Debate assisted suicide all you want. Make your theoretical arguments, your moral and ethical objections, parse the symantics. Knock yourself out with self-righteous claims about right and wrong. Unless you've been there, god forbid, deep inside the pain and suffering and despair, you really don't know jack. I did. His name was David.

The Beginning
It was a beautiful October day. The kind you savor. Remember. For one family, a day in which life would change forever. Impossible to forget.

David's parents were in the stands cheering their 17-year-old son and his New Jersey high school football team. The quarterback threw a long pass. Nimble, graceful David caught it midfield and with his legendary speed began to run, opposing team members hot on his heels.

Just short of the end zone a tackle. A pile up. One by one the players got to their feet. Except David. He lay on the field, unmoving, still. Too still.

A mother knows her child's every move. David's mother knew instantly his lack of movement was dangerously different. Not normal. Wrong.

As the first-aid squad moved onto the field, David's father tried to reassure her. "He's just knocked out. He'll get up in a minute."

But she was already in motion, running toward her child, filled with a terrible dread. As they were carrying him to the ambulance David opened his eyes and smiled at her. "I'm okay, Mom," he said. "I don’t feel a thing."

Words that would echo in her memory. Because he didn't know what his mother sensed instinctively, and the doctors soon confirmed. He was paralyzed. From the neck down. A quadriplegic. Spinal cord severed.

He would never feel anything again. Except, so unfairly, pain.

He would never move again. Except in his dreams.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~13 years later ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A Trip to the Beach
During our son's early childhood, before sports teams and camps and summer jobs and college we spent our summers in a big rambling house at the Jersey shore. Right on the beach. Yards from the ocean.

Friends came to stay. We'd swim, the kids on their boogie-boards, build sand castles, play volleyball, football, whiffle ball, tennis, hunt for shells and clams during long rambling walks.  

Very hot days we’d go to the water park. Climb those high winding stairs, slipping down and around the slides on our backs, bodies straight, arms crossed over chests, yelling through the twists and turns, splashing finally into the water. Running back up to the next higher slide.

Nights we'd play charades, dance on the big patio, take the kids to the boardwalk for miniature golf, the arcades and rides. Wander through the food court or up and down the boards. The kids always running ahead.

Except for those excursions we rarely drove. We used bikes, wagons, our own two feet on strong tanned legs. The kids too, pedaling or walking with friends to the playground, grocery or video store. Picking up a couple of pizzas on the way home.

It was heaven. The simplicity of warm lazy days in sun and sea. We took it for granted. Especially our precious good health, our personal and physical freedom.

Until we didn't.

Connection
One Saturday morning we woke to the sound of hammering. Two men were fitting a wheel chair ramp over the steps of the rental house next door.  

A big van pulled up. We watched as a man in a specially equipped wheel chair was maneuvered up the ramp to the big porch facing the beach, turned toward the sun and the ocean.

We went over to welcome our new neighbors … and met David.

We met his two full-time nurses and their families. And entered a world we'd never known. One nobody should have to know. Yet thousands do.

David's travels through that world taught us lessons, both practical and spiritual, about independence. And lack of it. About determination. And heartbreaking helplessness. About courage. And unrelenting pain.

We learned the mind-boggling enormity of catastrophic injury. A daily struggle so all-encompassing it's almost impossible to wrap your mind around the totality of what that means.

Okay, You Try It
Get inside it for a minute. Imagine your chin itches. No, don’t scratch it! Ask someone to scratch it for you. Now, clear your throat. No, don’t! There's a tube embedded in your neck connected to a machine 24/7 because you can't clear your throat, or cough, or even breathe on your own. (You're clearing your throat now, aren't you?)

You need constant care. All your bodily functions managed by others. No privacy. No pride. Diapers and dressings and catheters changed. Medications and treatments administered. Pain kept barely at bay.

You are dressed and undressed. Spoon fed the soft food and liquids you can hardly swallow, often choke on. Somebody must suction your breathing tube then, as well as hourly. Somebody has to brush your teeth, wash your face and your body, clip your nails, comb your hair.

You can’t turn on a light, make a phone call, watch TV, listen to music, read a book without someone's help. You've got to be lifted from bed to wheelchair and back. On vacation at the beach, you're lifted onto an air mattress in the sun.

Some vacation. You can’t go in the ocean, eat a piece of pizza, drink a beer, have sex.

One minute you’re a high school senior, a football star, an honor student, with friends, teammates, a girlfriend, a car, dreams of college, a promising future.

You’re big and strong and confident, brimming with good health, possessing the youthful sense of invincibility, immortality, endless possibility. Life is yours to claim, to grab with both hands.

Then, in a blink of epic cosmic betrayal, your hands are useless, your legs unmoving, your entire body, from the neck down, is paralyzed. Forever. You're a teenager, then an adult ... trapped in the role of a sick, helpless infant.

You are never alone. Every day, every night of your life someone must be there to care for you. Even when you sleep, someone's watching you, checking, ready to step in.

Because you get constant infections, open sores, bouts of life-threatening pneumonia. You're in horrendous pain. And filled with the terror of permanent imprisonment. Inside yourself.

You have no physical autonomy. None. You are, essentially, literally, a talking head (David’s phrase). You can smile, grimace, wink, turn your neck, laugh, curse, cry. That's it. That's all the control you have over your own body.

Still, you have infinite control over your mind. Your intellect. Your sense of humor. Your spirit. That's what saves you from madness. If you have the Herculean courage to use those few vital tools left intact. 

It's unthinkable. The overwhelming neediness. The frustration. Surely, the rage. Those who are --and who care for-- the profoundly disabled know how hard it is, day after day, year after year.

I know too.

If you've been paying attention, so do you.

David’s World
Through countless private and public indignities, David showed calm self-possession and genuine dignity. His personality was so alive, so kinetic, his mobile intelligence so compelling you'd forget his lifeless body and respond instead to the vital man inside.

David’s sense of humor was a saving grace. A way to acknowledge the cruelty of his life and poke holes in people's discomfort with its brutal reality. He made jokes about his condition.

He'd say he was the best at playing 'statues' and posing for pictures. “Call me Third Base” was a frequent ice breaker. The irony of truth rang through his favorite line: if he could move just one arm, he’d pick his nose, then scratch his ass.

That made the kids giggle. Especially the boys, who regularly offered to do both for him, as they'd all --including David-- dissolve into laughter.

My then 8-year-old son hung back at first. He'd never met a quadriplegic, had trouble reconciling the vibrant personality with the eerily immobile man. But eventually he too fell under the spell of David's charismatic charm.

David loved kids. One of my favorite memories from that summer is watching David and the boys play together. Yes. Play.

They'd roll his wheelchair down the ramp, position it in the alley behind our houses. He'd use his chin to push away the special tube near his mouth, releasing the airflow that allowed the chair to move. And one by one, each kid would jump on a skateboard, grab the back of the chair and let David take him for a ride.

The children's easy acceptance of David's disability was beyond inspiring. Especially for him. It was empowering. Life affirming.

They'd perch unselfconsciously on his bed to watch videos and baseball games. Argue endlessly about sports, David's passion. Bring him juice. Feed him pudding. Change the channel. Call for help when needed. And scratch his chin.

Children caring for the needs of an adult. The role reversal unnoticed. Unimportant.

Tami was David's primary nurse. His favorite. She'd attended college with him, earned that degree almost as much as he did. She and her husband and children were like family. Every summer they went to the beach with him, a working vacation for them -- and a brief respite for David's parents.

David was a statistician for the local government, using a computer with Tami's help. He earned money. And the unwavering respect of everyone who knew him.

The Beginning of the End 
We stayed in touch after that summer, visited a few times. But life and time intervened and we drifted apart. Then my husband’s mother had a stroke. Incredibly, one day when I took her to the outpatient rehab facility, there was David.

Five years had passed. He’d changed. A lot. He was wan, dull-eyed, clearly exhausted. Obviously in pain. Not the vibrant David I remembered. His once robust body shrunken. In his eyes I saw it. Defeat.

My heart ached. But I smiled and greeted him with carefully gentle enthusiasm. 

He managed a smile. A weak Hi, laboring to speak. The other nurse was with him.

I asked what’s happening, what’s wrong. “Tell her,” he croaked to the nurse. “She’s …  a … friend.” He was failing. Badly. Permanently.

Twenty-two years of quadraplegia with it’s infections, ventilators, feeding tubes, catheters, surgeries and procedures had taken its toll. His organs were shutting down.

He was in so much physical pain, the effort to breathe, to speak, to lift his head was overwhelming. His psychic pain was even greater. He'd lost the ability to work, to interact, to laugh. To participate in life.

He was dying with agonizing slowness, inch by inch, sliding toward a vegetative state, no will left to fight. No desire to go on.

One tiny spark: the desire to die. With dignity, exactly as he had lived.

“Help … me … out.” Not a colloquialism, a literal plea for release from his useless body, his increasingly useless brain, from a world he'd once made bright through sheer force of will, now filled only with anguish and despair.

Those eloquent eyes locked onto mine. Both of us crying. My hand touched his cheek, gently brushed at his tears. "I'm so sorry," I said. "I'd help you if I could." I meant it. Retroactively, I still do.

“He asks everyone,” the nurse whispered to me. “His parents, me, Tami, the doctors, friends.”

“So do it,” I said, looking steadily into David’s eyes. If this valiant warrior was ready to die, it was time. “You’ve done everything else for him all these years, you can do this too.”

“I can’t talk about it,” she was suddenly brusque. “We have to go, David. Say goodbye.”

I never saw him again. I wasn't there but I’ve been told someone found the strength to help him one last time. Courage to match his own.

Two years ago through Google I found a New Jersey municipal park and ball field in David's name.     

I wish I'd been able to contribute to that memorial. But I made a contribution honoring David to the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Resource Center.

David was more than an inspiration, he was a gift. I hope he's with Chris and Dana Reeve and all the brave souls like him, running in the sun.

Unassisted at last.