From Yahoo! News
Reeve made one of her final public appearances at a fund-raising event for the foundation in November and said she was responding well to treatment and that her tumor was shrinking.
"I'm beating the odds and defying every statistic the doctors can throw at me," Reeve said then. "My prognosis looks better all the time."
She said she kept her spirits up by remembering the man she spent years caring for.
"I was married to a man who never gave up," she said. "He taught me so much about courage and about going forward. He really was in this with me."
By his own account, Christopher Reeve admired many of the same qualities in the woman he credited with giving him the will to go on after the devastating riding accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe on his own.
In his 1998 autobiography, Still Me, the actor wrote that in the days immediately following his accident, both he and his mother were in favor of disconnecting the life-support machines and allowing him to die, but that his wife changed his mind.
"Dana came into the room...I mouthed my first lucid words to her: 'Maybe we should let me go,'" Reeve recalled in the memoir. "She said, 'I'm only going to say this once: I will support whatever you want to do because this is your life. And your decision. But I want you to know that I'll be with you for the long haul, no matter what.'"
"Then she added the words that saved my life: 'You're still you. And I love you.'"
This somewhat goes with an article that is brewing in my brain about, "Have I loved them (my family) enough today?" Stay tuned!
5 comments:
Tony showed me a small blurb in a magazine last night about this. I was shocked and sick over the loss of one so young--especially for their son. I thought he was 15 by now--but read just now that he's only 13. I also thought last night as I lay in bed about how close I am to 44 and how close each of us is every day to our last day. It seemed incredibly unfair that someone who had acted with such grace and poise during the trials of her husband would die so suddenly. . .
Thanks for writing about Dana. She was such an inspiration to me. It seemed as though when she looked into her husbands eyes, he was still taller than she, and not in a wheelchair. It was a true love that was such a blessing to witness, even if it was just from occasional pictures of them together. I was amazed that they were only married for 3 years before Christopher took his fall. It seemed to me that their love had mulled for years and years for her to have such complete devotion to him. She is and was an amazing example of a wife, friend, caregiver, and mother. I thought about how suddenly Christopher died. Not that he was expected to live a full life, but it was sudden. And I thought how merciful God was to take Christopher home before Dana, she was his caregiver and he would have suffered greatly without her. I really don't know thier faith or anything about their walk but they just seemed like good people who loved others with the love of God.
That is such sad news. I, too, felt so bad for their son. It does make you remember to never take one day for granted.
Are you still doing the recipe blog? I love new recipes and have some of my own I could add :-)
I was thinking about posting on the recipe blog, too. Is it time for the administrator to get us all started again?
Thanks for the tribute to this poor family. I hurt for their son but he has strong parents to remember.
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