| Jacquielynn Floyd: Finding the key to a new life 02/13/2001 By Jacquielynn Floyd / The Dallas Morning News July 7, 1993, was the last day of Sam Becke's old life.
It was the last day he ever tied his shoes or picked up a newspaper or waved to a friend. It was the last day he went to work driving a cab.
Sam's new life started that night when a passenger, a panicky teenager, shot the cabbie in the neck for the $40 in his shirt pocket. The kid ran off as the taxi bounced over a curb and crashed into a guardrail on Dolphin Road near Interstate 30. Sam slumped over the steering wheel, unable to raise his head.
"I would have given him the money," Sam says now. "I told him that it was not necessary to shoot me, that he could take the money and push me out of the cab."
Nearly eight years later, Sam is still bemused that somebody would do such awful damage to someone else for $40. The gunshot mangled Sam's spinal cord and left him paralyzed from his shoulders to his toes.
I met Sam a few months ago when Mike's dad, who was recovering from a stroke, was his roommate in a Dallas rehabilitation hospital. My father-in-law recovered enough to go home after a few weeks, but Sam is a permanent resident. He is and will remain dependent on other people for even the most personal aspects of his daily care.
Feeling trapped
Most people are too restrained to tell Sam what they're thinking, but occasionally someone tells him outright: I'd rather be dead than in your position.
For three years, that's what Sam thought, too.
A native of Cameroon, Sam had been a university student, driving a cab for extra cash. He had two small children. As he saw it, he was trapped in a life worse than death.
"I was 39 years old, and I was in bondage," he said. "I cried every night. I wanted to die, but I could not hold a gun, could not hold a knife."
He politely declined to talk to pastors and counselors. He lay in bed and burned with rage at what fate and a kid with a gun had stolen from him.
But doctors pointed out that his brain worked fine. And sometime in 1996, Sam performed an incredibly powerful act of strength and will.
"I came to the conclusion I should forget this guy who did this," he said. "They put him in prison, but that didn't make any change for me."
Focusing on prayer
Sam stopped crying at night. He prayed instead. He focused all the mental energy he could summon on developing patience and acceptance, on finding pleasure in the life he now lives.
He learned to drive a motorized wheelchair that he can steer with his chin. He joined support groups and welcomed visitors – especially his kids, who started looking forward to seeing their dad.
Sam can be tough on the nurses. He'll complain if he's not up and clean and dressed by midmorning. He knows that if he stops caring, it will be easy to slide into the ghostly half-life that too many victims of traumatic injury settle for, lying passively in bed and staring at TV.
He still makes friends readily. Former patients' family members – like me – sometimes come back and visit. And Sam drives his battery-powered chair to make social calls on other patients.
"I tell my daughter and son that the Lord is taking care of them because he left me to watch them grow up," Sam said. "Perhaps it is hard to believe, but I don't think I'm in a very bad situation."
The answer to Sam Becke's tragic dilemma wasn't easy, but it was simple: Only Sam could help Sam, so he did.
"I have my brain, my voice, my eyesight," he says, enumerating what sound like gifts of incalculable good fortune. "I can speak. I can cherish the part of the body that God left me.
"I am alive."
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