Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (15 page)

Chris managed to laugh. With Dana filling him in on Will’s latest antics and Juice regaling him with hospital gossip, Chris was able to keep his mind off the fears that threatened to paralyze him emotionally as well as physically.

They had always been a tactile couple, but now it seemed they touched more than ever. Dana was constantly sidling up to Chris, placing her hand on his shoulder, tousling his hair, nuzzling him or casually draping her arm over his chest, playfully throwing one of her legs over his. In his wheelchair, Chris’s paralyzed hands al-

ways lay splayed on their black leather rests, but Dana touched and held them constantly.

They were more affectionate than ever, in part because Dana was sure the contact had a therapeutic effect not only on Chris but on her. “I needed the reassurance and the warmth as much as he did,” she allowed. “Maybe more.” Dana’s hands-on approach was also due to the simple fact that any contact now had to be initiated by her. “I was used to Chris drawing me into his arms. Now I had to do all the hand-holding and caressing. I was touch- ing for two.”

Dana also helped out with therapy when she could. She would hold her hand against one side of Chris’s head as he tried to press against it, or gently massage his shoulders, hands, and feet to main- tain healthy circulation. She also brought Will along. Soon he was crawling all over his father and, in Chris’s words, “using me like a jungle gym.”

“We were careful, of course, that Will didn’t disconnect any of his dad’s trach tubes or anything by accident,” said Chris’s long- time physical therapist, Erica Druin. “But Chris and Dana both felt it was important for Will to be comfortable climbing all over his dad—that he not be
afraid
.” In fact, Will often took an active part in his father’s therapy. “I would be stretching Chris’s leg up in the air, and Will would be standing on the mat underneath helping me. He wanted to help so much, and he did. It was always a fam- ily effort.”

Druin remembered that Dana “wanted to keep everything light and fun.” There was a stage at one end of the gym at Kessler, and “music was always playing over the intercom. Will and Dana would climb up on the stage and start singing and dancing

around—really hamming it up. Chris laughed so hard. He just loved it.”

Chris lived for these visits from Dana and Will. “His face just lit up the minute they walked in,” Juice Miller said. “You could see that they meant everything to him. They were his world.”

Dana knew this better than anyone, and had completely re- arranged her life so that she could be there for Chris as often as humanly possible. Just before dawn each day, she crept into Will’s room to give her sleeping son a kiss on the cheek before leaving him with the nanny. Then she climbed into her black Eagle Vi- sion sedan and drove the eighty-five miles from Bedford to Kessler. Stopping by the admissions desk on the way in, she picked up some of the hundreds of letters and cards that were arriving for Chris each day. Then Dana perused the day’s list of scheduled vis- itors—usually family members like Ben and his mother, although occasionally celebrity pals like Alec Baldwin and Bobby Kennedy, Jr. (A visit from his old colleague Treat Williams was particularly memorable. When Williams dropped by unannounced, he found Chris sitting in the day room. “Don’t get up,” he joked.) Once she looked the list over, Dana gently reminded the nurse at the

desk not to let anyone in who was not on it.

From there, she took the elevator to the second floor and stopped in at the nurses’ station to see if Chris had managed to get a decent night’s sleep. Then she would head for Chris’s room and give him a good morning kiss before feeding him a break- fast of fresh fruit—the only food he could easily tolerate.

Dana would usually accompany Chris to his first physical ther- apy session, and then slip away around 11
A
.
M
. just long enough to do a multitude of family errands. Back beside Chris by early

afternoon, Dana would push his wheelchair around Kessler’s seven-acre grounds. It was, Chris later said, “the high point of my day. No matter how terrible things are, Dana has the power to make it all go away. She just kept, well, saving me. Her love is that strong.”

This quickly became evident to literary agent Dan Strone, who journeyed to Kessler to discuss the possibility of represent- ing Chris in a book deal. During the meeting, Chris lay in bed, with Dana sitting on a chair to his right. While the adults talked, Will happily crawled all over his unflappable mom.

“So much about Hollywood relationships is phony and con- trived,” Strone said. “But there was nothing fake about the way they interacted. She would touch his arm, and you could tell that there was really something there. It was completely natural; the affection between them was palpable. It was the real deal—a real love affair.”

As moved as he was by the strength of their bond, Strone was equally impressed by how focused both Reeves were. “It was like any other serious business meeting, and Chris was in complete control of it,” Strone said. “He asked very specific questions, and while Dana would contribute something now and then, he was in charge.”

Neither gave the impression that just a couple of months ear- lier their lives had been turned upside down. “Here was this man who was still learning to cope with his complete inability to move,” Strone said, “but after about one minute you forgot that com- pletely. Neither one of them complained once, or showed any sign of bitterness or unhappiness at all. Both were incredibly poised.” Strone, like everyone else who encountered them around this

time, gave Dana much of the credit. “I would never even hear any tension in her voice,” he said. Once or twice in Strone’s pres- ence, Chris began to have difficulty breathing. “Dana never pan- icked. People could be running around, but she was unflappable. I never saw her crack—not once.”

Yet she “needed him as much as he needed her,” Strone ob- served. “There was a balance in their relationship that kept them both grounded. They lived for each other—and they lived for Will.”

That meeting at Kessler proved productive. Chris quickly signed with Strone, who went on to broker a $4.25 million deal with Random House for Reeve’s memoirs. As he worked on the book over a two-year period, dictating it to an assistant, Chris periodi- cally spoke with his literary agent. At social functions, Dana in par- ticular would seek Strone out. “Dana was always positive and upbeat, no matter what horrors were going on that she and Chris had to deal with,” Strone said. “She was simply the warmest, nicest, most generous, most
decent
person I’ve ever met.”

Yet Dana had her moments. Such as when the
National Enquirer
ran a front-page story the first week in September 1995 pro- claiming that Chris wanted to end his life. Under the headline “Christopher Reeve begs wife: PULL THE PLUG,” the story quoted Chris as pleading with Dana to “end his misery.” The tabloid went on to say that Dana had actually agreed to turn off the respirator, once she’d discovered how it could be done legally. “You can’t let them get away with that, Chris,” Dana told him. “The kids are going to see this, and you don’t want them think- ing it’s true.” Together, they composed a letter to the
National En- quirer
denying the story and demanding a retraction. Just to make

sure it saw the light of day, Dana passed a copy on to their friend, the nationally syndicated columnist Liz Smith.

“This article was so hurtful and so completely without foun- dation that I felt I had to respond,” Chris wrote. “For myself, my friends and the thousands of people around the world who have expressed their love and support, I want to clearly state that your article could not be further from the truth . . . I want to live! I have not given up. I will never give up . . . An article such as yours, while distressing in the extreme, will not deter me.”

By this time, Chris’s initial attitude upon arriving at Kessler— a blend of fear and denial—had given way to grudging acceptance. At first, he had simply spurned all efforts to get him to read up on his injuries. Again, Dana stepped forward, this time aided by a par- ticularly insistent nurse named Patty. “Look, Toph,” she said, us- ing that favorite pet name, “if you’re going to get better—and you will—you’ve got to become an expert. I mean, it’s
your
body.”

So he carefully studied the impact his kind of spinal injury had on everything from his bowels to his breathing to his sexual function. Then he began to chip away at the wall of celebrity that stood between him and other patients at Kessler. He asked Kessler to dispense with his security guards, and soon other pa- tients were wheeling into his room to share their stories with him—and vice versa.

Again, Dana had been instrumental in this change of heart. From the beginning, she had poked her head into other patients’ rooms to see how they were doing. Then she carried their stories— along with their fond regards—back to her husband. Once he began visiting them himself, he came to the belated realization that “we were no different from one another. Some very nice

friendships developed.” (From this point on, Chris refused to see
Above Suspicion,
the film in which he played a paralyzed cop, be- cause it reminded him of his own callous indifference toward the disabled. “I’m very ashamed,” he later admitted, “about my smug- ness, my complacency. I never realized for a second that that could be me.”)

Once he faced the reality of his situation, Chris attacked his disability the way he would any other adversary—with the full intention of winning. In the long run, that meant one day find- ing a way to reconnect and regenerate the damaged nerves in his spinal column, enabling him to walk. In the short term, it meant maintaining muscle and skin tone, slowly regaining the sensation and perhaps even movement in his upper body, and weaning himself off the ventilator.

Toward that end, Kessler’s medical director, Dr. Marcalee Sip- ski, had Chris as her sole patient. “If I can’t cure Christopher— and nobody has a cure for spinal-cord injury,” she said at the time, “then my goal is to help him attain the highest quality of life he can.” In Chris, she believed she had “the ideal patient— motivated and extremely sensitive to what’s going on. When the doctors or therapists give him a task, you know he’s going to make sure he does it perfectly. If there’s an obstacle to overcome, he’s going to overcome it.”

Sipski’s colleague, Dr. Steven Kirshblum, was the director of the Spinal Cord Unit at Kessler, and would eventually take over as Chris’s principal doctor—and in the process become a close friend. He shared Sipski’s belief that Chris was “very demanding on himself—more than anybody else. He set his goals very high, but the wonderful thing was that he could become joyful when

he reached a goal. He’d push himself, but once he achieved something, he’d sit back and say, ‘Gee, I really did accomplish something.’ A lot of patients never allow themselves to enjoy these small victories.”

Kirshblum was also “amazed” by the Reeves’ “total lack of pre- tense.” Unlike other celebrities the staff at Kessler had had to deal with over the years, “there was no air of VIP status about either of them,” Kirshblum said, echoing the sentiment of the doctors and nurses who treated Chris at the University of Virginia Med- ical Center. “From the beginning, it was really ‘Let’s get down to business. What can we do to get Chris moving again?’ ”

Kirshblum, meanwhile, came in for some good-natured rib- bing from his star patient; Chris often took pleasure in zeroing in on the doctor’s tendency to slouch. “Out of respect for those of us who can’t stand,” Chris would say when Kirshblum walked into the room, “the least you can do is stand up straight!” Chris’s therapist, Erica Druin, remembered how Kirshblum “threw back his shoulders every time Chris kidded him. It got to be sort of their routine. We all got a kick out of it.”

In addition to helping Chris make the important medical deci- sions and caring for their son, Dana also had to handle both the press and the seemingly perpetual avalanche of mail from well- wishers. “Dana had to triage this,” Kirshblum said. “She was lit- erally his voice in talking to the media. Yet she remained calm, charming—I never saw her flustered.”

Chris’s old buddy Ken Regan was impressed by Dana’s abiding sense of calm. Soon after they arrived at Kessler, she told Regan to drop by and to be sure and bring his cameras. “I’m glad she did,” said Regan, who went on to chronicle Chris’s battle against the

effects of paralysis on film. “Because if I wasn’t looking through a camera lens and doing my job, I think I would have lost it al- together.”

Chris had always valued Dana’s opinion, but now they were truly equals in a way that they had never been before. “Dana went,” longtime friend Peter Kiernan observed, “from being a junior partner to a full partner.”

“It was testimony to the mutual respect they had for each other,” Dr. Kirshblum said. “It was the collective nature of their relationship that I found eye-opening—the teamwork. The way they bounced ideas off each other, it was a joy to watch—almost thrilling. It was like watching a well-oiled machine.”

Under the guidance of Dr. Sipski and then Dr. Kirshblum, Chris would begin a demanding daily regimen that he would fol- low, to a large extent, for the rest of his life. It began shortly af- ter he got up at 7:30
A
.
M
. A nurse and a therapist would “range” Chris’s arms and legs, stretching and rotating to promote circu- lation. After he was dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt, Chris was shifted to his Quickie P-300 and rolled into the cavernous phys- ical therapy room. The entire process thus far took no fewer than two and a half hours.

Moved again—this time from his wheelchair to a padded ex- ercise table—Chris went through more ranging. His arms and legs didn’t always cooperate. “The nurse is fighting to hold the knee down and the foot up,” Chris observed, “then he’ll bring it back to the middle and fight to bring my knee up to my chest. My whole leg is fighting, the foot flapping . . . It’s like watching someone else’s body—like it has nothing to do with me.”

After ranging came physical therapy using a Regis Cycle, a sta-