CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 15 -- The honors thesis that Brooke Ellison presented earlier this spring at Harvard University, "The Element of Hope in Resilient Adolescents," was a scientific analysis steeped in data.
But her own story would have made a good case study.
Struck by a car on her first day in the seventh grade and given little chance of survival, Ms. Ellison awoke, after 36 hours in a coma, as a quadriplegic, one whose first words included the questions, "When can I get back to school?" and "Will I be left back?"
Though she would regain no sensation below her neck, Ms. Ellison never missed a grade, and early next month she will cap her improbable educational odyssey by graduating from Harvard with an A- average and a bachelor's degree in psychology and biology.
A smiling 21-year-old woman with a strong, sometimes scratchy voice, Ms. Ellison said there is nothing extraordinary about her accomplishments, whether it is piloting her wheelchair (as well as the cursor on her computer screen) by touching her tongue to a keypad in a retainer on the roof of her mouth, or being selected by her peers to address them on senior class day on June 7.
And do not even try to tell her that she is, as near as university officials can tell, the first quadriplegic to graduate from Harvard.
"This is just the way my life is," Ms. Ellison said over the clicking of a ventilator that forces air through her trachea and into her lungs 13 times a minute. "I've always felt that whatever circumstances I confront, it's just a question of continuing to live and not letting what I can't do define what I can."
Those looking for a hero in this story, Ms. Ellison suggested, should focus on her mother, Jean Marie, 48, who has sat at her daughter's side in every class since the eighth grade.
After Ms. Ellison was admitted to Harvard, the family decided, reluctantly, that Mrs. Ellison would temporarily leave her husband and teenage son in Stony Brook, N.Y., and move into a dormitory suite with her daughter. The two have hardly been out of earshot, for even a moment, since.
"If I'm with friends or want to be alone," Ms. Ellison said, "she knows when to give me my space."
Mrs. Ellison, whose first -- and last -- day as a special education teacher was the day of her daughter's accident, has been much more than a 24-hour nurse. Though Ms. Ellison dictated her term papers into a voice-activated computer and did whatever research she could on the Internet, her mother turned the pages of books like "Heart of Darkness" ("I don't have a particular signal," Ms. Ellison said, "I just say, 'Mom, turn the page now.' "), and served as her daughter's surrogate right hand, raising hers high when Ms. Ellison had something to say in class.
As a tribute, the mother received a mock degree in "virtual studies" from the seniors in her daughter's house.
"I'm the brawn," Mrs. Ellison said. "She's the brains."
The mother added that her daughter "can't understand what all the hoopla is about, which is refreshing."
Though she has never known the freedom of tossing a Frisbee across the Yard, Ms. Ellison insisted that hers had been a fairly typical Harvard existence. She has, for example, occasionally sipped a beer at Brew Moon in Harvard Square, though she has hardly made a habit of it.
"I'd be drinking and operating my wheelchair at the same time," she said. "That would classify me as a d.w.i."
Ms. Ellison lived on campus all four years (the last three in the boxy, 30-year-old Currier House), studied with renowned professors such as Alan Dershowitz and Stephen Jay Gould, founded a student advocacy group on behalf of the disabled and attended her house's senior formal.
But she is the first to say that her mother -- as well as her father, younger brother and older sister -- were only the starting lineup on a team deep in talent that made her graduation possible.
Her dormitory room was custom-fitted by Harvard technicians with a hospital bed, small hydraulic lift, panic button and electronic door opener. When she signed up for a class on the history of opera, it had to be moved because the building was inaccessible with a wheelchair.
And though she and her date stayed at the senior formal well past midnight, they had to be chaperoned by her mother (Ms. Ellison's brother, Reed, was his mother's escort) and were ferried from the party not in a white limousine but a white van with an open cargo bay.
Kevin Davis, a retired Cambridge police detective who would often drive Ms. Ellison to class, said: "Brooke's captured my heart. It's inspiring to know a person of her character."
Like one of her idols, the actor Christopher Reeve, Ms. Ellison conceded that she does have moments of sadness, particularly when her sleep is interrupted by dreams of the dance classes that were her childhood passion. (A poster in her dorm room, brought from home, showed five pint-size ballerinas at a dance bar, the middle girl desperately trying to stretch to reach as high as the other four.)
She said she has never wanted to meet the man whose car hit her as she walked home from school, an accident that fractured her skull, her spine and almost every major bone in her body. But she said she holds no grudge.
"If I were to harbor anger for 10 years," she said, "it'd be too exhausting."
Even though she was a formidable student in high school who scored 1510 out of a possible 1600 on her College Board exams (she filled in the bubbles by dictating to a teacher), Ms. Ellison never expected to get into Harvard, which was the only college to which she applied other than the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
"I thought if I got accepted, I would put the letter in a frame," she said.
But once admitted, she said, Harvard, which costs more than $30,000 a year, made herculean efforts to ensure that she would attend. The university provided her with scholarships not only to supplement her father's salary as an administrator in a Social Security office but also to pay for her costly medical needs.
Ms. Ellison is keeping the text of her class day address a secret, but does allow that it will touch on the many friendships she forged in Cambridge. Among the first to approach her, on the way to an early morning language class, was Neil Holzapfer, 22, then a freshman from Kingston, N.H., who majored in government and Russian studies.
"I was struck by the courage that it would take for her to be in this kind of atmosphere, which is stressful and intense under the best conditions," Mr. Holzapfer recalled.
Four years later, Mr. Holzapfer said that his friend had become his role model, her love of the bubble gum rocker Bryan Adams notwithstanding. "Brooke is living a life that is out there," he said, "instead of closing up and looking inward."
After spending the summer getting to know her family again, Ms. Ellison intends to write her autobiography (she already has an agent, at William Morris) and hopes to travel as a motivational speaker.
"Anywhere people feel they need encouragement," she said, "that's where I hope to be."
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
"http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/051700grad-edu.html"
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