Nothing Is Impossible (12 page)

But there was more to come. Now that I was standing, of course the next thing to do was walk. I had taken steps on Dr. Edgerton’s treadmill before, but there my body was suspended by a harness and the motion of the treadmill made my legs move. This was completely different. For the first time I was actually being asked to initiate walking on my own.

The helping hands still held me upright. As I shifted my entire weight onto my right leg a therapist told me to look at my left foot and kick it forward. That was not much different from pushing my leg forward, which I had done hundreds of times against Chris Fantini’s shoulder. I kicked hard from my left knee and suddenly saw that my left foot was now ahead of me, a few inches above the bottom of the pool. Another therapist told me to push off my right leg and transfer my weight to the left. It worked. (One small step for man, et cetera …) Then we repeated the process, kicking the right foot forward and shifting weight to take another step. In that first attempt I took eight steps before I reached the end of the hose and had to be floated back to home base. As we continued my body seemed to remember what to do. The leg thrust and weight transfer became easier and looked more normal. By the end of the session I had walked in water eight times.

By September 2001 my exercise program included weekly aquatherapy at the Gaylord rehab facility in nearby Connecticut. The first six sessions were supervised by their physical therapists and then I was allowed to use the pool with two nurses and two aides from our team. The two hours set aside for me on Friday afternoons soon became a precious reward, an eagerly anticipated treat at the end of the week. We don’t have enough people to help me walk, but we still do most of the other exercises. Some days are better than others, usually depending on how well I sleep the night before, but the overall progress has been extremely gratifying.

The payoff came on January 20, 2002, when I traveled to St. Louis once again for the assessment that would complete the study. The evaluation took three days. In addition to the usual physical exam, the ASIA exam, and another three-hour session in the MRI, John and his team measured all the muscle activity, including the diaphragm, with an electromyogram (EMG). I felt like a giant pincushion, but I knew that the EMG needles would give a more accurate reading of synapse time and the degree of enervation needed to create movement.

Fortunately for all concerned, I hit a home run. The Motor Function score went up from 11 to 20, Light
Touch jumped from 57 to 78, and the Pin Prick total soared to 56 from a previous high of 22. Now John had accumulated enough data to publish a scientific article demonstrating that activity-dependent training promotes functional recovery in chronic spinal cord injury. He said the test had to be so thorough and repeated over a long period of time (almost two years) because thirty neuroscientists could stand at the bedside, watch me move, and still say it wasn’t happening. The article would be certain to cause controversy. We hoped it would also cause rehab facilities and neuroscientists (as well as insurance companies) to look at physical therapy in a new way. Perhaps the aggressive approach that had led to significant improvement in my case would now be used to treat not only other spinal cord patients, but victims of strokes, MS, and other central nervous system disorders as well.

A
fter my encounter with Scientology I moved on in my search to discover the relevance of spirituality. But during the next twenty years, culminating with my injury in 1995, I tended to focus on the Big Questions only when I was not preoccupied with activities and issues of the moment. Others tried to impose their beliefs on me: the Scientologists begged me to return, and my acting coach in the eighties wanted me to become a follower of the Buddhist leader Baba Muktananda. During the Superman years I received hundreds of letters from fans explaining that Jor-el is God and his son Kal-el (Superman) is Christ, sent from Krypton to be raised by a humble family in Kansas before beginning his mission to save the world. I could appreciate the obvious parallel, and I did consider Superman to be a significant mythical icon in popular culture. But if religious individuals
saw Superman as Christ, and identified me as Superman, then what? How did I ascend from working New York actor to present-day Messiah?

In 1987, Gae Exton and I went our separate ways. Our relationship had been tenuous for some time. I returned to New York in early February as soon as I finished filming
Superman IV
, leaving Matthew (seven) and Alexandra (three) behind. The separation was amicable and we readily agreed to put the best interests of the children above all else: joint custody, British and American citizenship, and mutual consent on all important decisions. Still, I was nearly overcome with guilt. As a child of divorce myself, I could only hope that they wouldn’t have as hard a time as I did.

Now that I was living three thousand miles away, I needed to find ways to ease the pain and to remain a strong presence in their lives. In late February I hosted a documentary on the future of flight, which was filmed at the Air and Space Museum in Washington. I kept a video recorder with me and made tapes of myself next to the
Spirit of St. Louis
, at the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. I even included a drive-by glimpse of the White House. Back in New York I taped kids in the park where we had played countless games of hide-and-seek; I went to the corner deli to tape greetings from the man who used to give Matthew a
banana when I got my morning coffee; from the roof of our apartment I took shots of the Museum of Natural History across the street, our second home on rainy days. At the end of the video I looked into the camera and told them we’d see each other very soon.

I did my best to sound positive and cheerful, but even as I dropped the tape off at the post office, I wasn’t sure if I’d been able to mask the pain. I needed a real distraction, anything that would make me feel better. Drugs and alcohol were out of the question; I didn’t want to escape reality by making myself less conscious.

Flipping through my mail as I walked back from the post office, I came across a brochure for “Loving Relationships Training.” I gathered from the material that their mission was to help people find happiness by learning to love anyone and everyone we meet on life’s path. Weekend seminars, open to newcomers and graduates alike, were held several times a year in cities around the world. The next one in New York was only two weeks away. I decided that was more than a coincidence; maybe I was meant to find out about this source of spiritual healing at one of the lowest points of my life.

I reserved a place and showed up at a midtown hotel on Friday afternoon to begin my weekend of LRT. At the registrar’s desk I filled out forms that included complete confidentiality and handed over a check for
$1,500. Then I found myself in one of the ballrooms of the hotel, seated among three hundred others waiting patiently for the seminar to begin. I looked around and saw apparently normal people of all ages and descriptions. At least no one seemed tense or semirobotic, a marked contrast to many of the Scientologists in 1975.

Soon a side door opened and the leaders joined us—a man and a woman in their early forties, both fit and attractive in a well-tailored suit and a colorful designer dress. There were no workbooks, no videos, no E-Meters or personality tests. They simply began talking, taking turns as they addressed us. Although they must have delivered the same message many times before, they didn’t sound rehearsed and I didn’t feel that I was attending a lecture. They were relaxed, warm, and intimate in front of such a large gathering; if you’ve ever heard Deepak Chopra speak you get the idea.

They began by going into more detail about LRT as a basis for living, and then explained how we would spend much of the weekend in practical application. The premise was simple: All human beings are equal and equally worthy of loving and being loved. All our relationships must be informed by love, whether inside the family, among friends, or even in the fleeting moments as we pass others on the street. When we sit down at a restaurant, how many of us really pay attention to the
waiter? We might listen for a moment while he reads the specials, but could anyone describe him accurately after dinner? The same applies to bus drivers, tollbooth collectors, all the people we scarcely notice as we follow our own pursuits. All it takes is a brief moment of eye contact, which acknowledges the equality of another human being. Even that is a loving relationship.

Like other simple equations, many people find that one almost impossible to solve. How does one become able to love a relative when there has been nothing but jealousy or hatred for years? Are we expected to love someone who has deliberately harmed us in some way? The first step, which we were asked to take on Saturday morning, was to declare a statute of limitations on damage done to us by our parents. Now we used notebooks, putting it in writing that the statute had expired. From this day forward we agreed individually and collectively to forgive any grievances still held against them. Next we made a list of all the people who immediately came to mind as enemies, detractors, rivals, and anyone we had ever envied or knowingly deceived. We were given only ten minutes to think of names and write them down, which was probably a good idea because most of us could have gone on for hours.

The next task was to list ten words that best described ourselves, not taking into account what others
might think. Then we had to write down ten words defining the person we would like to be—not a role model, but the embodiment of our own potential. After that we were given a few moments to find a partner. Each pairing would remain together for the rest of the weekend. This was a scary proposition, because I have to admit I had not evolved to being nonjudgmental. Put simply, I didn’t want to get stuck with some weirdo. (Actually, most people thought the weirdest thing about the weekend was that I was there in the first place.) Fortunately my radar had identified three very attractive women in the group on Friday afternoon, so I immediately made a beeline for Choice A and managed to get there before the competition. I should have made a mental note that I might not succeed with LRT: we had just spent a day and a half learning that everyone is equal and equally worthy of love, and here I was practicing basic Darwinism. We had to move quickly because there was no negotiating; once eye contact was made with one of the other 299 people in the room, that was it.

My partner was a tall, very good-looking blond woman in her early twenties. She had left her small hometown in Pennsylvania to pursue a modeling career in the Big Apple when she was only eighteen. Apparently she was successful at work but unlucky in love.
She described herself as habitually attracted to the wrong men—ones who broke promises, mistreated her and diminished her already low self-esteem. I shared with her my wish that people would stop assuming that some of us have no problems.

The one-on-one tasks continued the rest of the afternoon and most of Sunday morning. We wrote and exchanged lists of people and things we love, hate, want to remember, and would like to forget. As usual we weren’t given much time, but now I found it quite exhilarating to free-associate. It was very liberating to write down the first thoughts that came into my mind and then share them, uncensored, with someone I had never met but to whom I soon felt I could say anything.