Cecil Neth Keeps the Lights On

Cecil Neth is paralyzed from his nose down. Lying silently in bed at home, he’s fed intravenously. A ventilator handles his breathing. His wife is often uncertain of his mood.

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »

Cecil was writing editorials for the Sun-Times back in 1985 when he was told he’d acquired amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Within three months of this diagnosis he was unable to dress himself. The Sun-Times allowed him to move back to Fort Collins, Colorado, where he’d recently taught journalism at the local university; sit in on editorial conferences by way of speaker phone; and file copy by modem. In early 1987 he retired. The paper gave him a big send-off. Friends came in from all over to hail Neth, who sat wanly in a wheelchair. After dinner the writer William Greider, to whom Neth had been a mentor years ago at the Wheaton Journal, stood with one hand gently resting on Neth’s shoulder and told stories.

Jane Neth teaches in Fort Collins’s public schools. “He still can think and he still can write,” she told us, “but he gets tired so fast. And he is fearful. And I think in some ways this fearfulness has limited him. He is fearful that when I go to Denver, which is 60 miles away, that he won’t see me again. I think the disease has done that to him. His world is so confined. We got him into a wheelchair at Christmas, and on Labor Day we’ll put him on the patio. But it takes four people to get him out of bed.”

In some respects the tale Cabela told for Neth’s book was grimmer than his own.

Cecil finished writing his with an eyebrow. By raising an eyebrow he throws a switch that controls a cursor on a computer screen in front of him. The cursor brings down letters, common words, and even pet phrases from the top of the screen and adds them to the copy block at the bottom. “You’d think that using your eyebrow to type wouldn’t wear you out,” Jane Neth said. “But it really does take a lot out of him.”

Last week McComb dropped dead. Again Cecil wept. McComb had saved his life.