Chris Reeve: Explaining the Tragedy

Actor Christopher Reeve, who has been paralyzed from a horseback-riding accident since 1995, lost six friends in the attack on the World Trade Center and is now having to cope with explaining this new tragedy in his life to his son, Will, 9. Some of the boy’s schoolmates lost their parents in the tragedy. “Up until Sept. 11,” Reeve, 48, told The Washington Post about his son, “he believed the world was a secure and peaceful place, and now he is very acutely aware that there is an unknown danger. I’ve noticed that he needs reassurance every day just about little things — what the plan is after school, who’s going to pick him up, what we are doing tomorrow, is Dad going to be home.” (The actor also has two older children: Matthew, 21, and Alexandra, 17.) Reeve and his wife, Dana, 40, were in D.C. in part to accept a $2 million federal grant from Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson for the Christopher Reeve Foundation (which promotes spinal cord injury research), says the Post. Reeve considers his appearance an “opportunity to remind politicians and the public to think about the domestic agenda while we are preoccupied with the military crisis.”