  | Richard Galli had brought his son back to life, and then he had to find a way to kill him. | ||||||||
 By John Pantalone '71 On July 4, 1998, Richard Galli '69, a successful attorney, and his wife, Toby Schmulowitz Galli '70, a hospital social worker, suffered an unimaginable tragedy. Their 16-year-old son Jeffrey dove into a swimming pool at a party in Barrington, R.I., struck his head, and nearly drowned. Although his parents pulled him from the pool and saved his life, their son had become a total quadriplegic, unable to feel or to move anything below his neck. Over the next 10 days, Jeffrey journeyed from the edge of death, while his father struggled to decide whether to remove him from life support and let him die. Galli documented those days in a gripping memoir, Rescuing Jeffrey, which was published last June by Algonquin Books.
The book has won critical acclaim for a no-nonsense style that is at once harsh and spiritually uplifting. The New York Times called it "a huge story unflinchingly told." Galli says there is a direct connection between the book and his career as a URI journalism student 30 years before. "When I didn't have a lot of self-confidence, Wilbur Doctor, my first--and best--journalism professor, encouraged me to become editor in chief of the student newspaper, The Beacon. He also helped me get a job as a reporter for The Providence Journal. The skills I learned as a journalism student and as a working news reporter made me want to write Rescuing Jeffrey and enabled me to do it well." "After the accident, I started off feeling totally isolated," Galli recalls. "I was convinced my family was in a hopeless situation. I thought that letting Jeffrey live would be worse than letting him die. I began to doubt that I had done him a favor by saving him, and I felt that I had to undo it." One day at the hospital it struck Galli that "this would make a great story. I said to myself, 'I could write this. I'll bet people would be interested in knowing what going through something like this is all about.'" Written in the crisp, precise style endorsed by Wilbur Doctor, Rescuing Jeffrey follows Galli from the depths of despair to acceptance of his son's condition. The book, Galli tells his readers, "is nothing more than a glimpse of one father coping with the ruination of one son...It is just a story. It describes the process I went through to resolve my own predicament: I had brought my son back to life, and then I had to find a way to kill him." Near the end of the book, having watched Jeffrey reclaim his life from physical injury and emotional shock, Galli is no longer capable of easing his son into death: "It was Jeffrey's life," he writes, "It was his fight to fight. He had shown me he wanted to fight, and how hard. It was his fight to lose, if it came to that. It was not my fight to quit." During the 10 days depicted in Rescuing Jeffrey, while his parents and younger sister Sarah struggled to understand Jeffrey's prognosis and the kind of limited life he would be able to live, the family was engulfed by an outpouring of the deepest concern. Galli incorporated into the book some of the messages the family received during the weeks that Jeffrey spent at Hasbro Children's Hospital. "From the start," Galli says, "I intended to offer the story to The Providence Journal. In a way, it was to be a kind of thank-you note to the community." During those early days, Galli began taking notes whenever he could, usually at night before he went to sleep. In August 1998, while he sat in Jeffrey's room at a rehabilitation hospital in Atlanta, Galli compiled a book-length story, a condensed version of which was serialized over three days in April 1999 in The Providence Journal. "I knew he was spending a lot of time writing diligently," recalls Jeffrey, now a URI freshman. "I figured it was something about this, but I was apprehensive about asking, and he didn't want to tell me until later." The manuscript became a source of contention between Richard and Toby. "I didn't want it published in the paper," Toby says. "I felt it was too personal, and I worried what our friends would think of us. I saw it as a wonderfully written piece, but I still didn't want it published. Once it was out, the response we got was incredibly, overwhelmingly positive." As it turned out, hundreds of people who had contacted the Gallis during the early days of their ordeal had the same conflicted thoughts about Jeffrey's survival. "I struggled with Jeffrey's case in the same way they did," says attorney Gary St. Peter, who has known Richard for 25 years. "Jeff grew up a good part of the time in our home doing things with us because our families were so close. I wondered, as Richard and Toby did, is it going to be better if Jeffrey doesn't make it?" St. Peter had been Galli's partner in the Providence law firm Adler Pollock & Sheehan until each left to start his own firm about nine years ago. St. Peter dealt with his own devastation in the first week after Jeffrey's accident by initiating a trust fund that raised nearly a quarter million dollars in the first year. Richard Galli began his career at URI as an engineering student but switched to journalism when he discovered pocket billiards and his own lack of aptitude in calculus. After graduation, Richard served in the Army (as a Vietnamese interpreter), then went to law school, where he graduated in the top seven percent of his class. "During those first 10 days, there were two Richards. The part of me that was a journalist was sealed off from the part of me that was a dad. As a father I was very often confused. As a journalist I could report about my confusion, because that was an important part of the story." Galli says. "This isn't an essay," he adds, "I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I'm trying to make the reader see and feel the experience in the same kind of chaotic rush that we did." In the acknowledgements for Rescuing Jeffrey, Galli thanks Toby, Jeffrey, and Sarah, "who sacrificed their privacy so that I could tell this story." But first of all he thanks Wilbur Doctor, whom he had not seen in many years before The Journal series ran, remarking that Wilbur "preached an old-time newsman's gospel: tell the truth in an interesting way." To learn more about the book, about Jeff Galli, and about some of the technology that helps him make his way in the world, visit his Web site at www.rescuingjeffrey.com. You can contact Jeff or Richard through the Web site e-mail; they would be happy to hear from you. |
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