Save the Last Dance for Me
My husband’s favorite movie is Scent of a Woman, and the night we met he told me he’d like to learn to tango someday. Someday came sooner than he thought. The following week I asked if he would take tango lessons with me. That was pretty much it. Dancing became a new passion we shared together.
At our wedding three years later, we danced an Argentine tango to La Cumparsita for our First Dance. It was a special dance for a very special day. Most couples will agree that marriage holds many challenges. Our first challenge came early on. During our honeymoon in Hawaii, my husband slipped and fell, sustaining a spinal cord stroke. He became paralyzed from the waist down, permanently.
The full extent of that loss slowly sank in during the months following the accident. Things that use to be easy to do, now took 4 times longer. Whether that was putting on a pair of pants or getting out of the car. Forget about going over to a friend’s house: stairs, narrow doorways, tiny bathrooms. Dancing the tango again? No way.
After dreaming for 12 years of one day dancing with my husband, we found Marisa and her seedling nonprofit called Infinite Flow-A Wheelchair Dance Company http://www.infiniteflowdance.org/.
I was so excited! Marisa is a dancer who had been temporarily paralyzed from the neck down with a rare spinal cord disease. After recovering and establishing herself as a professional ballroom dancer and instructor, she made it her mission to share the power of dance with others who are seemingly bound by their wheelchairs. Infinite Flow is showing the world that anyone can dance, especially someone in a wheelchair. And this is partner dancing, not just individual dancing. What that means to me is that I can tango with my husband once again. Bring on the ochos! In Infinite Flow’s classes, a wheelchair dancer is paired up with an ambulatory dancer and we learn how to lead and follow with rhythm, just like any ballroom dance class.
Infinite Flow brought dancing back into our lives. It opened our minds to other activities we thought we would never be able to do again. Dancing makes us happy. It’s great exercise, and we’ve made so many great friends through these classes. If dancing did this for us, maybe it could do the same for someone else. For all these reasons, we chose to make a contribution to Infinite Flow.
Review from #MyGivingStory
