He was handsome by all standards, even dashing as some have written. Slender, muscular, 6’4”, blue eyes, dark brown wavy hair. He was intelligent, accepted into Princeton University, Julliard, Columbia University, Brown University, Cornell University, Northwestern University, and Carnegie Mellon University before choosing Cornell and, later, Julliard. He was athletic, playing baseball, soccer, tennis, hockey, and swimming. He was a licensed hang glider. He was an equestrian.
But even men like this die.
Even Superman dies.
Christopher D’Olier Reeve was born September 25, 1952. Though he had accomplished many things and his filmography is extensive, he is best known for his role as Superman, starring as Clark Kent/Superman in four blockbusters (1978, 1980, 1983, and 1987). Unfortunately, the other thing Reeve is known for is his accident on May 27, 1995.
“For Christopher Reeve, all that was apparently required for disaster was a slight shift in his weight. The actor and Eastern Express were galloping easily toward a zigzagged, three-foot-high rail jump, the third of 15 jumps they were to navigate on the two-mile course.
“He was in the middle of the pack on the scoreboard, and he was pretty excited about it,” says Lisa Reid, 42, a 24-year veteran horse trainer who first met Reeve a year ago and witnessed his May 27 ride. “The horse was coming into the fence beautifully. The rhythm was fine and Chris was fine, and they were going at a good pace.”
“But then, Reid says, that seamless synergy between horse and rider dissolved suddenly, and devastatingly.
“The horse put his front feet over the fence, but his hind feet never left the ground,” she says. “Chris is such a big man. He was going forward, his head over the top of the horse’s head. He had committed his upper body to the jump. But the horse — whether it chickened out or felt Chris’s weight over its head, I don’t know. But the horse decided, ‘I can’t do this.’ And it backed off the jump.”
“But Reeve kept moving, pitching forward over the horse’s neck. To Reid it appeared that Reeve first hit his head on the rail fence, then landed on the turf on his forehead. “He was unconscious when I got there. He was not moving, he was not breathing,” said Helmut Boehme, an organizer of the horse trials. To Boehme, it appeared that “the life had gone out of him.”1
Reeve’s first and second vertebrae were shattered, causing severe spinal cord damage and leaving him paralyzed from the neck down, unable to breathe without the assistance of a ventilator. Years into his recovery, he was finally able to breathe for about 90 minutes without ventilator assistance.
On this day in 2004, at the age of 52, Christopher Reeve died. He went into cardiac arrest, presumably from a reaction to an antibiotic he was taking for a pressure ulcer that had turned septic.
Even Superman dies.
Hebrews 9:27 reminds us of this fateful truth. “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” Job understood this as well and voiced it in Job 7:1. “Is there not an appointed time to man upon earth? are not his days also like the days of an hireling?” According to Ecclesiastes 9:5, “…the living know that they shall die” but to many wait too late to do anything about it.
After his accident, Reeve tragically admitted that he “still hadn’t found God.”2 He grew up attending a Presbyterian church. He tried Scientology. He finally landed in the Unitarian church. He never says that he became a Christian, only that he became a Unitarian.
That’s not a sufficient answer, especially on the day of our death.
John 3:36 says, “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.” Earlier in this chapter, Jesus told Nicodemus, “Ye must be born again.” Without new birth, there is no Heaven, and dying once becomes dying twice.
Revelation 20:14-15 says, “And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. (15) And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.” The old saying is true. Born once, die twice; born twice, die once.
Can you say with Paul, “We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.” (2 Corinthians 5:8)
1https://people.com/christopher-reeve-people-cover-story-equestrian-accident-29-years-later-1995-8653188
2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Reeve
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