Christopher Reeve’s children reveal their dinner table rule following their father’s accident
The documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story hits theaters today, and it’s bound to garner a lot of interest: people are fascinated by the life of Christopher Reeve.
Christopher Reeve was an amazing man. He was best known for playing the iconic DC hero Superman, a role that would follow him all his life before a terrible horse-riding accident befell him in 1995 and left him paralyzed from the neck down. Naturally, Reeve had difficulty adjusting to what had happened—he details the journey in his 1999 book Still Me—but he pulled through and became an activist for stem cell research in addition to remaining an actor. He also started the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation and the Reeve-Irvine Research Center, each devoted to finding treatments for people in the same position as him.
On top of all that he was also able to be an excellent father to his kids, Matthew, Alexandra, and Will. All three are involved with the documentary, and they’re using the buzz around it to share heartfelt stories about their dad.
Will, the youngest, sat down with his siblings on Good Morning America to talk about what everyday life was like for the Reeves. Dinner, he said to Diane Sawyer, was always “family time.” Christopher and Dana would sit at the head of the table, and “My mom would feed him and herself. We had friends dropping by. It was very happy, robust, loud—everything you would want from a family dinner.”
He went on, “That was every night, and the one thing you weren’t allowed to talk about was specific medical stuff. It could be anything else.”
Will was only a child when Christopher Reeve passed away of heart failure in 2004, aged just 52. Tragically, he then had to face a second terrible blow when his mother died of lung cancer just two years later. He was an orphan at the age of 13, an unbelievably difficult reality to face, but he always remembered his parents as beautiful people. “I think no matter the contours of a family, no matter how scraggly the branches on the family tree might be, as long as it’s rooted in love, it doesn’t matter what your family looks like as long as it’s yours,” he told Sawyer.
The whole interview with Will and his siblings is deeply touching, and it speaks to me as the daughter of a quadriplegic person. While it wasn’t easy, there were a lot of moments like Will Reeve describes —dinner table times where the whole family got together, ate good food, and had fun. It’s nice to know that other people lived in a world where disability was present, too, but it didn’t necessarily rule the lives of the children involved. And thanks to the work of Christopher and Dana Reeve—Still Me was a book my parents owned as I was growing up, and it’s a wonderful read—I learned to appreciate the intricacies of life after paralysis.
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