Free Still Me by Christopher Reeve

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 Russian. 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