My Wife Left Me in a Wheelchair With Two Kids — Saying She “Didn’t Sign Up to Be My Nurse”
Then two.
I did everything I could to provide for my girls and pay for my therapy.
I sold everything I could just to have a chance of walking again someday.
The truck.
My father’s tools.
My wedding ring, which I told myself was a practical decision and which I still think about at red lights.
Three years of physical therapy, twice a week, in a clinic that smelled of rubber mats and other people’s hope, and in year three the money ran out on the same afternoon the doctor stopped saying “some patients.”
I remember driving home — Ray drove; Ray always drove — and Greta, six by then, asking from the back seat if I was sad, and me saying no, and Greta saying, “Okay, but your face is.”
That night I built the first reacher.
I built it because the one the clinic sold cost sixty dollars and broke in a month, and because I had a broom handle and a coat hanger and a daughter who couldn’t reach the cereal, and because a man who has just been told “never” for the last time needs to make something that works.
It worked.
I built a second one for the woman down the street with the bad hip.
Then six more for the clinic, who asked if they could sell them.
Ray took a picture, put it online, and said, “You know what, D, I think we have a company.”
We had a company.
Ten years have passed since then.
I never walked again.
But I learned how to live with it.
Amelia and Greta are incredible girls.
Greta is thirteen and reads everything and argues with all of it.
Amelia is ten and has never once in her life seen her father standing and does not, she informs me regularly, see what the big deal is.
A few years ago, my friend Ray and I started an online store that became very successful.
Adaptive gear — grips, reachers, kitchen tools, the things I’d spent six years jury-rigging out of duct tape and spite because nobody sold them at a price a single father could pay.
Ray did the website.
I did the products.
Last year we shipped to forty-one countries.
