Christopher and Dana Reeve Love Story, Part Two

By Christopher Andersen. Excerpted from Somewhere in Heaven (Hyperion, 2008)

Read the heart-wrenching tale of Superman's last day below this photo gallery of the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation Gala.

For their love-at-first-sight meeting, go to the previous page.

Saturday, October 9, 2004, Backstage at Southcoast Repertory Theater, Costa Mesa, California
She was one of the bravest women Mimi Lieber had ever known. But when Lieber poked her head into the cramped dressing room to ask if Dana Reeve would be joining her and the rest of the cast of Broadway-bound Brooklyn Boy that night for a postshow drink, the solitary figure she saw was plainly terrified.

Dana had been on the road performing in Brooklyn Boy for two months -- visiting home most weekends -- and was set to fly back to New York once and for all the next day. She had spoken to Chris on the phone only a few hours before about how excited she was to finally be returning to her family. Now, in an instant, that excitement had turned to dread.

"Something's wrong at home," Dana explained, using one trembling hand to steady the other as she clasped the phone to her ear. While Dana had been onstage, one of her husband's physicians had left an urgent message on her cell phone. Dana had received many emergency calls like this in the nine years since Chris's accident, as he faced one medical crisis after another. But this time the doctor's tone was unmistakably ominous.

It had all happened with such alarming speed. Although Chris could not feel it, the bedsore on his lower back was of growing concern -- this on top of the systemic infection he had been fighting for nearly three months. A powerful combination of what Reeve liked to call "industrial-strength" antibiotics had worked against these infections in the past, but he had built up a resistance to them over the years. Now the nurses who took care of Chris around the clock begged him to stay in bed so the drugs could take effect.

The patient had other ideas. With Dana twenty-six hundred miles away, Chris felt it was more important than ever that he attend their twelve-year-old son Will's peewee league hockey game that afternoon. Moreover, it was a key matchup: Will's team, the Westchester Express, was set to go head-to-head with their archrivals, the Mass Conn Braves from Springfield, Massachusetts. Nonetheless, the nurses continued to plead with Chris. "Please stay home this one time...This doesn't look good."

"No, I'm going," Chris shot back.

"But you go to all of Will's games. You can miss one. He'll understand."

"No, no, no," Chris replied. "I want to watch Will play! So let's go!"

It took more than three hours for the aides to dress Reeve, load his wheel chair on to his specially outfitted van -- "Every time we leave the house, it's a production," Dana liked to joke -- and drive the twenty miles to the Brewster Ice Arena. But once the Westchester Express took to the ice at 3:20 P.M., Chris was at rink level behind the glass, cheering Will and his team on.

"Will, Will, Will," Chris chanted as his son scored two of the Express's eleven goals to defeat the Braves. Will's winning moves earned him the game puck for the day.

By 6 P.M., father and son were back at home on Great Hills Farm Road in suburban Bedford, New York. While Will showered and then chatted with friends online, Chris placed a call to then–Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. The Reeves had campaigned for Kerry, a strong supporter of stem cell research that might lead to a cure for spinal cord injuries, and Chris wanted to thank the Massachusetts senator for mentioning him by name during the most recent presidential debate.

"Chris was very excited about the future," Kerry recalled. "It was a long conversation about all the things we wanted to accomplish. I knew he hadn't been feeling well, but he gave no indication that he was in distress. He was... exuberant."

Both ardent Yankee fans, Will and his dad dined on turkey tetrazzini while glued to the Yankees–Minnesota Twins game on television. They both cheered when the Yankees won. It had been a great day, Will later said, "for father-son bonding."

At around 10:30 P.M., Chris was in bed and Will dropped in to say good night. He switched the set to CNN so his father could watch the latest campaign coverage, and then said good night the way he always did: Will kissed his father on the forehead, then, as he was leaving, took Chris's big toe between his thumb and forefinger and wiggled it. It was the last time he saw his father conscious.

Will was already fast asleep when, shortly before midnight, his father suffered a massive heart attack. Chris was resuscitated and rushed by ambulance to Northern Westchester Hospital in nearby Mt. Kisco. Now Dana was being told over the phone that her husband was alive, but comatose.

"Do I need to get a plane right now?” Dana asked the doctor, her steady voice masking a rising panic.

"Yes, I think you do," he replied.

"Could he die?" Dana inquired point-blank.

"Yes."

She hesitated for a moment before asking one more question -- the one that, in her mind, said more about the gravity of the situation than any other. It was a question that, even during the worst of the many crises that had gone before, none of Chris's doctors had ever said yes to. "Do I...Dana asked. "Do I need to call the kids?"

"Yes."

Dana took a deep breath. She hung up the phone and immediately called the one person she knew who had the resources and the pull to get her a private jet on a moment's notice -- Marsha Williams, wife of Chris's close pal Robin Williams.

Next, Dana phoned Will, who was now being looked after by family friends. "I'm coming home right now," she told Will. She tried to reassure him. "Don't worry too much. Dad's a tough guy -- he's been through things like this before and bounced right back."

As she headed for Los Angeles Airport to board the private jet arranged by Marsha Williams, Dana worked her cell phone. She called London to discover that Matthew Reeve, one of two children from Chris's ten-year relationship with British modeling agent Gae Exton, was already on his way from England with his mother.

Meanwhile, Will's half-sister Alexandra, an undergraduate student at Yale, had driven down from New Haven. Within an hour of her father's arrival at the hospital, she was sitting at his bedside.

Alexandra had been warned that Chris had lapsed into a coma and was not responding to stimuli. But when she leaned in to speak to him, she noticed that his eyes "flickered. He knew I was there. He definitely heard me."

It was precisely the hopeful sign Dana needed. As she flew across the country, she checked in with Alexandra, who reassured her that Chris was sleeping peacefully through the night. There had been emergencies like this in the past, Dana told herself -- times when he’d been rushed off to the hospital, and yet he'd always somehow managed to come through. "I thought," she later confessed, "There's a possibility..."

Hope faded in the early morning hours of October 10, however, when Chris suffered a series of cardiac arrests. Each time, intensive care doctors fought frantically to pull him back from the brink -- all in keeping with Dana's wishes. "Please, please," Dana told doctors from the plane. "Just keep him alive until I get there."

By the time Dana arrived at Westchester County Airport late that afternoon, most of the family was already at the hospital. Gae Exton and Matthew were there from London, as were Chris's father, Franklin Reeve, his brother Benjamin, and Dana's parents.

Chris's mother, Barbara, an angular, athletic woman who enjoyed rowing on Boston's Charles River well into her seventies, had received a call at 7:30 A.M. that Chris was in intensive care and driven two hours from her home in Princeton, New Jersey. When Chris suffered his famous horseback riding accident nine years earlier, it was Barbara who stood over his bed at the University of Virginia Medical Center and made the case for taking her son off life support.

"All I could think of was how active he was -- sailing, scuba diving, flying a plane, skiing, tennis," she later recalled. "I didn't feel he would want to live if he was paralyzed, trapped in his own body."

Although she risked angering Dana and the rest of the family back in June of 1995, Chris's mother had persisted. "I just don't understand," she told the others, "why we are doing all these measures just to keep him alive." It's not, she said, "the kind of life he would want to live."

At the time, Barbara's son by her second marriage, Chris's half-brother Jeffrey, took her aside. "Mom, Chris would want to be able to see Will grow up," Jeff said of the then-three-year-old boy, "even out of the corner of his eye." It was then, Barbara admitted, that she finally "came around" to the idea that life as a quadriplegic was still worth living.

The ventilators and monitors were still whooshing and beeping as they kept Chris alive, but this time things were different and everyone in the room knew it. As her son neared the end of his life, Barbara leaned over and whispered in his ear. "You're free, Chris," she said. "You fought a good fight and now you are finally free, Chris. You're free of all these tubes!"

When she got to the hospital, Dana didn't wait for the elevator. Instead, she dashed up the stairs to the second floor, threw her things down, and ran into Chris's room. "The good news," Mimi Lieber later observed, "is that Dana made it. I think he waited for her."

Now that she was finally on the scene and able to help her son through this terrible ordeal, Dana asked for Will to be driven to the hospital. Once he got there, Dana fought the urge to break down as she wrapped him up in her arms. "We're going to say good-bye to Dad now," she whispered into his ear. Then, taking his hand, Dana led Will into intensive care.

Chris had never emerged from his coma, but Will believed that somehow he knew the people who loved him were there. Will softly kissed his father on the forehead and gently wiggled Chris's toe.

"Night, Dad," Will said.