Jenni Showalter may never know for sure how her 14-month-old son became a quadriplegic. Her guess is that someone hit him in the head at a babysitter's house, but it is a guess neither she nor police were ever able to prove.
All she really knows is that one morning in 1987 she took Kevin to the babysitter's house healthy and walking; he had learned to walk just one week earlier. By afternoon, Kevin was in the hospital and doctors were trying to save his life.
Kevin spent five weeks at Lutheran Hospital and another three at a rehabilitation facility in Chicago. When Kevin returned home to Fort Wayne, he came under the care of Turnstone Center for Disabled Children & Adults, a United Way agency partner.
At the time, Showalter wouldn't allow herself to consider the worst; she had been told, after all, that people with spinal cord injuries sometimes regained movement up to two years after the injury.
"Every night when I tucked Kevin into bed," she says, "I would pray to God that he would walk again."
But as time moved on, it became clear that, although Kevin had made significant progress, he would be a quadriplegic for the rest of his life. And so, Showalter dug in and dedicated herself to making sure that her son's life would be the best it possibly could be.
She still has painful moments, especially when she sees babies inspecting the movements of their hands and feet - movements that Kevin largely lost 18 years ago.
"It hurts me more now," she says. "Now, I think of all the things he didn't get to do. All the things other kids did that he couldn't."
But she is eternally proud of what her son has been able to accomplish and the wonderful man he has become, and she is profoundly grateful for agencies like Turnstone, where Kevin participates in athletic programs and where he learned to trust and dream again.
"I'm not sure I could have given that back to him no matter how much I had tried," Showalter says.
Kevin is 20 now and a vocal music major at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. And Showalter? She's 51 and giving back to United Way, where she's worked for more than a decade to help improve the lives of others.
"When you give through United Way and support agencies like Turnstone," she says, "you help give people back their hopes and dreams."