Joni Eareckson Tada

  b. 1949 | American author

At The Bottom

— 1967

She begged numerous friends to help her commit suicide.

On a hot July afternoon, 17-year-old Joni Eareckson dove into the Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore, not realizing how shallow it was.  Her head struck the bottom, and the impact crushed the fourth cervical vertebra, leaving her paralyzed from the neck down.  Her arms and legs were completely lifeless, and the doctors told her there would be almost no chance of recovery.  Eareckson was angry and filled with despair.  She begged numerous friends to help her commit suicide.  As she recalled years later, she begged them “to slit my wrists, dump pills down my throat, anything to end my misery.”  She had a lifetime yet to live, and she wanted none of it.  She couldn’t imagine a life in which she couldn’t swim or ride horses — two of the things she loved most.  Instead, she was trapped in a body she couldn’t control.  Friends and family tried to reassure her that her accident had happened for a reason and that she would someday be able to make sense of it all.  Joni didn’t believe them.  “I was numb,” she remembers, “desperately alone, and so very, very frightened.”