out the An- gelina Jolie wig just yet!”

To Peter Kiernan, she cracked in an email, “I’ve lost some

weight, but I can wear the jeans I used to wear in college and I look pretty good in them.”

Dana proved it November 17, 2005, when she swept into the annual Christopher Reeve Foundation gala wearing a slinky gown, pearls, and Reeve Foundation dog tags bearing the Super- man “S” logo. “The tumor is shrinking and shrinking and shrink- ing,” she said.

Dana’s physician dad was also optimistic. “The current strat- egy,” he said, “is to turn it into a chronic disease. If we can man- age to keep the cancer at bay then she can go on for years that way.” But, he conceded, “it’s still early in the game.”

Whatever the outcome, Dr. Morosini was more in awe of his daughter than ever. “It’s quite inspiring to see what she has had to deal with,” her dad said. “She’s a remarkable woman. She’s tak- ing on this latest challenge with grace, like she has done with everything else in her life.” The American Cancer Society agreed. They named her Mother of the Year for her dedication to rais- ing Will in the aftermath of her husband’s death.

Charles Morosini had no idea that he would in fact be Dana’s next unexpected challenge. While Dana played host to twenty- four members of the Reeve and Morosini families that Thanks- giving, her dad suffered a stroke in the middle of dinner and had to be rushed by ambulance to Northern Westchester Hospital. Right away Dana pointed out that, since her house was already set up for handling people suffering from disabilities, she should take care of her father. “Her natural instinct was to have Dad move into her house,” Adrienne said. The rest of the family con- vinced her that they could take care of Dad; she needed to fo-

cus on herself.

Charles Morosini would go on to make a complete recovery,

and it looked to the world as if Dana would, too. Although chemo had caused her hair to fall out, on January 12, 2006, she donned a wig to sing “Now and Forever” at a Madison Square Garden re- tirement ceremony for New York Rangers star Mark Messier. A friend of the Reeves’, Messier occasionally gave Will hockey pointers when he and Dana dropped by after practice.

“It was a surprise and honor,” Messier recalled when Dana ap- peared at the Garden. “You could just feel the energy from the crowd, it was so emotionally powerful.” So powerful that she re- ceived a prolonged standing ovation. Later, Messier was even more moved to learn that Dana had actually changed her chemother- apy schedule to be there. “That,” he said, “is the kind of person she was.”

Later that month, the cancer began growing again. With Michael Manganiello at her side, Dana was shown new X-rays that clearly indicated the tumor had, in the doctors’ words, “gone in a new direction.”

Back in the hospital for more radiation treatment, Dana was still upbeat. She told everyone that she intended to go home, and proved her resolve to get better by never losing her sense of hu- mor. “I’m beating the odds and defying every statistic the doc- tors can throw at me,” she said in a group e-mail to her friends. One of those friends, Mandy Patinkin, remembered one of her last e-mails. “She told us there was balance and fairness in this