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After an Accident, Finding Love with a Marine

In a relationship that would be full of unusual challenges, Kevin Hillery faced an all-too-typical one just months after he and Shannon Beydler started dating.

Upon arriving with Ms. Beydler at her parents’ stilt house near Tampa, Fla., Mr. Hillery — a law student at Georgetown University at the time who had been paralyzed from the waist down the year before — had to methodically scoot himself up a long set of wooden stairs outside the home as his hosts, Kimberly and William Beydler, looked on.

Any concerns the onlookers might have had were quickly laid to rest as he laughed his way up the stairs.

“That’s just his personality,” recalled Ms. Beydler, now 26 and a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps Inactive Ready Reserve. “It’s hard to watch him do that and be upset or frustrated. If he’s not affected by this, then what am I to complain about?”

Nevertheless, the experience served as a preview of what their future would look like together. “That was an eye-opening trip to me,” she said. “It was definitely like, this is how travel is going to be, this is how we are going to have to navigate visiting friends and family.”

She said that Mr. Hillery told her right from the start, “We need to focus on what we can do together, not what we can’t do.”

It also showed just how determined Mr. Hillery, also now 26 and a lawyer for the Department of Defense, was to not let his disability, the result of a mountain-biking accident in 2011, get in the way of their budding romance.

The couple had met in August 2012 as they waited to enter Nationals Park in Washington to watch a baseball game. Mr. Hillery had bought the tickets, and a mutual friend had assembled a group to go. Though they were not seated next to each other, Ms. Beydler knew she wanted to learn more about Mr. Hillery.

They had a lot in common. She, too, had gone to Washington to attend law school (at American University) and was planning a career in public service. Transplants to a city, they wanted to make friends.

A few weeks after they met, when Ms. Beydler sought to pay Mr. Hillery back for the baseball ticket, he suggested instead that he take her out to dinner. As Ms. Beydler, who is also a judicial clerk in Washington for Chief Judge Lawrence B. Hagel of the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, remembers it, Mr. Hillery spent most of the evening asking about her. And his interest and genuineness were far beyond anything she had encountered.

“I was superimpressed by everything about her,” he said.

Their paths had crossed at the right time. Beyond his interest in the law, Mr. Hillery, a graduate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., wanted to find a way to serve his country. And she was thinking of joining the Marines, just as her brother and her father, who currently leads the Marine Corps Forces Central Command in Tampa, had before her.

“We started to get to know each other during the first semester at law school, bouncing ideas off each other,” Mr. Hillery said. “Just to see how she handles any different task was just incredible.”

As the fall semester progressed, date after date brought more conversations about law, service, the military, family history and ambitions. The further they got into their relationship, the more obstacles they learned to overcome together.

Ms. Beydler was living with roommates in a rowhouse in Georgetown; the main floor was accessible only by steps. For almost two months, the couple avoided it until finally Ms. Beydler decided it was crazy for Mr. Hillery not to see where she lived and meet her roommates. (He had to hoist himself up.)

As the romance deepened, Mr. Hillery was careful to tailor what and how Ms. Beydler learned about his injury. He was still adjusting to his new body and too taken with Ms. Beydler to overwhelm their relationship with these details.

“He didn’t want any part of his disability to cloud that at the outset,” she said. “As we would get to know each other more and more each month, he would tell me more about what was involved.”

The son of Ellen and Frank Hillery of Medway, Mass., a Boston suburb, Mr. Hillery knew early on that he wanted “something that felt larger than myself.” In 2008, he enrolled in the Naval Academy with hopes of joining the Navy SEALs. But in the spring of 2011, during an off-road adventure race with three friends in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, a storm blew in as he was biking down a hill; a tree hit his head and rolled down his back, crushing his spine. Mr. Hillery was airlifted to Charlottesville, Va., where he underwent surgery.

During months of rehabilitation, he wondered if he would ever be able to get back to the Naval Academy. Less than a year later, Mr. Hillery did just that, graduating with his class — the first paraplegic to do so in the school’s 170-year history.

For her part, Ms. Beydler grew up on military bases around the world, but a visit to her parents in Japan during her junior year at the College of William & Mary helped clarify her plans. Spending time with her father and his colleagues in the military made her realize that joining the Marines could give her the life she wanted: practicing law and serving others.

The summer after they started dating, as the weeks of the Marines’ Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Va., wore on, pushing Ms. Beydler in ways she had never been pushed, she began to realize how deep her attachment to Mr. Hillery was, and how her life would be better with him. “I think you realize when you’re going through that kind of experience that you want people in your life who make it better and easier, not harder,” she said.

In time, the couple waded deeper into their theoretical future. They discussed whether they could have children and how Ms. Beydler’s career in the military would affect Mr. Hillery’s life and own career.

“I needed to talk through some things with him,” she said. “Could we have kids? He said he could.” She was also concerned, she said, that when she returns to active duty in the fall, “that there will be accessible housing at all the bases” to which she’s likely to be posted.

Mr. Hillery recalled being so impressed with how she seemed unfazed by nearly every obstacle. “Shannon just makes stuff happen,” he said, whether it is carrying him up a flight of stairs or into the ocean.

For her part, Ms. Beydler said: “It’s so hard to peg down where the balance is. But I do everything because of him.”

Her mother said: “Sometimes I think that love is more than something physical. When she was commissioned, he gave her a Ka-Bar knife, which are used by Marines, with her name engraved on it. I know it may sound kind of weird, but it was very thoughtful and showed her that he really respected her choice to serve her country.”

In April 2014, the couple moved in together, sharing a wheelchair-accessible apartment in Arlington, Va. And last summer, after they both took the bar exam, they embarked on a two-week cycling trip, he using a hand cycle, in Iceland.

On one of the trip’s final days, as the couple rode along the fjords in the country’s eastern half, Mr. Hillery found “just the most ideal spot,” to propose, he said. It was sunny and warm for a country that rarely is, so Mr. Hillery suggested they pull over to take some pictures. That’s when he made his pitch.

Ms. Beydler, partial to warmth and sun — and this particular man — said yes.

On the night of the wedding, an unseasonably cool Independence Day eve, 160 friends and family members gathered in the formal gardens of Airlie, a neo-Georgian conference retreat and hotel about an hour outside of Washington.

Ms. Beydler, in a sleeveless white dress, and Mr. Hillery, in a tuxedo, exchanged vows before Judge Hagel during a soft rain. Turning from the crowd at the ceremony’s conclusion, Ms. Beydler seated herself on Mr. Hillery’s lap and put her arms around his neck as they shared a kiss.

“It was just total joy,” he said. “I was also just kind of barely paying attention to the fact that anyone else was there, and to the rain. I had my eyes and thoughts glued on her.”

Ms. Beydler’s mother said she hoped the couple could be role models. “I hope this encourages other handicapped service members that life isn’t over when you have something traumatic happen, and you can move on and good things can happen,” she said.

The bride, who had opposed giving up her surname, has chosen to take Mr. Hillery’s to ensure it is carried on in the armed services, as he had long hoped it would be.

Reflecting on this new chapter, just a few weeks after the ceremony, the bride said: “I’ve always just been drawn to his outlook on life. It’s hard to be around him and not feel hope. I’ve done more in my life since we started our relationship than I’d ever done before — and that’s because of Kevin pushing me.”

On This Day

When
July 3, 2016


Where Airlie in Warrenton, Va.


Rain Delay Heavy rain after the outdoor service forced a quick change of plans. Instead of having cocktails in a garden, guests meandered up to the terrace of a rustic octagonal pavilion overlooking the grounds, where they sipped cocktails and tasted local cheeses. Dinner was indoors, under a vaulted wood ceiling.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section ST, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Obstacles Are for Conquering. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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