FEBRUARY 2022 47Bradley is awed by his wife and all that she has done,
not just to keep him alive but to make life worth living. For
years, his presence buoyed their family. Now, unquestion-
ably, he is their preeminent concern—and “I don’t know
how I can ease the burden of me,” he says. When that
conundrum weighs most heavily upon him, he can’t avoid
considering one way to solve it. “Maybe it’d be better if
this was just all over,” he says. “Yes, those thoughts creep
in—and they’re real. I can’t ever imagine myself acting on
those thoughts, but I definitely have them.”T
HE BRADLEYS BUILT their dream home in St. George
a little over two years ago, and while it was designed for
a 7' 6" former NBA center—expansive door frames, super-
tall vanities, chest-high doorknobs—it was not designed for
a 7' 6" former NBA center in an electric wheelchair. Shawn
can’t access the gym or the home theater in the basement.
To avoid crushing the tracks that keep wall-sized sliding
doors in place, he must take the long way around the side
of the house to reach his backyard, with the pool in which
he can’t swim. Because he needs room to shift positions at
night, Ca r r ie sleeps upsta irs in t he master bedroom while
he’s relegated to a first-f loor guest room. He’s confined to
just a fraction of a sprawling three-story home.
So the family has begun planning for an accessible
version of the same house, this one in suburban Dallas,
with elite care and rehab facilities nearby. Instead of a
basement, it will have an outbuilding, and it will all sit
on a wide tract of land, with smooth walking paths so
Shawn can roam the grounds. With his circulation poor
and his muscle mass dwindling, he often grows cold, so
he treasures time spent outside with the sun on his face.
But that’s all a way off. In Utah, a few days before
Thanksgiving, holiday music drifted down from ceiling
speakers in the Bradleys’ current lofty living room. Shawn
had just returned from his long rehab stint in Dallas; this
marked the first time that he, Carrie and the kids shared
quiet time alone at home in months. A 12-foot Christmas
tree, bare and awaiting ornaments, stood along the back
wall. A year earlier, as they finished trimming, Shawn
had scooped Carrie up on his shoulders so that she could
crown their tree with a star. This time, humming along
to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” he sat off to the side,
allowing Carrie and the kids room to do their work.
Dubbie stood on a ladder. Carrie on a stepstool.
Armed with soft red-and-white snowf lake ornaments,
each strained to reach parts of the tree that Shawn once
accessed with ease. Finally, Bradley asked for a handful
of the ornaments, wheeled closer to the tree and, one by
one, slid them between his spindly, rigid fingers and jerked
his arm forward, f linging the f lakes awkwardly upward.
His first few attempts caromed off the branches and
tumbled to the f loor, but Carrie and the kids laughed along
and encouraged him to toss a few more.
So, eyes trained on the top of the tree, Shawn Bradley
kept trying.have fathomed when they exchanged vows. “I didn’t ask
her to do this,” Bradley says. “This isn’t what ‘in sickness
and in health’ typically means.”
To cope with old traumas and fresh ones, Carrie remains
in perpetual motion—tending to her husband, scheduling
appointments, keeping pace with her kids. When Shawn
was in the hospital she would often bring in pastries to lift
up the staff, then return home and collapse in her upstairs
closet, hoping the clothes muff led her sobs. “It’s not just
the person that’s involved in the accident,” Carrie says. “It’s
a domino effect. Our family has been forever changed.”
The Bradleys, still, probe constantly for normalcy.
After Shawn left the hospital in May they tried a date
night, but it required that Carrie scout a movie theater
to determine whether the venue could accommodate
Bradley’s mammoth wheelchair—a rig that weighs nearly
500 pounds, took three months to engineer and, he says,
“costs more than most cars.” Carrie had to tend to Shawn’s
popcorn and soda throughout the film, then load him into
the family’s new $120,000 cargo van, which lists violently
to one side as its hydraulic lift raises him up. Even date
night exhausted her. “I love him, and he was so happy,”
she says, “so I never wanted to tell him.”