Out of a severely broken body

Some of you may be at least vaguely familiar with the painfully sad story of the actor Christopher Reeve (1952-2004), a talented athlete who studied at Cornell University and at the Juilliard School, attained star status in the title role of the Superman films of 1978-1987, and then, in late May 1995, was severely injured in an equestrian accident that left him a quadriplegic at the age of not quite forty-three.  (He responded with remarkable courage, but he was just fifty-two when he died.)

But the sad story isn’t limited to Christopher Reeve himself.  His wife, Dana, herself an actress and singer who was nearly a decade younger than Reeve, faithfully cared for him after his devastating injury.  After his death, she assumed the chairmanship of what was, by then, called The Christopher Reeve Foundation.  It’s a charitable organization that is dedicated to finding treatments and cures for paralysis caused by spinal cord injury and other neurological disorders and, in the meantime, to improving the quality of life for people suffering from such disabilities.  However, in August 2005, Dana, who had never smoked, was diagnosed with lung cancer.  She died in early March of 2006, seventeen months after her husband, at the age of forty-four.  In 2007, on the first anniversary of Dana Reeve’s death, the Foundation announced that it had changed its name to The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation.

In 1980, Christopher Reeve appeared with Jane Seymour and Christopher Plummer in a relatively modest little romantic fantasy called Somewhere in Time.  I don’t consider it a great film, but I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for it since I first saw it at least three decades ago.

I probably haven’t seen it since Christopher Reeve’s catastrophic accident.  Somewhere in Time was on television last night, though, and so I watched it again.  (I didn’t do a lot of serious work yesterday, to be honest.)

I was deeply struck, this time around, by a scene at the very end of the film.  Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve), dramatically separated from the woman he loves, Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour), dies.  (Sorry if I’m spoiling the plot for you.)  The camera looks down upon his body, which is lying upon a bed far below.  A desperate hotel employee is trying to summon help.  Manifestly, Richard is having an out-of-body experience, of a kind very commonly reported in accounts of near-death experiences.  Then, as the immediate, mundane environment fades away, the camera looks toward a light in the distance and begins moving toward it.  In the end, we see Richard and Elise embracing, clearly in heaven.

We can hope that Christopher and Dana Reeve had much that same experience on 6 March 2006.

And we have genuine basis for that hope.  Here, for example, is an intriguing account of one event during Christopher Reeve’s own medical treatment following his equestrian accident.  I quote from the Wikipedia article on “Christopher Reeve”:

In Kessler, he tried a drug named Sygen which was theorized to help reduce damage to the spinal cord. The drug caused him to go into anaphylactic shock, and his heart stopped. He claimed to have had an out-of-body experience and remembered saying, “I’m sorry, but I have to go now”, during the event. In his autobiography, he wrote, “and then I left my body. I was up on the ceiling . . . I looked down and saw my body stretched out on the bed, not moving, while everybody—there were 15 or 20 people, the doctors, the EMTs, the nurses—was working on me. The noise and commotion grew quieter as though someone were gradually turning down the volume.” After receiving a large dose of epinephrine, he woke up and stabilized later that night.