A Body Broken, A Soul That Sings

When he speaks, David Green's voice is thin and wispy, as if he must strain to form each precise word.

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But when the 71-year-old choir director sings, punching out the beloved words of sacred melodies, his voice is transformed into a rich and booming instrument. It is a voice of a man who has been teaching others to sing for 43 years and that cannot be diminished just because the body that surrounds it has been damaged.

Although he has been paralyzed and has used a wheelchair for almost two decades, David has directed the choir at the Seabrook Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Lanham for the past seven years, molding a group of amateurs into a force of tonal cohesion whose annual Christmas concert is so well-loved that it recently attracted a crowd of 300.

He and wife Dorothy, 70, who will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary this spring, guide the choir through their love of music, prayer and each other.

It was 18 years ago this past Dec. 2 that David, Dorothy and son Derrick were hit from behind by a drunk driver as they were driving from a church league basketball game in New Jersey to their Connecticut home.

None of the three ever lost consciousness. Instead, in the moments after they were hit, Derrick, now 37, remembers feeling cold and hearing the sound of rushing wind, then the screams of his stoic father. Dorothy, who had been sitting in the front seat but was pushed to the back through the force of the collision, immediately cradled her husband in her lap and began to pray aloud.

That first night, Derrick asked a doctor if his father would survive. "The doctor looked at me, and he said, 'You may not want him to, in the condition he's in," Derrick recalled.

Doctors first predicted that David would be paralyzed from the chin down. But slowly he regained limited movement, first in his left arm, then his right. Today, he remains paralyzed from the chest down and has little control of his wrists or hands.

That means he cannot wave a conductor's baton, cannot turn the pages of sheet music. Before each practice, his son David Jr., 46, who sings in the choir and serves as one of his chief caretakers, helps strap stiff splints onto his arms. They keep David's wrists straight and let him wave his arms in small circles in time with the music.

But mostly, he directs with his voice.

"You must round your lips and drop your jaw," he told the group of men and women on a recent Friday night as they prepared for their annual Christmas concert. The group, some dressed in suits and Army fatigues from the just-completed day of work, listened intently. "You'll be surprised," David continued. "It will change the whole quality of the sound."

It has taken a long time for the Green family to get this far. After the accident, David spent a month in the hospital, then eight months in a rehab center. He endured surgeries and a treatment that required him to hang upside down for long stretches as fluid drained from his lungs.