Remembering The Reeves (page 3 of 3)

Life After Chris

On September 25, 2004, Chris celebrated his 52nd birthday. Fifteen days later, an infection stemming from another pressure wound raged through his body and stopped his heart. Devastated, I met with Dana, and we just embraced for a long time and cried.

Dana became chairwoman for the foundation and carried on Chris's fight for stem-cell research. She also picked up her acting and singing career.

Often I would stop by the house to see if she was okay. In June 2005 she called, excited to tell me she'd gotten a cabaret gig in New York City and needed photos for the promotional posters. She came down to my studio, and, my God, she looked gorgeous. We shot all day. Her enthusiasm was infectious, even though she didn't feel well. She kept coughing, and said, "I've got this cold and can't shake it."

A couple of weeks later, she was still coughing. I said, "Gee, Dana, you ought to go see a doctor," and she said she had an appointment scheduled.

It was the next month that she told me she had lung cancer. I was speechless. "Don't worry," she said. "I've never smoked a day in my life, and we caught it early. I'll have treatment. Probably in six or seven months, I'll be clear of the whole thing."

Dana had had so much more than her share of adversity. To me, it was as if she were caught up in a ferocious avalanche of bad luck. In February 2005, four months after she lost Chris, her mother died after ovarian cancer surgery. That November, while her father was visiting for Thanksgiving, he suffered a stroke. It seemed so unfair each time something terrible happened to this giving, beautiful person.

Dana called me early in January to say she was going to sing at Madison Square Garden for Mark Messier, who was retiring from the Rangers. I watched on television and thought, She's really beating it!

Three weeks later she took a nosedive. Over the phone, Chris's eldest son, Matthew, leveled with me. "She's in the hospital, Ken," he said. "I don't think she's going to make it." A week later, Dana died, on March 6, 2006, at the age of 44.

I asked myself, Can there be someone up there who let this happen to two people who did not deserve it? But I also had this feeling that Dana was called to be with Chris. Maybe she did too. At her husband's memorial, Dana had looked up and said, "I'll be there with you one day, Chris."

A few months before she died, Dana taped an introduction to a PBS documentary called The New Medicine. She told viewers, "For years, my husband and I lived on -- and because of -- hope. Hope continues to give me the mental strength to carry on." It has given me strength as well. As a photojournalist, I have had an extraordinary life, traveling the globe and meeting the newsmakers of our time. But one of the greatest experiences of my life was becoming close friends with Chris, then doubling that by meeting Dana too.

From Reader's Digest - October 2006

 

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• Christopher and Dana Reeve: Exclusive Photos
• View some special moments with the Reeves captured on camera.
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• Christopher Reeve: A Hero Onscreen and Off
• Just months before his untimely death and nearly a decade after his tragic accident, Christopher Reeve spoke one last time with Reader's Digest about his personal struggles, keeping up hope, and his frustrations with the current administration's opposition to stem cell research.
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• The Brooke Ellison Story
• A screech of brakes, a small body flying through the air -- and 11-year-old Brooke Ellison couldn't move or even breathe on her own. But the story was just beginning.
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• Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation
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