Good neighbors getting help

Two months ago today, Michelle and Dennis Weitman’s lives changed in just 10 feet.

Dennis Weitman was helping a neighbor fasten plywood to the bare-framed roof of an Otis Orchards home when he tumbled through the rafters, landing on his face and shoulder on the floor below.

He lay there with a damaged spine. He could not move from the waist down, and it quickly became clear that at age 44, Michelle’s husband of 19 years never would walk again.

“I knew right away what happened,” Dennis said last week. “I couldn’t feel my legs.”

Just like that, Dennis was no longer a truck driver. His four-day trips hauling groceries to and from Los Angeles were over. His days of saddling up his palomino, Keno, were at least on hold. And the modest two-bedroom home he and Michelle had built their dreams around couldn’t accommodate a wheelchair.

Another person might curse himself for ever having gotten up on the roof, but Dennis wouldn’t. Even now he says, “One of the things we’ve always done is if somebody needs help, we help them.” He and Michelle have done so unconditionally.

Dennis was too busy after the fall to play should-a, would-a, could-a. He was rushed to surgery and then to St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute to learn a new life. Suddenly, all the tasks he had taken for granted – even simple things such as putting on pants – were incredibly difficult.

At home, Michelle struggled to keep life moving forward for the couple’s daughters, Rebekka and Jessicca, while holding down her own job and practically wearing ruts in the freeway driving back and forth to see Dennis. The days before Dennis’ return home clicked away like seconds on an egg timer in her head. She had eight weeks to create a home that would allow Dennis to do the simplest things, such as go through a doorway or use the bathroom. Would he even be able to reach up into the cupboard to fetch a water glass?

Alone at the house, Michelle picked through one of her “rat piles,” one of her stacks of junk just too good to throw away, until she found a folder titled “Mom’s Dream.” The folder was thick with house drawings Michelle had sketched on bits of paper and drawn to scale on grid sheets from a graph notebook.

The Weitmans always had planned to remodel one room in their home each year. The house was small. An acquaintance once told them that originally the rural house probably had been a milking room with a few stalls attached for waiting cows.

Now, Michelle needed to make the home suitable for Dennis before he returned. Faced with rising hospital debt, she didn’t have the money. Dennis’ father, in his 70s, had taken over a portion of Dennis’ truck route to help pay the bills, but it wasn’t enough to fund what Michelle had in mind, which was boosting the size of the tiny home by a third.

Then, a few weeks ago, all those Saturdays the Weitmans had spent on other people’s projects began paying off.

The neighbor Dennis was helping the day of the accident offered to do whatever he could. And most of the folks along the Weitmans’ milelong stretch of Joseph Avenue did, also. Their girls’ 4-H club pitched in, and members of Opportunity Presbyterian Church, which the Weitmans attend, began covering the family’s construction costs – everything but new heating and air conditioning.

It’s been rare since mid-July to stop by the Weitmans’ home after 5 p.m. without spotting at least a dozen people and sometimes as many as 26 bending shovels or swinging hammers.

“You couldn’t ask for better neighbors or better friends,” Michelle said. “Everything has been donated or paid for with donations.”

Last Thursday, Dennis came home from St. Luke’s, two weeks early. He rolled up the makeshift wheelchair ramp at the newly widened front door, past the ADA-quality bathroom and into the stick-framed recreation room that looks onto the couple’s horse pasture. The floor was still bare concrete and there was no roof over his head, but the construction was far enough along to see “mom’s dream” becoming reality in a few more weeks.

“I’ve got a good wife and two good kids,” Dennis said. “Just because I got a chair for legs is no biggie. I’ll get by.”