FOR BETTER AND WORSE:
When British journalist Melanie Reid married, she knew her outgoing husband wasn’t the nurturing type, so when a horseriding accident left her disabled, she gave him the chance to leave. What has happened since shows how precious true love really is ...
a tragic accident tests love and loyalty
As with many second marriages, ours trailed plenty of baggage: hurt exes, hostile grown-up children and a bewildered younger one. For me, the good middle-class girl who obeyed all the rules in the past, it was madness, a coup de foudre; for my new husband, a handsome, funny, streetwise photographer, who’d played the field most of his life, it was a startling commitment, a sea-change.
Dave and I met as successful professionals on a big newspaper, and together, with my son Doug, we created a home life in a tumbledown rural paradise. We had 18 years of golden times; laugherfilled, hectic, sustained by that wonderful sense of being on the same side, supporting and adoring each other. Dave believed in me more than I believed in myself; a novel experience for me. He unconditionally had my back.
Never a natural parent, he respected that my priority was Doug and we forged a tolerant, outdoorsy, team lifestyle, giving each other space and maintaining our own friends. I made no attempt to shoehorn him into a father role. There was a surfeit of freedom, fun, walking holidays, and as much sport as Doug and I could persuade him to attempt.
The music stopped, with devastating abruptness, in 2010. I was 52, fitter and more active than I’d been at 32, with a big job at the The Times newspaper and
lighter home responsibilities since Doug had left for university. Dave was 64, and anticipating a pleasant retirement. The day of my riding accident, Good Friday, he was at work in Glasgow, while I’d taken my horse for a crosscountry jumping day 94kms away in Perthshire. He got a call from the course organiser – I’d had a fall, and was being taken to hospital. He jumped in his car and headed north. Then, another call – a helicopter was now flying me to the specialist spinal unit in Glasgow. He did a lonely u-turn.
Through the descending fog of shock and morphine, I remember him joining me in A&E after my MRI scan. The head of the spinal unit explained I’d fractured a lower back vertebrae, which was not so serous, and broken the cervical vertebrae C6 in my neck, which was. What I didn’t know was Dave was also taken aside and gently warned there was every possibility I’d be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.
Trauma rips you asunder physically. Dave had to go home, while I, fading into barelythere awareness, was sent to high dependency to focus on breathing as a way of surviving. Dave’s horrible job now was to contact Doug, who was abroad. Then family and friends, repeating the dreadful news over and over again, absorbing the shock and tears of others. Even now, I can’t bear the details of those first hurt-filled days. What little I do know is that Dave, the type of macho Scotsman who never cries, wept with despair for about 48 hours. As the news rippled out, the phone started ringing. And rang, and rang. He found himself imprisoned, telling and retelling daily updates, unable to escape. That, he told me later, was one of the worst bits. “I seemed to be on the phone from the moment I got up until the middle of the afternoon,” he said.
Difficult times
As days consolidate into weeks, trauma separates you mentally, too. Honesty became dangerous. I was in denial about my condition. Dave wasn’t. He and I were actors in two different plays – wearing brave faces in order to keep spirits up; soldiers joshing with injured comrades. He took on the role of my guard dog, with the blessing of the doctors, refusing to allow any but a handful of people to visit me in hospital. He pursued the one tiny insurance policy I could claim on, tangential to membership of a horsey organisation, with diversionary aggression. Few people grasped the gravity of my injuries or their consequences for our future, let alone the psychological ramifications. How could they, when we ourselves couldn’t?
Paralysis is often described as life changing, a euphemism shiny with overuse. More accurately, it felt as if a selective nuclear strike had atomised our lives. Cards and flowers piled up at our home; the only structure that seemed to be still standing, but even that wasn’t certain. Dread of financial insecurity assailed Dave through the night. He felt under siege from the practical responsibilities thrust upon him, yet pretended to be strong. “Who’s our mortgage with?” he asked me urgently one day. “Where do you keep the file?” My brain was too befuddled to recall. All we could do was firefight. More complex emotions were for later.
By the time I came home, after nearly a year in hospital, we were assured of keeping a roof over our heads, but we hadn’t yet properly tested that ‘in sickness and in health’ line uttered so blithely in wedding vows. Oh, it must be hard enough, at the end of life, losing a beloved partner to illness or dementia. But when catastrophe arrives in fit, healthy, complacent middle-age, and snatches your body without warning, the impact on a relationship is seismic, testing the true calibre of love. I never doubted the rock of our friendship; there was respect, support, affection. But as time passed, and the permanence of my injuries became more evident, bigger questions arose. My husband was not the nurturing type. As my brother observed, years before, Dave was put on earth to be the head of entertainment. He was not designed for selfless caring. Nor was he practical. In fact, were you to design the man least suited to cope with a dependent, doubly incontinent, sexless wife, you’d come up with my husband.
Pillar of strength
Marry the bad boy, girls, and in the course of ordinary life, run the risk of losing him. With the thrill goes the risk – leopards, spots and all that. I’d always been aware of that. Now, with my six-foot frame paralysed from the shoulders down, heavy and rigid, legs jammed together by spasm like telegraph poles, with only my right arm, right thumb and forefinger vaguely functioning, I was no longer a tall blonde. I had to address my new reality. I needed someone to wash and dress me in the morning, and lift my legs into bed at night. I, once the practical one, had lost the ability to do almost everything physical except offer a half-hug, propel a wheelchair and hold a mug of coffee. Gone was the entire reciprocity of married life. I needed a sexless saint, not a legendary wild man.
I was alive, my brain wasn’t damaged, and I could still work as a writer, but I had been hollowed out as a woman. All allure, sensuality, movement and touch had been shed. My identity had gone. In hospital, they taught us about fertility and sexual possibilities, post-spinal injury. For me, it was irrelevant, mocking. I was no petite, fragrant invalid. My body was hostile to intimacy; I was insensate, asexual, unfanciable.
My sexual bereavement was nothing, I soon realised, compared to the loss of working hands, or of continence, or of the ability to dress myself. Nonetheless, I couldn’t inflict it on anyone else. I offered Dave a way out. Previously, I’d never condemned people who couldn’t cope when terrible things beset their partners. Some people just aren’t cut out for it, and it’s better to set them free than keep them prisoner. Bluntly therefore, while still in hospital, I had suggested that we should – lovingly, regretfully – go separate ways, allowing him to get a life. He told me not to be stupid. “I’m going nowhere. You’re stuck with me, kid.”
That brusque sacrifice moved me immensely and continues to do so. I reckon it’s the ultimate definition of love and loyalty. He proceeded to stun everyone who knew him by evolving into a carer. Not the slickest or most patient, but certainly the funniest. With humour and in exchange for a free pass to the pub whenever he wanted, he steeled himself to rescue me again and again after bowel meltdowns, falls and breakages, and put me to bed every night. That’s nobility! The human capacity to change does exist. And we compromised. We hired a professional carer to get me up in the morning; I bit my tongue as he attempted practical stuff I once did effortlessly, wielding a screwdriver or loading a dishwasher. In company, he still
flirts, because it’s in his DNA, and he’s still the life and soul of the party. And I watch, fondly, wistfully, form the sidelines, glad that he’s still there.
A deeper love
Over the years, we’ve recalibrated our relationship.
As I got better at managing my disability, the darker times faded. We have eased into a modest equilibrium: every morning, he and my carer Janice help me get to my feet with a standing frame, and escort me as I stagger up and down the living room. Even after nine years, we both still notice tiny improvements in my walking and foot placement, which makes us happy. We are impossible optimists!
During the day, Dave has respite. Around the house in my wheelchair, I am largely self-sufficient, and some days I drive independently to visit friends. At night, he’s there to sling my legs on to the bed, strip off my bottom half unceremoniously, and wedge pillows expertly around my body so I can sleep. The eventual death of my inner superwoman has made me massively more tolerant of his general scattiness and humbly grateful for his honour, duty and sacrifice. The bond between us is deeper, different; love forged with kindness and friendship. We are interdependent: as he gets older, I can fix his mobile phone, chauffeur him, locate his car keys. We still have each other’s backs unconditionally. Our ability to laugh at anything endures, although I never escape the guilt of what I did to him. Even now, poor guy, anywhere he goes, the first thing anyone asks is: “How’s Melanie?”
Three years after my accident, the singer/songwriter Emily Maguire wrote Bird Inside A Cage, inspired by our story. She summed up perfectly the redemptive power of love in the face of catastrophe. “But it’s love that saves us when all else has failed us/When you just can’t take another day/But he calls my name like nothing’s changed ...” We have both suffered and lost, immensely so, but what remains is precious.