That simple, framed sentence holds a truth that Amy has learned to live in the year since a van full of Utah State University agriculture students returning from a field trip crashed near Tremonton.

Eight classmates and their instructor died Sept. 26, 2005. Jared Nelson and another student, Robbie Petersen, survived.

While Petersen is back at USU, Jared, who turns 23 on Sunday, spends his days in a wheelchair, being ferried to doctors and therapists from Portland to Salem, Ore.

His brain, severely injured along with the entire left side of his body, is slowly learning to control his body again.

Jared cannot speak or walk, and his brain can make his body do only some of what those around him ask. He can catch a 5-inch ball, but not throw it. He can make his right leg move forward, but not his left. He swallows so slowly that he must be fed through a stomach tube.

His eyes open wide; his expression is blank, masking his thoughts. What he understands, no one knows.

With each passing week, Jared's family members must balance their hopes against the evidence.

Jared will surprise them with his old humor - he good-naturedly grabbed brother Brock's hat the other day - but doctors have told them Jared probably never will return to college or hold a job. No one knows how much or when his brain might heal.

"That's the hardest part, the unknown," says his father, Brent Nelson.

Living day to day: Amy, Jared's bride of 38 days when he was injured, does not mope over her loss. As the cross-stitched picture, a gift from her inlaws on their first anniversary, suggests, she takes one day at a time.

"If it's this way forever, fine. We'll do those things we can do," says 25-year-old Amy, a native of northern Utah's Morgan.

Each day begins at 6 or 6:30 a.m., when Amy and Jared awaken in the basement bedroom of his parents' home in Woodburn, where the family has a 500-acre tree farm and nursery. It's about halfway between Portland and Salem, 30 miles from each.

Amy gives Jared the day's first doses of medicine, mixed with a can of high-calorie liquid food. She does this by attaching what looks like the outside of a large syringe to his feeding tube and pouring in the thick, opaque liquid.

At 5-foot-2 and 100 pounds, Amy is too small to lift her 6-foot-2, 200-pound husband into his wheelchair, which does not fit through the bedroom door. Instead, she calls Brent or Brock, and they move Jared upstairs to the kitchen/family room, where in his wheelchair or daybed he is at the center of the household bustle.

On Saturdays, bathing day, the family strips Jared and carries him on a beach towel into his parents' large, tiled shower, where he is laid on a blue foam mat.

His father and sometimes Brock, wearing shorts, scrub him down. If both men are there, they can lift Jared themselves; if Brock is gone, lifting Jared requires his wife, father, mother, Cheryl, and 14-year-old brother, Kyle. Every other day of the week, Jared gets a sponge bath.

An older brother and sister are in Utah now. Blake transferred to USU from Brigham Young University this fall and Carissa is studying at BYU.

Cheryl says that through the months, as her son has required less constant care, she has backed away, allowing Amy to care for Jared.

The young woman had been in the family barely a month before the accident, but she had worked off and on for years on the Nelson farm while staying with friends nearby. She and Jared were engaged and married after each served an LDS mission. She went to Canada; he served in Honduras.

On days when Jared has medical appointments - and that is most days, since his injuries included a broken leg, a badly bruised shoulder, a damaged optic nerve and five broken teeth - Amy packs enough cans of food and water to feed him every four hours. The noon feeding on a recent day was in the parking lot of his doctor's office in Portland; the 4 p.m. one was outside Wal-Mart.

Amy keeps up a steady, if one-sided, conversation with her husband as she straps down his wheelchair in the mini-van, wheels him down the ramp or plops her purse in his lap.

His strong right hand grips the slip of paper she places there.

"You've got the list. Can you read that?" Amy asks. Loading him up with bags of adult diapers and dangling one from his headrest bar, Amy tells Jared: "Here you go. Hold this stuff. It's your job."

Studying cases of Huggies wipes, she asks: "Do you remember how much these were at Costco?"

It's not only natural to talk to Jared. It might be useful as well, Amy says. Doctors have told her informal conversation can trigger language in brain-damaged patients.

"Someday, hopefully," Amy says, "he'll just pipe back."

'Take that step': Amy is Jared's cheerleader at therapy, whooping and hollering for every inch he moves his right leg while propped on an armpit-height walker.

"He gets excited when Amy gets excited," says Mike Studer, his physical therapist, who lifts Jared's left leg and coaxes him to step with his right.

"Come on, Jared. Take that step! Take that step! Take that step!"

Studer says Jared has progressed better than expected. In spring, Jared could not sit without tipping over. Now he can stand, with help, and is learning to walk.

Besides physical therapy, Jared goes three days a week to a nonprofit center in Woodburn, where volunteers and families use a technique called patterning to reawaken brains damaged by accidents and strokes.

Five volunteers move his head and limbs as he lies face down, simulating crawling movements. Whether it helps Jared's brain isn't clear. But the exercise is surely good for him, Amy says.

Likewise, outings to the zoo, rodeo and movies are good stimulation. For their anniversary, Amy, Jared and friends from Utah went to the Pacific Coast, where they toured an aquarium.

And Jared rarely misses a ninth-grade football game at North Marion High School, where Kyle is carrying on the family football tradition.

Jared, who once carried 275 pounds, had earned honors as the conference's defensive player of the year. He had hoped to make it as a walk-on for USU's Aggies this year, says his mother.

"He was the strongest person people knew," she says. "He was a big teddy bear, but tough. Everyone loved his hugs."

Helping & hoping: Hope comes easily to those who love Jared.

His mother's dream is that he will be walking and talking and can greet Brock at the airport when he returns from a mission in two years. Brock leaves for Pennsylvania in November.

His father looks at the four old cars he and Jared collected and still need restoration - from a 1930 Model A to a '69 Cadillac convertible. "They're just waiting for him to work on them - I hope."

As for Amy, she is eager for Jared and her to have a place of their own. She wants to return to Logan next fall, and pictures herself taking classes at USU, with Jared by her side in his wheelchair. She even is thinking of becoming a physical therapist.

She cannot know Jared's hopes, since he hasn't spoken to her for nearly a year.

Occasionally, though, he will grab her hand or touch her face. And that's enough.

"Those moments make up for what he can't say."

kmoulton@sltrib.com