For about 10 minutes, Christopher Reeve wanted to end his life. So when wife Dana Reeve told him to wait and if he still felt that way in two years, then they'd figure it out, he knew what she was doing. "On one level, you could say she used the oldest selling technique in the book," the Superman star recalled in his 2002 memoir Nothing Is Impossible: Reflections on a New Life.
"You offer customers a free trial, a free sample, with no obligation and no money down, in order to get them on the hook." But in this case, he continued, "On another level, a much deeper one where our love and respect for each other has always lived, she knew that I was in the first stage of a natural reaction to tragedy. Asking me to wait was the perfect course of action.
She was giving me room, the freedom to make a choice, yet knowing what that choice would be in time." Chris was describing a moment that occurred in the ICU several days after he was thrown from a horse during an equestrian competition on May 27, 1995. He had suffered what doctors called a "complete" injury: His spinal cord was severed at the C-2 vertebra, rendering his brain unable to transmit signals to the rest of his body.
He was paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe on his own. "When I first realized what my situation was, I thought, Maybe I'm too much trouble. Maybe this will be just too hard on everybody.
Maybe I should just check out," the actor said on Larry King Live the following year. "And my wife—my beaut.