Dana Reeve dies of lung cancer

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — Dana Reeve, who won worldwide admiration for her devotion to her "Superman" husband, Christopher Reeve, through his decade of near-total paralysis, has died of lung cancer at the age of 44.

Reeve, a singer-actress who gave up some of her own career to be one of the nation's best-known caregivers, died late Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Medical Center, said Kathy Lewis, president of the Christopher Reeve Foundation.

Reeve had succeeded her husband as chairwoman of the foundation, which funded research into spinal-cord paralysis cures. She announced in August that, while she wasn't a smoker, she had been diagnosed with lung cancer.

Lewis visited Reeve in the hospital Friday and said Reeve was "tired but with her typical sense of humor and smile, always trying to make other people feel good, her characteristic personality."

"She was a woman with an incredible heart who really put herself out there to help people with disabilities and especially those who are caregivers — something she knew a lot about," Lewis said.

Comedian Robin Williams, a longtime friend, said of Reeve's death: "The brightest light has gone out. We will forever celebrate her loving spirit."

Four months ago, at a fund-raising gala for the foundation, Reeve looked healthy in a long, formal gown and said she was responding well to treatment and her tumor was shrinking.

"I'm beating the odds and defying every statistic the doctors can throw at me," Reeve said then. "My prognosis looks better all the time."

Asked how she kept her spirits up, Reeve said she "had a great model."

"I was married to a man who never gave up," she said.

She was still looking well on Jan. 13, when she sang Carole King's "Now and Forever" at Madison Square Garden during the retirement ceremony for Mark Messier's New York Rangers jersey.

"Despite the adversity that she faced, Dana bravely met these challenges and was always an extremely devoted wife, mother and advocate," former President Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement Tuesday.

They described Reeve as "a model of tenacity and grace" and an "inspiration to us."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said of Reeve: "I thought that after everything that she had gone through with Chris that she would have time to smell the flowers and be in the sun. But apparently that was not meant to be."