Save Chris Riddle's Life!

Hello friends,

My name is Jim Johnson, and I’m writing to you today on behalf of Chris Riddle, and his family. I was going to try to give you the quickest of movie sequel recaps to bring you up to speed on the life events that brought us to this go fund me request. Instead, in the spirit of both brevity and urgency I will tell you the only things you really need to know. 1) In a 2023 survey 62% of Americans said they were living paycheck to paycheck. 2) At the height of the Covid pandemic Chris and his wife Karen both lost their jobs. 3) At the same time Chris was struck with a medical emergency.

That’s it. That’s all it takes. The veritable perfect storm. This confluence of events tipped the first in a series of dominoes that are still falling on my friends to this day. Two evictions and three amputations later and here we are. Chris and his family have lost their place to live, and Chris has lost his leg to just above the knee. There but by grace of God go any of us my friends. When people say “they just fell through the cracks” this is what they’re talking about, these are the cracks.

If you need all the gory details feel free to message me and I’ll give you the play by play, but it really is just that simple. Once the snowball starts rolling, you can’t stop it no matter how hard you work.

A few months ago, Chris’s life was completely on fire. Not as badly as it is now, though that was definitely in the mail. With, what I imagine was his arm well and truly twisted, his family set up a go fund me. They left it up just long enough to buy one bucket of water to put out said fire. I told him “there are still hot coals under there buddy, you have to leave the go fund me running”. Chris didn’t want to bother us. He didn’t want to be a burden. Having been through what he had, literally working himself nearly to death, he knew the exact, and almost crippling value of a dollar. He felt shame asking for help. I cannot explain to you how badly it breaks my heart to think about that.

That’s why I am handling this go fund me campaign. I will be leaving this campaign up for the foreseeable future. I am coming to you with a hat permanently nail gunned to each hand. It would be safe for you to expect some begging, perhaps a little light groveling. I’m not a particularly proud man to begin with, but when it comes to helping the people I love, I am utterly shameless. The plan here my friends, is that you and I are going to save Chris’s life, whether he likes it or not. I’d rather turn his face red blushing over how loved he is, than have his face turn the eggnog color they paint them in coffins.

Right now, Chris is in a facility receiving treatment and so far, things are going well. His family is staying with a friend. Unfortunately, just like in that little town of Bethlehem we like to speak about this time of year, there is simply no more room left at the inn. When Chris is released there will very literally be nowhere for him to go. As of this writing Chris’s family has less than a week to find other accommodations or they too will have nowhere.

Please understand, and I can’t make this clear enough, this campaign is not about quality of life. It isn’t about helping someone who’s had a tough break get over the hump. It’s about those things to a degree yes, but more than anything this is a matter of life and death. Please help me. Please don’t let my friend die.

With shelter, proper nutrition, appropriate medicine, and physical therapy it will still be a hard road to get, and keep Chris healthy. Fortunately, one thing I know about Chris, he is not afraid of hard work. He will absolutely learn to swim again on his own. If only we plug the hole at the bottom of the pool. Before he is swept down the drain forever.

Where Chris’s leg used to be is a wound like a grimace over a foot in length fastened with almost three dozen staples. A wound of this size and seriousness begs to become infected. If it becomes infected the blood pumping through Chris’s body will become poison… again. At that point the very best-case scenario is they would give him emergency intravenous antibiotics and cut off more of his leg. But that’s not what will happen. If Chris cannot be in a safe place, a place where he doesn’t have to worry about the temperature of Indiana winter, a place where he can keep his wound clean and dry, a place to convalesce, to rebuild his health… He will simply die. His body is not in a position to withstand these traumas yet again.

We as a community have been crushed under the weight of our ghosts. I know that as time passes the other side of the ledger will inevitably continue to fill with more names, until its pages drip with ink. But right now, in this moment, you and I can wrest the pen from the ever madly scribbling hand of the cosmos. We can say No. Not him. Not now.

My friends, unfortunately you and I will never be afforded the opportunity to travel back in time. To stand in the rafters looking down on a colosseum, and make sure that Owen Hart’s harness is secure and the quick release mechanism has not been triggered. This will simply never happen. But we do not need the conceit of H.G. Wells to collectively hold Christopher up. Right now, in this very moment, in real time, with nary a flux capacitor in sight, it can be we that break Christopher’s fall.

Over these past few years, we have lost so many people we love. Some of you have confided in me that you still dream of them. I do too. I know that we would give anything to see them again. To look into their eyes, to hear them laugh one more time. Chris has eyes; you can still look into them. Chris has a delightful laugh; you can still hear it. Chris has eyes, they’re wide open. He can see what’s coming. Dear God, the horror. Please help me. Please don’t let my friend die.

Chris has had trouble sleeping even with the post operation pain medicines. Sleep is indescribably valuable. Not just for its therapeutic and medicinal qualities but because it is the great reset. It is the state that comes before the new. If you are lucky enough in the dark of night to be found by the tomorrow and pulled to her chest, then you are delivered to another chance. Help me give these people another chance. A chance to stem the tide. A chance to let the corner man tend their wounds. A chance to breath, and in the width of that breath to create a plan to wrench their lives back from the hungry jaws of entropy.

When asked for her opinion on what the earliest sign of civilization was, anthropologist Margaret Mead was to have said the first sign of civilization was a broken human femur bone that had healed. The thinking being that a person with an injury that serious would be left behind by the tribe, dying at the fang of a predator, exposure, or simply starving to death before the injury had a chance to heal. The empathy and compassion required to keep an injured party safe, and cared for until they could heal from such a grievous injury marked the genesis of human civilization.

I know some of you out there might be saying “but Jim that story is apocryphal, Margaret Mead never said that”. To you I say SO WHAT!? Just because she never said it doesn’t mean it isn’t completely and totally true. Empathy and compassion are what make us human, as much as any opposable thumb or ability to use tools. Taking care of each other and our ability to organize that care to do the most good must be how we mark civilization, how we separate ourselves from the beasts.

Chris is a man filled with empathy and compassion. This is a demonstrable fact. Chris Riddle is a certified hero. I’m sure a few of you remember this story but it bears repeating. As a young man Chris was walking down the street and saw smoke rising from a nearby house. Without a thought for his own safety, Chris ran into a burning building and started kicking down doors. The inhabitants of half a dozen apartments had their lives saved that day. As a bonus Chris jumped in and helped the Easthampton fire department start running hoses when they got there. He also saved my life once…

In the Fall of 2001, while the wreckage of the world trade center still smoldered, my parents and I were in Cape Cod at the bedside of my sister. She was in the final stages of dying from the cancer that had ravaged her body. It was Chris who answered my desperate, drunken phone call from half a state away. He told me I had it wrong. He told me that in the movie Danny Aiello’s character wasn’t actually a chiropractor named Louis; he was God. He told me that angels were coming to free my sister, and that I didn’t need to worry anymore. I don’t know if he knows this, but that night, in a very real, and substantive way, he saved my life.

Chris has put in his dues. He has paid it forward at each and every opportunity that has ever presented itself to him. Up to and including saving those people from a house fire. Life itself can be a house fire. But if you and your loved ones make it out, if you do the head count and find all the members of your family have the front lawn under their feet, then isn’t it your duty, nay your moral obligation to wrap yourself in a wet blanket, hold your breath, and stick your hand back into the smoke? To grab someone any way you can, and pull them with all the strength and love you can muster? Friends, if we don’t try to save each other, who will?

I have to stop. I feel like if I continue writing I can convince you. If I sat here and wrote forever you would understand. Typing until dust settled on me, I could make you see this gentle giant deserves our help. If I wrote to the world’s end, I could somehow convey to you that Chris is perhaps the sweetest man I have ever met, and you would agree with me that he must be saved. I have to stop. They need our help now, not in some distant future where my hands have turned to gnarled arthritic claws still smashing themselves against a keyboard that has long ago ceased to function. Thankfully there is an update function on go fund me so I can continue to write in that capacity as much as I want, and I will. You will be updated often. You will know what I know, and will be able to see how your money is helping.

In closing… To Santa Clause, if you’re reading this, I promise I’ll be better next year. Just please bring my friend what he needs. Please help me. Please don’t let my friend die. To God, if you’re listening, I cry Uncle, I cry mercy. Please forgive this sinner, and save my friend. I swear to you he is a good man. Please help me. Please don’t let my friend die. To you reading this… I am begging you. On my hands and knees, I am begging you. Please help me. Please don’t let my friend die.

Too Long Didn’t Read: My friend and his family have become homeless. He just had a major surgery. If we don’t help him, he will die. His wife will be widowed, his children will be orphaned, and they will still be homeless. Please help me. Please don’t let my friend die.