Still Me

by Christopher Reeve

  Dana was going through the same process. She had been raised as a Catholic but found she could not accept formal religion. After my injury she read When Bad Things Happen to Good People, written by Rabbi Harold Kushner, a man whose son had progeria, a terrible disease in which the victim ages rapidly and dies in adolescence. Here was a man of God, who served God, and who couldn’t reconcile the fact that this could happen to him. But he finally reached a conclusion that both Dana and I could accept—that God doesn’t make these things happen. We were given free will, and everything obeys the laws of nature. If you are flung over a horse’s head, you very well might break your neck. It just happens. But where God comes in, where grace enters, is in the strength you find to deal with it. You may not know where it comes from, but there’s an enormous power at work.

  And so you may find that you try to behave in the best manner you possibly can, the most loving way you can manage at any given moment. I think that old adage “God is love” is literally true, whether or not you actually believe in God. Thinking that way helped me get past the “me-me-me”—my body, my problems, my condition, myself.

  Three weeks after the operation it was time to think about rehab. I had to pick a place. People had told me—and I felt this was right—that the rehab facility is important, but that it’s even more important to be near people you care about, friends and family. This pointed to the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange, New Jersey. Most of my family lives within a reasonable distance from there. My mother’s in Princeton. Dana and Will were in Bedford, only an hour away. Almost everybody else in my family lives in New England, except for my half brother Mark, who lives in Oregon, and my half sister Alya in New Mexico.

  One day in late June Dr. Marcalee Sipski, the director of the spinal cord unit at Kessler, came down to UVA with a pulmonologist, Dr. Doug Green, to see if I was ready for rehab. Dr. Sipski used her safety pin and prodded around, but I had very little feeling anywhere. I could feel along my shoulders, but that was about it. I had a little feeling in the bottom of my left foot; when somebody would do deep massage on my left foot, I could feel it. Otherwise, nothing. I really couldn’t feel anything below my shoulder blades.

  And then Dr. Sipski said, “I need to see whether you’re complete or incomplete.” So that issue resurfaced; it had never actually been resolved. I told her that I had been classified as incomplete, but she replied that she needed to do her own assessment. She inserted a rectal tube, but I didn’t even feel it. I felt absolutely nothing. Then she made the pronouncement, “Well, you’re a C2 complete.” This was devastating to me. How could Dr. Jane and the people at UVA have kept telling me I was incomplete, and I was going to descend to C4, and I would get off the vent, and my phrenic nerve was working? Yes, it is working, I thought, but it’s not doing anything. It may be intact, but it’s not working. Intact and working are two different concepts.

  Again I plummeted. I felt such loss, such confusion, such a sense of doom. The demons continued to attack—thoughts of hopelessness and despair and being in a straitjacket and not being Harry Houdini, not being a magician who could get out of it. They came at me more ferociously than ever. I felt I’d been betrayed. All these nice people with their gentle southern voices had been torturing me with lies. Sometimes I even thought that it wasn’t worth going to rehab. I should just be parked someplace. If anyone wanted to talk to me, they would know where to find me, because I would be living out my days staring out the window.

  So it went. Fearful thoughts, serene thoughts, spiritual thoughts, morbid, self-pitying, pathetic thoughts. After Dr. Sipski spoke to me, I felt the truth had been told. Why did everyone else keep lying? Did they think I couldn’t handle the truth? Or was it just too personally painful to them to face the fact that I was a C2 complete? I couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t understand it. But Dr. Jane stuck to his position. He kept coming into the room, always with that sunny disposition, and he’d pat me on the shoulder and say, “I think you’re going to get some deltoid soon. And if you can get your deltoid muscles back, you can begin to move your arm. It’s also a sign that you’ve got some C4, you’ll be able to breathe.” And I would just look at him but couldn’t confront him. Somebody of his standing and reputation. I was in a quandary.

  The letters began to mean more than ever. One came from Deborah Huntington, who was our neighbor when we were growing up in Princeton. Because there weren’t enough boys in the neighborhood, we recruited Deborah and her sisters to play baseball with us. She wrote me a five-page letter about those times—remembering me making spectacular catches in the outfield, often hitting the ball over the fence into the neighbors’ yard. She recalled that she held me in a certain kind of awe in those days, casting me as a sort of neighborhood hero.

  I would get letters from fellow students at Cornell, or a letter from a former schoolmate at Juilliard. There were many letters from people who were spinal cord injured, telling me to fight on. I received a long, compassionate letter from a woman who said she could identify with me completely because for many years she had suffered from chronic indigestion. There were letters from people telling me about a favorite moment in a movie or play. People recalled having seen me on the stage in Williamstown or on Broadway. They were a lifeline, those letters. I needed support, I needed something positive. I would tell Dana, “Read me another one, take me somewhere. Let me go back in time, let me go back and relive those moments when I could do things.”

  And there were letters that said, “You’re going to go through a very morbid, self-pitying stage. But stay with it, you’ll come out the other side. You’ll find that a life is possible.” I couldn’t believe it, especially after Dr. Sipski had been there and I’d learned about the new definition of complete. Her parting words had been: “We’ll do what we can for you.” All I had to look forward to was learning how to operate a wheelchair with my mouth. And maybe learning how to use a computer with my voice.

  But slowly I began to come up again, as one does from a dive in deep water. I gradually stopped wondering, What life do I have? and began to consider, What life can I build? Is there a way to be useful, maybe to other people in my predicament? Is there a way to be creative again? A way to get back to work? Most of all, is there a way to be there for Dana and Will and Matthew and Alexandra, to be a husband and father again? No answers came, but raising the questions helped.

  There was one strong image I would cling to when I was alone. Someone, a stranger, had sent me a picture postcard of a Mayan temple in Mexico, the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl. There were hundreds of steps leading up to the top. And above the temple were blue sky and clouds. I taped this postcard to the bottom of the monitor, where it was always in view. I let it become a metaphor for the future. Even as I watched all those sobering numbers on the screen, I began to imagine myself climbing those steps, one at a time, until finally I would reach the top and go into the sky.

  Chapter 3

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  When Dana said, “You’re still you, and I love you,” it meant more to me than just a personal declaration of faith and commitment. In a sense it was an affirmation that marriage and family stood at the center of everything, and if both were intact, so was your universe. Many people have known this all their lives. I did not. Up to the time I met Dana—from early childhood until I was nearly forty—I didn’t believe in marriage, although I had always yearned for a family. The idea of home was confusing to me, too, because I had grown up between two families, and neither one ever seemed truly secure. This contributed to my developing a fierce independence, which had many positive aspects. But a part of me always looked longingly at other families, where there was communication, respect, and unconditional love, which provided a solid foundation for the children as they grew up.

  I was born on September 25, 1952, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. My father, the poet and scholar Franklin d’Olier Reeve, was a graduate student at Columbia, working on a master’s degree in Rus
sian. My mother, Barbara Pitney Lamb, had been a student at Vassar, but just before they were married, in November 1951, she transferred to Barnard. At first they lived downtown on Prince Street, and my father would take the subway up to Columbia every day, but soon they moved to a ground-floor apartment on East Eighty-eighth Street near the East River. Our building was near Gracie Mansion and a fireboat station. I rode a little fire truck around in the courtyard in the back, pushing the pedals and ringing the bell. I remember bumping along in my stroller as we headed off to Carl Schurz Park to watch the boats at the fire station.

  Barbara and Franklin in the spring of 1951.

  My brother, Benjamin, was born on October 6, 1953, so we are only a year and eleven days apart. My father and his younger brother, Richard, had a similar separation in age, and similar problems: in both cases the older one usually got the first crack at everything and was often preferred. When we were very young our parents used to dress us alike. Later I often joked that the only way you could tell us apart was that I had the blue mittens and Ben had the red ones. I think today most parents are much more conscious of the need to allow each child to establish his own identity. But in the early fifties there was still a tendency to lump siblings together—particularly twins or children close in age. We were often referred to as Tophy and Beejy. I remember wanting to separate myself quite early on, and I think Ben did, too.

  Tophy (right) and Beejy on a Sunday morning.

  My parents’ romance began during the Christmas holidays in 1950, when he was at Columbia and she was still at Vassar. They met because of an unusual family connection. Mahlon Pitney was my mother’s uncle, and he married my father’s mother, Anne d’Olier Reeve, after her divorce from Richard Reeve, Sr. My mother and her parents, Horace and Beatrice Lamb, were invited to Mahlon and Anne’s house on a hilltop in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. My mother had not been particularly interested in going until Horace told her that Anne had two sons, Franklin and Richard Reeve, Jr., who were both bright, handsome college students.

  She was immediately taken with Franklin. As they were decorating the Christmas tree in the great family room, Franklin pulled a Styrofoam ball off a branch and teasingly threw it at my mother, who quickly grabbed another one and threw it back at him. A playful indoor snowball fight ensued. They spent most of the family holiday together, and no sooner had she returned to Vassar than my father called and asked to come visit her the following weekend. She was both excited and taken aback by the intensity of Franklin’s interest in her. But this was a part of his character, which I think I inherited: the single-minded pursuit of a particular objective. My father was a real romantic in those days, prone to strong passions, whether in politics, ideals, or love. Whatever captured his interest became all consuming, at least for a time. He courted my mother ardently, driving up from Columbia almost every weekend. They took long walks by the Hudson and lingered in coffee shops near the campus. Soon her mailbox was filled with stories, poems, and love letters.

  In the summer of 1951 my mother went to Europe with several of her college classmates. My father wanted very much to come along on this trip, but Horace and Beatrice strongly objected. I think they felt their daughter was too young for such an intense romance. So instead Franklin spent the summer working on the docks on the West Side waterfront, “shaping up” every morning with the longshoremen, waiting to be chosen to unload banana boats. From this experience he developed an interest in the labor movement and socialism.

  Franklin had come from a prominent Mainline Philadelphia family. His grandfather, Col. Richard d’Olier, was the CEO of the Prudential Insurance Company for more than twenty-five years. Money was never an issue; all his heirs attended the best prep schools and colleges in the East. On the other hand, Horace Lamb had come from a working-class family in Sandusky, Ohio, won a scholarship to Cornell, and eventually become the senior partner in one of New York’s most prestigious law firms, with homes on Sutton Place and in New Canaan, Connecticut—virtually the definition of a self-made man. I think he resented the idea of my father, a rich young Princeton graduate, transforming himself into a “workingman.”

  In spite of the long hours on the docks, Franklin always found time to send passionate letters to various American Express offices in Europe, keeping up with my mother’s itinerary. When her ship docked in New York in early September, my father greeted her on the pier with an engagement ring. Over my grandfather’s objections they were married at the Presbyterian church in New Canaan on November 23, 1951. She was nineteen and Franklin was twenty-three.

  But a widening gulf was developing between my parents when I was born. Franklin was beginning to turn away from his privileged background and to become more involved in his new interests—socialism and Russian language and literature. Coming from New Canaan, used to a privileged society, my mother still had a limited and rarefied view of the world, and she lacked confidence in herself. When she was eighteen she had an old-fashioned coming out party in New York. But afterwards the phone did not ring and no eligible bachelors appeared at the door. I once asked her what that was like, and she said, “Well, I came out, but I went right back in again.”

  She was very pretty. In the pictures of her when she was young, she is a knockout. But when she was still in her early teens she was sent to an all-girls boarding school in Arizona because of her asthma. Then she came back east and graduated from Westover, another girls’ school, in 1949. She had never had a boyfriend or even dated, so Franklin probably seemed too good to be true. He was extremely handsome, bright, funny, and charming. He was a scholar, a poet, an athlete (he set a record in the hammer throw at Princeton that lasted for decades). He was also something of an actor, having written and performed with the University Players.

  My mother’s father, Horace Lamb, at the time of my parents’ courtship.

  Everything changed for my mother that Christmas of 1950, when she suddenly found herself in a whirlwind romance with an extraordinary young man. She got married less than a year later, became pregnant at nineteen and a half, had a baby at twenty, then gradually discovered that she was married to someone who was going off more and more in his own direction. His romantic interest in her was gradually being replaced by an equally romantic interest in his work and colleagues at Columbia. My mother was never an intellectual, and before long they had little to talk about. The atmosphere in our home became increasingly tense.

  It must have been overwhelming for my mother to have to cope with two rambunctious boys at such a young age. Ben and I were usually going at each other, competing for attention and space. My father was devoted to both of us and enjoyed taking on much of our daily care. I think he even felt he could do a better job than my mother. But as my parents drifted apart, my mother had to take more responsibility. On some deep level I wished she were more confident and able to take control of us.

  When she was a young mother, she loved us very much, but she let people push her around, including me. I’m more ashamed now of having taken advantage of her than I was at the time, but then I was always testing her. I wanted her to say, “No, you can’t get away with that.” I needed boundaries. Now I realize how young and frightened she must have been when her marriage to Franklin broke up.

  My strongest memory of that New York apartment was the day we left it. A moving van pulled up in front of the building. This was a cause of great excitement for a three-year-old because the van was so huge. I remember running around inside it while they were loading the furniture, the clothes, and the bric-a-brac. I was only dimly aware that we were moving because the marriage was over.

  We went to Princeton because my mother really didn’t know where else to go. There she had friends from the days when she and Franklin were dating. We had half a house at 66 Wiggins Street and settled in on New Year’s Eve 1955. Horace paid the bills. My brother and I went to the Nassau Street School, just up the block. I was very happy there. We had to wear nice brown shoes every day. The minute I came home I would go upstairs
to change so I wouldn’t get them dirty playing.

  At first Ben and I visited Franklin on a fairly regular basis, but gradually that tailed off. We were supposed to spend six weeks with him every summer, as well as alternate weekends and holidays, but it didn’t work out that way. Within a year of the divorce the particulars of the court settlement became increasingly irrelevant.

  In the early years he had changed our diapers, fed us, taken us for walks, and felt extremely proud of us. But when we ended up in Princeton, and especially when my mother married Tristam Johnson, a stockbroker and a Republican, Franklin had a harder time relating to us. After getting his Ph.D. in Russian, my father had applied for a teaching job at Princeton in order to be near us. But friends of my mother who had influence with the president of the university blocked the appointment, accusing him of being a Communist. This turned out to have a lasting impact on our relationship, because it meant he couldn’t see us as much as he wanted to or be as involved in our development. In 1956 he married my stepmother, Helen Schmidinger, a fellow graduate student at Columbia, and in February of that year they had their first child, my half sister Alya (of the famous President Clinton phone call). Two sons, Brock and Mark, soon followed. After the rejection by Princeton, I think Franklin was bitter and disappointed. He realized that Tris would become a more prominent figure in our lives, and that he would be far less of an influence on Ben and me. While the door was still open for visits, he turned his attention to his new wife and family.