Chicago Tribune- Tuesday, October 15, 1996

Marathon latest chapter for couple

By Lori Nickel
TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

To this day, it is one of the few things they cannot agree on. Like a scene right out of "When Harry Met Sally."

Lynn says Jamie was cheating and looking at her hand of Uno cards. Jamie swears he was just bedazzled by Lynn and couldn't help but gaze her way.

Two months after that party in 1985, they were engaged.

Jamie Parks and Lynn McGovern were as close as any couple could be when Lynn was nearly killed in a car accident two years later. She and her brother were on their way to pick up Jamie to go to a White Sox game when another car crashed into the passenger side, where Lynn was riding, Lynn suffered severe head injuries, a broken collarbone, broken clavicle and several broken ribs. She was in a coma for 17 days and unresponsive for eight months.

Sounds like "An Affair to Remember."

When 16,000 competitors start in the Loop on Sunday in the LaSalle Banks Chicago Marathon, they all will have reasons for wanting to cross that finish line.

For Jamie and Lynn, this is just another chapter of their love story.

"It's unbelievable how the two of them are like one," said Steve Troglio, the Parks' pastor at Eagle Rock Community Church. "I don't know how else to describe it. Jamie is right there for her. Lynn is right there for him. When we stand up in church to sing, Jamie pulls her right up out of the chair, and she holds on to his arm the whole time."

Hours of rehabilitation gave Lynn her life back, but it would be in a wheelchair she sometimes calls "that stupid chair." She wouldn't marry Jamie until she could walk down the aisle. She went to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago to get stronger, and she still works out three to four hours a day to improve.

And finally, in 1994, with her father on one arm and brother on the other, Lynn walked down the aisle to take Jamie's hand in marriage.

Jamie had competed in two Chicago marathons and several other local races. But every time Jamie ran, Lynn would be stuck along the sidelines as a spectator. So five years ago, they tried something else: Jamie running while pushing Lynn in the wheelchair.

"He struggles when we go uphill," Lynn said. "I'll say, 'Come on, you can do it! Just get over this and then you're home free.' Sometimes I'm meaner and I just tell him to get going. 'What, do you have a piano on your back?"' The wheelchair is standard, not one of those racing models. The only customized additions are two CUP holders strapped to the back. The Parks have completed 23 races, most recently the Motorola Half Marathon on Sept. 29. They finished 122nd out of 3,000 participants. Shortly after that, they completed a 22-mile training run in a forest preserve near their Tinley Park home and they decided to enter the Chicago Marathon.

"I'm excited," Lynn said. "I just hope we finish. I would hate to have all that training all for nothing."

Jamie has been asked the question many times, especially during those months when no one could communicate with Lynn. There was a time when doctors said she wouldn't improve, when she was in a hospital bed, when she didn't recognize her fiancé. Why did he stay?

"If the roles were reversed, Lynn would have done the same thing for me," he said.

In fact, after one of their first dates, Lynn asked Jamie to put on his seatbelt for his drive home. He never wore his seatbelt, but he put it on. Sure enough, on the ride home, he fell asleep at the wheel and went through an intersection where he was T-boned by another car. He walked away from the accident.

Jamie is certain that if something happened to him, Lynn would be there.

"God gives you one person," said Jamie, "and once I knew she was the one, there was no way I was going to let her go. I know, I sound like a Hallmark card or something. But I cherish every moment with her."