Back to Spring / Summer 2007 Issue
A Victory for Optimism
After a life-shattering accident, a local club GM recovers, rebuilds and reconnects.
by David Hall
On a ramp leading up to his office, Reggie Colomb stumbles as he struggles to find his center. With his rib cage shifted drastically to one side––the result of a horrific car accident that claimed his wife last spring and left him critically injured––Colomb’s midsection is no longer in the middle. He hobbles, catches his balance with a cane and walks on, baby step by baby step, to a waiting golf cart.
For a man who lost the love of his life in the wreck, subsequently spent more than two months in a coma and stood on death’s doorstep knocking with all his might, every step is an accomplishment, every day a full-fledged miracle. Colomb, the 50-year-old general manager and head golf professional at the Country Club of the Crystal Coast in Pine Knoll Shores, is, in almost every way, a new man. On the walls of his tiny office in a trailer that, until recently, sat in the shadow of the fancy, new waterfront clubhouse that Colomb masterminded were several of those ubiquitous motivational photos. You know the ones: “IMAGINATION,” “PASSION,” “OPPORTUNITY” and “SUCCESS” are all depicted in awe-inspiring splendor among shots of cliffs, oceans, mountains and golf courses. “VISION,” reads one poster in large type, above a lighthouse shining over the sea at dusk. “The only way to discover the limits of the possible,” it reads below, “is to go beyond them into the impossible.”
“I always had these,” Colomb says, motioning toward the wall. “Now I know what they mean.”
With the staff scheduled to move into the new clubhouse, the makeshift office was temporary. Colomb knows what that word means, too. On a sunny April Saturday morning last year, Colomb and his wife, Irene, were ejected from the back seat of their family car on U.S. 70 when a tire blew on the way to a Raleigh airport. The couple’s two daughters, one of whom was driving, were wearing seatbelts in the front seats and practically walked away. Irene Colomb died at the scene. Reggie Colomb’s world as he knew it was gone. His spine misaligned by 2 1/2 finger widths after the impact, Colomb suffered permanent spinal cord damage. He tore a meniscus in his left knee. Damage to his left hip makes relocating his center even harder, exacerbated by the fact that one of his left ribs, which protruded from his body after the wreck, healed over the top of another.
Initially, as Colomb lay in a coma, doctors told his children he’d never move his limbs again, let alone walk. A sometimes shrewd but always successful businessman, before the accident Colomb could be impatient, terse, coarse. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, and he wasted no time. Long hours and the resulting late-night meals had him up to 240 pounds, and the stress of overhauling the country club—including the replacement of an outdated clubhouse, an upgrade of the golf course and a general facelift to meet the expectations of an influx of affluent clientele––often manifested itself in his personality.
These days, more than a year after the life-altering wreck and with months of strenuous rehab behind him, Colomb laughs more. He cries more, too, as he continues on what he calls his “journey” and tries to share the message of hope and optimism he believes God left him here to spread. “He’s a lot calmer,” says Colomb’s 25-year-old daughter Jennifer, who assumed the leadership role in the family home after the accident. “I think he’s learning to reflect on life and what’s in front of him for the moment. I really think he’s taking each day for what it’s worth now—not to say that he didn’t before, but I think he was just so rushed and so busy, sometimes he neglected what was going on around him.”
Cards and Prayers
To spend time with the new Colomb is to be in the company of serenity, sadness, inspiration, heartache and hope all at once. The accident leaves him moving more slowly—for now, he says—and he talks openly about his Christian faith and his love for the innate goodness of his fellow man. When he speaks of his grueling, ongoing recovery, Colomb deflects credit to his three children, his friends, his doctors, the staff at the Coastal Rehabilitation Hospital in Wilmington, the country club’s members and God. Anybody but himself. “It’s not me,” Colomb insists. “I was the instrument. I mean, it was easy for me. I knew what I had to do: I had to walk. Was that easy? I’ll be honest: No. But I knew what I had to do.” He had, in fact, walked one time since the accident, but that is a story for later.
In the five months that transpired between the day of the accident and the day he willed himself out of the rehab center in Wilmington, Colomb reached what he called his lowest point. Always a fighter, he twice asked God to take his life, only to be reminded that he still had reason to live. Colomb’s faith was fortified by cards and letters and not-so-random acts of kindness back home. The Zurn family, Ruth and Gary, brought meals to his children while he was in the hospital. His church in his native Rutland, Vt., held prayer vigils. CCCC club president Phil Panzarella and Lorraine DiJoseph, the club’s office administrator and a 20-year member, arranged communications between Colomb and the club’s members so they could check on his condition online. Hoover and Donna Taft—more good friends—made sure Colomb didn’t have to survive on hospital food once he became capable of eating again.
Colomb believes all the help and support has left him with a debt to his fellow man. He pays it forward in the form of undying, overt gratitude, an unwavering sunny outlook and a ready smile. Colomb moves back in forth in conversation between discussing his recovery and the rebirth of the club so often that it becomes impossible to distinguish between the two. The parallels, he says, are obvious. Equally obvious is the place the club occupies in Colomb’s busy life. His office phone rings constantly, but it seems that for every business call he gets, another comes in to wish him well.
With his experience, Colomb is an authority on perspective. Having faced death as closely as one can and living to tell the tale, his is a perspective all of us want but none of us wants to earn. He now uses public speaking to impart his message, recently addressing a group of fellow PGA professionals in Myrtle Beach, S.C. “The formula to success in the club business is the same formula to success in life,” Colomb, a longtime teacher of golf, says with a hint of his New England accent in a voice that seems to require more effort now. “First, define a target and stay focused on it. Remain positive. Pray. And accept that good things are going to happen. As things that aren’t so great happen, you learn from it, and we become better by learning. My life has only been great. I’m blessed. There’s been some challenges. There’s been some bumps and humps. I’ll play again. One of my goals is to maybe qualify for a U.S. Senior Open or something like that. That may not occur; I may not have the physical abilities to do that. But I can make my U.S. Open my clubhouse for my members. It’s all in the way that we present it.
“This is a challenge; it’s a journey,” he continues, referring to the club. “My life is a challenge; it’s a journey.”
‘Take Me, God’
To understand the degree to which a man has overcome adversity, it is necessary to examine and understand the adversity. The day of the accident—April 15, 2006—was just another day, an Easter weekend morning that found four-fifths of the Colomb family driving to Raleigh after breakfast together at home in Morehead City.
Jennifer, then 23, was driving the family’s silver Infiniti Qx4 SUV and Janelle, then 14, was in the front passenger’s seat. Their parents sat in the back, Irene behind the driver’s seat and Reggie to her right. Irene and Janelle were to fly back home to Vermont for a week for Easter break while Reggie and Jennifer planned to drive on to Pinehurst to watch middle child Chris, then a junior on UNC-Wilmington’s golf team, compete in a tournament. The parents, with a week apart ahead of them, sat in the back as they often did to take advantage of some rare time together. “As many hours as I worked, Irene and I in our relationship valued time that we could share together with gentle touches, with hugs and kisses,” Colomb says. “So it was not uncommon for us to sit in the back seat and have either Jenn or Chris drive and us hug and kiss a little bit and act like kids.”
Unlike many involved in traumatic events, Colomb says he remembers every painful detail of the accident. He and Irene were discussing the possibility of bringing Irene’s mother down from Vermont to live in North Carolina, a move that would’ve meant selling her mother’s home. Suddenly, about seven miles outside of New Bern on U.S. 70 West in Jones County, the family heard a thud from underneath the car. The rear left of the vehicle went “out of whack,” Colomb says, and Jennifer spoke up.
“Daddy,” she said, “I can’t hold the steering wheel.”
In a period of 5 to 10 seconds, her father advised Jennifer to pump the brake lightly. The vehicle slowed, but not quickly enough. As it flipped several times, Reggie and Irene were ejected. The girls, bruised and bloodied, remained in the mangled car. Stunned but alert, Colomb says he somehow—despite the injuries that would immobilize him for the next several months and leave him struggling
to walk to this day—walked to the front of the vehicle to check on his daughters. Janelle was climbing out, and her father says he walked around the front of the vehicle to where she was standing. “Where’s Mommy?” Janelle asked. Her dad stumbled to the other end of the vehicle, where, on a barren stretch of rural highway, unfathomable tragedy intersected with the promise of the hereafter.
“Irene was laying on the side of the road, like she was sleeping,” Reggie Colomb recalls, his voice weakening and familiar tears beginning to escape his eyes. “I gave her a kiss and she didn’t respond. I kissed her again and she didn’t respond. And I looked away, and that’s when I knew that she was gone. And then I turned and I looked up in the sky, and she was there, standing in a brilliant, brilliant white, with a huge smile on her face. And I kissed her again, and then the [paramedic] said, ‘Sir, you need to let her head down. We’re going to put you to sleep.’ ”
There, on the highway, Colomb asked God to take his life.
The next time he awoke, some 10 weeks later, Panzarella, filling in for the kids at his bedside, was standing over him with tears streaming down his face. The coma, during which Colomb was fed with tubes, was followed by a four-week period in intensive care made tougher by the fact that he was awake and couldn’t move. Still unable to eat, Colomb could only watch the movement around him as he relied upon his caregivers for his every need.
On a steamy day last summer, his bed drenched with his own sweat and the IV in his arm failing to quench a miserable thirst that wouldn’t go away, Colomb had had enough. For a second time, about 12 weeks after the accident, he asked again with all his conviction: “Take me, God.”
Days later, though, came the turning point in Colomb’s recovery. Still somehow clinging to life as the prayers left his friends’ mouths and the cards and letters arrived at his hospital room, he was sleeping when he started awake. Then it hit him: This recovery, this life, this improbable defiance of odds—it wasn’t about him. Colomb thought first of his children, who had flown to Vermont to bury their mother and returned to tend to a dying father who had suddenly lost the will to live. He thought of the scores of friends and acquaintances who were rooting for him, especially those helping to take care of his children. People he didn’t even know were sending cards. How, he asked himself, could he let so many people down?
“Somehow,” Colomb says, “God sent me a message of how selfish I was.
“That’s what changed me. That was the point that I changed. Because I still have love to give, and I have love to receive.”
Walking Tall
Some of that love came to him, and was reciprocated, during his grueling rehab in Wilmington. Colomb, with his core permanently shifted, became determined to find his center and walk again.
While at Coastal Rehab, the natural-born leader became a coach of sorts to his fellow patients. Colomb would stick his head in a room and urge other patients to listen to the medical staff and remain optimistic and upbeat. “If they were positive,” he explains, “the air in our whole wing would be positive, so it would make it easier for everybody else.”
In time and with agonizing work, Colomb went from his bed to a motorized wheelchair to a push chair to a walker. He promised the center’s staff members, who had bathed him and helped him get out of bed every day and encouraged him to keep working, that he would walk out of the building. Early on, he’d ride his wheelchair to the outside doors every day and say to himself, “I’ve gotta walk through here.”
Colomb worked with spine specialists, knee specialists and neurologists, lifting weights and taking literal baby steps toward recovery. Meanwhile, he encouraged the other patients at the center to push themselves: If a rehab specialist tells you to do 10 reps, he told them, do 12. If they tell you to do 12, do 15.
On Sept. 22, 2006, five months and seven days after kissing Irene goodbye and asking God to take his life on the side of the road, Colomb waited to be released from the center. But they wouldn’t let him go. Only later did he find out his release was being delayed until Dr. John Liguori, one of heads of the center, could make it to witness Colomb’s grand exit firsthand.
Finally, Colomb stood unsteadily at the end of a hallway with dozens of staff members, family, friends and fellow patients lining the 90 feet between him and the rest of his life. Step by step, leaning partially on his friend Amber, one of the rehab specialists, Colomb slowly made his way down the hall.
There was DiJoseph, her eyes covered with sunglasses to hide her tears. Colomb’s daughters stood there among the crowd, crying with everyone else. Applause echoed through the building. Inspired, a girl with similar injuries rose from her wheelchair for the first time. Even Liguori cried openly.
“The front of his shirt was soaking wet—his white, starched shirt—from all the tears,” DiJoseph says of the doctor. “Everybody was cheering and taking pictures. “It was so emotional because it was like watching a child taking his first steps, or you take the bird and you let him free.” The steps, Colomb believed all along, were inevitable. He became so close with some of the rehab staff that he continues to speak with them regularly, as friends, to this day. As people inspired him, he now inspires others.
“I appreciate that people draw on my willingness to stay positive, but I was blessed with wonderful children,” he says. “I had a wonderful wife for 27 years; very good family support—brothers and sisters, mother and father, in-laws. When you have that, as I told the doctors and the therapists, I can’t not make it. There were two negatives in there, so I could only make it. I knew I could only make it, only because there was everything behind me. I knew that. And I knew when I first stood up for the first time without assistance that I had something behind me holding me up—a lot of somethings: prayers, love, friendship, new acquaintances that grow into friendships. That’s my message here.”
The Roadside Miracle
Those steps, Colomb is quick to remind a visitor, were not his first since the accident. The steps he took around the car at the scene that day were confirmed by a passerby who later came by the hospital to “check on the man I saw walking around the car” after the accident, Colomb says. Jennifer Colomb doesn’t remember anything from that day after her head hit the windshield when the car flipped a second time. She said a hospital staffer and a club employee who was present at the hospital both confirmed the passerby’s inquiry as her father lay in a coma.
Asked how it was that he walked that day but not again for several months, Colomb is unyielding. “God,” he says as a confident, knowing smile breaks across his face. “God. Guardian angels. I walked around the vehicle, absolutely. I remember it clear as day. Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.” Colomb is just as adamant when he recalls Irene’s presence above him that day. She didn’t say anything, but she spoke with the way she looked at him.
Irene Colomb, who was 52, was a fifth-grade teacher at Newport Elementary with 30 years in the business. She was known for earning respect from her students by respecting them and handling even the most troubled children. Reggie Colomb recalls a phone call that came years ago in the middle of the night. It was a student calling from the top of a bridge. No longer able to tolerate sexual abuse from a family member, the girl was about to jump. “She called Mrs. Colomb because that was her last chance,” Colomb says. “We went and picked that kid up and brought her home. It’s unbelievable, but that’s real. And I was blessed to have her as my wife for 27 years.”
Heather Dietzler, the principal at Newport Elementary, remembers Irene Colomb as an inspiration. “She was the teacher who sustained unconditional love and generosity for her students and those around her. Even on the hardest day she was kind,” Dietzler wrote in an e-mail. “Simply watching her teach you could see the connections she had with the children. They absolutely adored and respected her, as did her [co-workers].” As they approached their 50s, the Colombs had begun to see friends facing life-threatening illnesses like cancer. That prompted big-picture, whatif- something-happens conversations that they shared with their children. That’s why, while Irene didn’t say anything at the accident scene, her husband knew what she meant. He recognized the look.
“She was standing there — bright, bright, bright with a huge smile on her face,” Colomb says. “What she said is, ‘We did good with our kids, number 1. And number 2, keep moving on with your life and be happy.’ That’s real. That’s real. That picture is as real as us sitting here. It’s too clear for me not to believe it.”
Healing
The Colombs got away for Christmas, their first without Irene, as recommended by grief counselors to help cope with the loss. Jennifer Colomb says her mom loved Christmas and always went over the top with music and decorations, filling their home with holiday spirit. Last Christmas Day the four remaining family members sat together in a Las Vegas hotel room, sharing stories and comforting each other. Part of taking that trip — and part of going anywhere west of New Bern — is passing the scene of the accident, something Reggie Colomb says has gradually gotten easier as he and the family move forward on their journey.
On the anniversary of the accident, Colomb says, he spent most of the day alone. He prayed. He told Irene he loved and missed her. He thought of the positive things in his life. He told his children he loved and appreciated them.
Jennifer, now 25, is the member and activities coordinator at the club. Janelle, 15, remains an outstanding student whom her father would love to have on staff someday. Chris, 23, graduated from UNCW this spring.
The club’s staff recently moved into the new clubhouse, and the booming membership will soon follow. The vision Colomb had when he came to Carteret County in January 2004 is being realized, just like the vision he had of leaving the rehab center on his own two feet. Colomb, who turned 50 in January, still goes to rehab in Morehead City four days a week. He now walks with a cane he can’t wait to cast aside. Still, with all the support he’s had from all the sources through all the dark days, he knows he’ll never truly walk on his own. Every step, past and future, is the result of one kind of help or another. The friendship between the children and their father is more openly expressed now—a hug here, a thoughtful card there, a more frequent “I love you, Dad.”
“I think we’ve all learned that we have to take life as it comes,” says Jennifer Colomb, who speaks with the confidence and optimism instilled by her mother and personified by her father. “I don’t want to say we’re all calmer, because all of our lives have really been shaken up. But I think we’re each realizing we can handle anything after handling such a tragedy. Every day I wake up and I’m not stressing about the little things. I’m like, ‘You know what? I got through that a year ago. I can get through anything.’ ”
Reggie Colomb laughs like he means it. He cries when the urge comes. The edge that once defined him professionally still exists, but it has dulled with the hard-earned realization of what’s truly important in this world. Minor things stay that way now. It’s one of the major lessons of his recovery, one that came out of long nights staring at a hospital ceiling and wondering whether he’d ever get any better or whether his children would lose another parent.
“You’re looking at first for an answer: Why? Why now? All that stuff,” Colomb says. “But I have a peace.
“I can comfortably say I’m much more at peace with myself—absolutely, I learned that.”
Walking gingerly with his cane down a handicap ramp he never thought he’d need to use in a million years, Colomb loses his balance and stumbles again. He reaches for a handrail and leans against it, stopping to remind himself that with every step must come a conscious search for the new center of his being.
In more ways than one, his journey has already led him to it.
For a man who lost the love of his life in the wreck, subsequently spent more than two months in a coma and stood on death’s doorstep knocking with all his might, every step is an accomplishment, every day a full-fledged miracle. Colomb, the 50-year-old general manager and head golf professional at the Country Club of the Crystal Coast in Pine Knoll Shores, is, in almost every way, a new man. On the walls of his tiny office in a trailer that, until recently, sat in the shadow of the fancy, new waterfront clubhouse that Colomb masterminded were several of those ubiquitous motivational photos. You know the ones: “IMAGINATION,” “PASSION,” “OPPORTUNITY” and “SUCCESS” are all depicted in awe-inspiring splendor among shots of cliffs, oceans, mountains and golf courses. “VISION,” reads one poster in large type, above a lighthouse shining over the sea at dusk. “The only way to discover the limits of the possible,” it reads below, “is to go beyond them into the impossible.”
“I always had these,” Colomb says, motioning toward the wall. “Now I know what they mean.”
With the staff scheduled to move into the new clubhouse, the makeshift office was temporary. Colomb knows what that word means, too. On a sunny April Saturday morning last year, Colomb and his wife, Irene, were ejected from the back seat of their family car on U.S. 70 when a tire blew on the way to a Raleigh airport. The couple’s two daughters, one of whom was driving, were wearing seatbelts in the front seats and practically walked away. Irene Colomb died at the scene. Reggie Colomb’s world as he knew it was gone. His spine misaligned by 2 1/2 finger widths after the impact, Colomb suffered permanent spinal cord damage. He tore a meniscus in his left knee. Damage to his left hip makes relocating his center even harder, exacerbated by the fact that one of his left ribs, which protruded from his body after the wreck, healed over the top of another.
Initially, as Colomb lay in a coma, doctors told his children he’d never move his limbs again, let alone walk. A sometimes shrewd but always successful businessman, before the accident Colomb could be impatient, terse, coarse. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, and he wasted no time. Long hours and the resulting late-night meals had him up to 240 pounds, and the stress of overhauling the country club—including the replacement of an outdated clubhouse, an upgrade of the golf course and a general facelift to meet the expectations of an influx of affluent clientele––often manifested itself in his personality.
These days, more than a year after the life-altering wreck and with months of strenuous rehab behind him, Colomb laughs more. He cries more, too, as he continues on what he calls his “journey” and tries to share the message of hope and optimism he believes God left him here to spread. “He’s a lot calmer,” says Colomb’s 25-year-old daughter Jennifer, who assumed the leadership role in the family home after the accident. “I think he’s learning to reflect on life and what’s in front of him for the moment. I really think he’s taking each day for what it’s worth now—not to say that he didn’t before, but I think he was just so rushed and so busy, sometimes he neglected what was going on around him.”
Cards and Prayers
To spend time with the new Colomb is to be in the company of serenity, sadness, inspiration, heartache and hope all at once. The accident leaves him moving more slowly—for now, he says—and he talks openly about his Christian faith and his love for the innate goodness of his fellow man. When he speaks of his grueling, ongoing recovery, Colomb deflects credit to his three children, his friends, his doctors, the staff at the Coastal Rehabilitation Hospital in Wilmington, the country club’s members and God. Anybody but himself. “It’s not me,” Colomb insists. “I was the instrument. I mean, it was easy for me. I knew what I had to do: I had to walk. Was that easy? I’ll be honest: No. But I knew what I had to do.” He had, in fact, walked one time since the accident, but that is a story for later.
In the five months that transpired between the day of the accident and the day he willed himself out of the rehab center in Wilmington, Colomb reached what he called his lowest point. Always a fighter, he twice asked God to take his life, only to be reminded that he still had reason to live. Colomb’s faith was fortified by cards and letters and not-so-random acts of kindness back home. The Zurn family, Ruth and Gary, brought meals to his children while he was in the hospital. His church in his native Rutland, Vt., held prayer vigils. CCCC club president Phil Panzarella and Lorraine DiJoseph, the club’s office administrator and a 20-year member, arranged communications between Colomb and the club’s members so they could check on his condition online. Hoover and Donna Taft—more good friends—made sure Colomb didn’t have to survive on hospital food once he became capable of eating again.
Colomb believes all the help and support has left him with a debt to his fellow man. He pays it forward in the form of undying, overt gratitude, an unwavering sunny outlook and a ready smile. Colomb moves back in forth in conversation between discussing his recovery and the rebirth of the club so often that it becomes impossible to distinguish between the two. The parallels, he says, are obvious. Equally obvious is the place the club occupies in Colomb’s busy life. His office phone rings constantly, but it seems that for every business call he gets, another comes in to wish him well.
With his experience, Colomb is an authority on perspective. Having faced death as closely as one can and living to tell the tale, his is a perspective all of us want but none of us wants to earn. He now uses public speaking to impart his message, recently addressing a group of fellow PGA professionals in Myrtle Beach, S.C. “The formula to success in the club business is the same formula to success in life,” Colomb, a longtime teacher of golf, says with a hint of his New England accent in a voice that seems to require more effort now. “First, define a target and stay focused on it. Remain positive. Pray. And accept that good things are going to happen. As things that aren’t so great happen, you learn from it, and we become better by learning. My life has only been great. I’m blessed. There’s been some challenges. There’s been some bumps and humps. I’ll play again. One of my goals is to maybe qualify for a U.S. Senior Open or something like that. That may not occur; I may not have the physical abilities to do that. But I can make my U.S. Open my clubhouse for my members. It’s all in the way that we present it.
“This is a challenge; it’s a journey,” he continues, referring to the club. “My life is a challenge; it’s a journey.”
‘Take Me, God’
To understand the degree to which a man has overcome adversity, it is necessary to examine and understand the adversity. The day of the accident—April 15, 2006—was just another day, an Easter weekend morning that found four-fifths of the Colomb family driving to Raleigh after breakfast together at home in Morehead City.
Jennifer, then 23, was driving the family’s silver Infiniti Qx4 SUV and Janelle, then 14, was in the front passenger’s seat. Their parents sat in the back, Irene behind the driver’s seat and Reggie to her right. Irene and Janelle were to fly back home to Vermont for a week for Easter break while Reggie and Jennifer planned to drive on to Pinehurst to watch middle child Chris, then a junior on UNC-Wilmington’s golf team, compete in a tournament. The parents, with a week apart ahead of them, sat in the back as they often did to take advantage of some rare time together. “As many hours as I worked, Irene and I in our relationship valued time that we could share together with gentle touches, with hugs and kisses,” Colomb says. “So it was not uncommon for us to sit in the back seat and have either Jenn or Chris drive and us hug and kiss a little bit and act like kids.”
Unlike many involved in traumatic events, Colomb says he remembers every painful detail of the accident. He and Irene were discussing the possibility of bringing Irene’s mother down from Vermont to live in North Carolina, a move that would’ve meant selling her mother’s home. Suddenly, about seven miles outside of New Bern on U.S. 70 West in Jones County, the family heard a thud from underneath the car. The rear left of the vehicle went “out of whack,” Colomb says, and Jennifer spoke up.
“Daddy,” she said, “I can’t hold the steering wheel.”
In a period of 5 to 10 seconds, her father advised Jennifer to pump the brake lightly. The vehicle slowed, but not quickly enough. As it flipped several times, Reggie and Irene were ejected. The girls, bruised and bloodied, remained in the mangled car. Stunned but alert, Colomb says he somehow—despite the injuries that would immobilize him for the next several months and leave him struggling
to walk to this day—walked to the front of the vehicle to check on his daughters. Janelle was climbing out, and her father says he walked around the front of the vehicle to where she was standing. “Where’s Mommy?” Janelle asked. Her dad stumbled to the other end of the vehicle, where, on a barren stretch of rural highway, unfathomable tragedy intersected with the promise of the hereafter.
“Irene was laying on the side of the road, like she was sleeping,” Reggie Colomb recalls, his voice weakening and familiar tears beginning to escape his eyes. “I gave her a kiss and she didn’t respond. I kissed her again and she didn’t respond. And I looked away, and that’s when I knew that she was gone. And then I turned and I looked up in the sky, and she was there, standing in a brilliant, brilliant white, with a huge smile on her face. And I kissed her again, and then the [paramedic] said, ‘Sir, you need to let her head down. We’re going to put you to sleep.’ ”
There, on the highway, Colomb asked God to take his life.
The next time he awoke, some 10 weeks later, Panzarella, filling in for the kids at his bedside, was standing over him with tears streaming down his face. The coma, during which Colomb was fed with tubes, was followed by a four-week period in intensive care made tougher by the fact that he was awake and couldn’t move. Still unable to eat, Colomb could only watch the movement around him as he relied upon his caregivers for his every need.
On a steamy day last summer, his bed drenched with his own sweat and the IV in his arm failing to quench a miserable thirst that wouldn’t go away, Colomb had had enough. For a second time, about 12 weeks after the accident, he asked again with all his conviction: “Take me, God.”
Days later, though, came the turning point in Colomb’s recovery. Still somehow clinging to life as the prayers left his friends’ mouths and the cards and letters arrived at his hospital room, he was sleeping when he started awake. Then it hit him: This recovery, this life, this improbable defiance of odds—it wasn’t about him. Colomb thought first of his children, who had flown to Vermont to bury their mother and returned to tend to a dying father who had suddenly lost the will to live. He thought of the scores of friends and acquaintances who were rooting for him, especially those helping to take care of his children. People he didn’t even know were sending cards. How, he asked himself, could he let so many people down?
“Somehow,” Colomb says, “God sent me a message of how selfish I was.
“That’s what changed me. That was the point that I changed. Because I still have love to give, and I have love to receive.”
Walking Tall
Some of that love came to him, and was reciprocated, during his grueling rehab in Wilmington. Colomb, with his core permanently shifted, became determined to find his center and walk again.
While at Coastal Rehab, the natural-born leader became a coach of sorts to his fellow patients. Colomb would stick his head in a room and urge other patients to listen to the medical staff and remain optimistic and upbeat. “If they were positive,” he explains, “the air in our whole wing would be positive, so it would make it easier for everybody else.”
In time and with agonizing work, Colomb went from his bed to a motorized wheelchair to a push chair to a walker. He promised the center’s staff members, who had bathed him and helped him get out of bed every day and encouraged him to keep working, that he would walk out of the building. Early on, he’d ride his wheelchair to the outside doors every day and say to himself, “I’ve gotta walk through here.”
Colomb worked with spine specialists, knee specialists and neurologists, lifting weights and taking literal baby steps toward recovery. Meanwhile, he encouraged the other patients at the center to push themselves: If a rehab specialist tells you to do 10 reps, he told them, do 12. If they tell you to do 12, do 15.
On Sept. 22, 2006, five months and seven days after kissing Irene goodbye and asking God to take his life on the side of the road, Colomb waited to be released from the center. But they wouldn’t let him go. Only later did he find out his release was being delayed until Dr. John Liguori, one of heads of the center, could make it to witness Colomb’s grand exit firsthand.
Finally, Colomb stood unsteadily at the end of a hallway with dozens of staff members, family, friends and fellow patients lining the 90 feet between him and the rest of his life. Step by step, leaning partially on his friend Amber, one of the rehab specialists, Colomb slowly made his way down the hall.
There was DiJoseph, her eyes covered with sunglasses to hide her tears. Colomb’s daughters stood there among the crowd, crying with everyone else. Applause echoed through the building. Inspired, a girl with similar injuries rose from her wheelchair for the first time. Even Liguori cried openly.
“The front of his shirt was soaking wet—his white, starched shirt—from all the tears,” DiJoseph says of the doctor. “Everybody was cheering and taking pictures. “It was so emotional because it was like watching a child taking his first steps, or you take the bird and you let him free.” The steps, Colomb believed all along, were inevitable. He became so close with some of the rehab staff that he continues to speak with them regularly, as friends, to this day. As people inspired him, he now inspires others.
“I appreciate that people draw on my willingness to stay positive, but I was blessed with wonderful children,” he says. “I had a wonderful wife for 27 years; very good family support—brothers and sisters, mother and father, in-laws. When you have that, as I told the doctors and the therapists, I can’t not make it. There were two negatives in there, so I could only make it. I knew I could only make it, only because there was everything behind me. I knew that. And I knew when I first stood up for the first time without assistance that I had something behind me holding me up—a lot of somethings: prayers, love, friendship, new acquaintances that grow into friendships. That’s my message here.”
The Roadside Miracle
Those steps, Colomb is quick to remind a visitor, were not his first since the accident. The steps he took around the car at the scene that day were confirmed by a passerby who later came by the hospital to “check on the man I saw walking around the car” after the accident, Colomb says. Jennifer Colomb doesn’t remember anything from that day after her head hit the windshield when the car flipped a second time. She said a hospital staffer and a club employee who was present at the hospital both confirmed the passerby’s inquiry as her father lay in a coma.
Asked how it was that he walked that day but not again for several months, Colomb is unyielding. “God,” he says as a confident, knowing smile breaks across his face. “God. Guardian angels. I walked around the vehicle, absolutely. I remember it clear as day. Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.” Colomb is just as adamant when he recalls Irene’s presence above him that day. She didn’t say anything, but she spoke with the way she looked at him.
Irene Colomb, who was 52, was a fifth-grade teacher at Newport Elementary with 30 years in the business. She was known for earning respect from her students by respecting them and handling even the most troubled children. Reggie Colomb recalls a phone call that came years ago in the middle of the night. It was a student calling from the top of a bridge. No longer able to tolerate sexual abuse from a family member, the girl was about to jump. “She called Mrs. Colomb because that was her last chance,” Colomb says. “We went and picked that kid up and brought her home. It’s unbelievable, but that’s real. And I was blessed to have her as my wife for 27 years.”
Heather Dietzler, the principal at Newport Elementary, remembers Irene Colomb as an inspiration. “She was the teacher who sustained unconditional love and generosity for her students and those around her. Even on the hardest day she was kind,” Dietzler wrote in an e-mail. “Simply watching her teach you could see the connections she had with the children. They absolutely adored and respected her, as did her [co-workers].” As they approached their 50s, the Colombs had begun to see friends facing life-threatening illnesses like cancer. That prompted big-picture, whatif- something-happens conversations that they shared with their children. That’s why, while Irene didn’t say anything at the accident scene, her husband knew what she meant. He recognized the look.
“She was standing there — bright, bright, bright with a huge smile on her face,” Colomb says. “What she said is, ‘We did good with our kids, number 1. And number 2, keep moving on with your life and be happy.’ That’s real. That’s real. That picture is as real as us sitting here. It’s too clear for me not to believe it.”
Healing
The Colombs got away for Christmas, their first without Irene, as recommended by grief counselors to help cope with the loss. Jennifer Colomb says her mom loved Christmas and always went over the top with music and decorations, filling their home with holiday spirit. Last Christmas Day the four remaining family members sat together in a Las Vegas hotel room, sharing stories and comforting each other. Part of taking that trip — and part of going anywhere west of New Bern — is passing the scene of the accident, something Reggie Colomb says has gradually gotten easier as he and the family move forward on their journey.
On the anniversary of the accident, Colomb says, he spent most of the day alone. He prayed. He told Irene he loved and missed her. He thought of the positive things in his life. He told his children he loved and appreciated them.
Jennifer, now 25, is the member and activities coordinator at the club. Janelle, 15, remains an outstanding student whom her father would love to have on staff someday. Chris, 23, graduated from UNCW this spring.
The club’s staff recently moved into the new clubhouse, and the booming membership will soon follow. The vision Colomb had when he came to Carteret County in January 2004 is being realized, just like the vision he had of leaving the rehab center on his own two feet. Colomb, who turned 50 in January, still goes to rehab in Morehead City four days a week. He now walks with a cane he can’t wait to cast aside. Still, with all the support he’s had from all the sources through all the dark days, he knows he’ll never truly walk on his own. Every step, past and future, is the result of one kind of help or another. The friendship between the children and their father is more openly expressed now—a hug here, a thoughtful card there, a more frequent “I love you, Dad.”
“I think we’ve all learned that we have to take life as it comes,” says Jennifer Colomb, who speaks with the confidence and optimism instilled by her mother and personified by her father. “I don’t want to say we’re all calmer, because all of our lives have really been shaken up. But I think we’re each realizing we can handle anything after handling such a tragedy. Every day I wake up and I’m not stressing about the little things. I’m like, ‘You know what? I got through that a year ago. I can get through anything.’ ”
Reggie Colomb laughs like he means it. He cries when the urge comes. The edge that once defined him professionally still exists, but it has dulled with the hard-earned realization of what’s truly important in this world. Minor things stay that way now. It’s one of the major lessons of his recovery, one that came out of long nights staring at a hospital ceiling and wondering whether he’d ever get any better or whether his children would lose another parent.
“You’re looking at first for an answer: Why? Why now? All that stuff,” Colomb says. “But I have a peace.
“I can comfortably say I’m much more at peace with myself—absolutely, I learned that.”
Walking gingerly with his cane down a handicap ramp he never thought he’d need to use in a million years, Colomb loses his balance and stumbles again. He reaches for a handrail and leans against it, stopping to remind himself that with every step must come a conscious search for the new center of his being.
In more ways than one, his journey has already led him to it.