Finding Sarah

by Sarah Ferguson

  I spied a man in a green T-shirt and khaki shorts. He looked like he knew where he was going. I asked for directions and we struck up a conversation. He was Jeff from Nashville, the owner of a company that believes in rebranding (which was exactly what I needed), and was in Hawaii for an advertising conference. We chatted, and I asked him if he thought my business interests were beyond saving. Jeff explained to me that all companies these days were talking about enhancing their corporate image and self-esteem. There was hope for me yet! (Jeff had no idea where he was going on the Hawaiian shoreline either.)

  It just so happened that Oprah and Lisa Marie had lunch the day before I arrived in Hawaii. They conspired together, and the next thing I knew I was whizzing my way to Oprah’s home in Maui. We spent some delightful time with her. Her doggies and I chased each other up and down hills. Oprah and I became fast friends.

  Some nights I talked for quite a while to the photos of my daughters, but they knew and I knew it was important to heal. I needed this time far from the madding crowd.

  After my Hawaii interlude, I was reunited with Eugenie, Beatrice, and Dave Clark, Beatrice’s fabulous boyfriend. We were invited to stay with some other friends, keen to offer their support to a friend in need.

  To reach my friends, I boarded a small motorboat. From a distance I saw my girls. The island appeared a lush bump on a turquoise sea. As the boat bounced over slightly choppy waters, torrential rain pelted me, the wind whipped my hair, and the ocean spray spit up over the bow. I was sure I would look as if I had swum there, with giant flippers and frizzy hair. But I would feel safe, at home, in the arms of people who love me.

  The girls were waiting for me on the dock, and all three of us cried with relief to be together again after a month. They helped me unpack and asked me to tell them of my adventures.

  That night I wrote in my diary: I enjoyed this present, the present of my daughters, the present of God’s love, and the present of my giant mistake, which enabled me to see and appreciate all the gifts in my life. I am truly blessed.

  Yet sometimes the best of spirits can be dampened, if we let it happen. While I walked with Beatrice and Eugenie and watched them learn how to kitesurf, the media was mocking me again. In June, I had to lay off some of my staff due to mounting financial problems. The media aimed their torpedoes straight at me, criticizing me for jetting off abroad after letting my staff go. But being out of the United Kingdom was the safest place for my mind. However, the media would never understand this, even though I was staying with friends as their guest. Again, I had to bear the strain and get on with it, just as my father taught me. I held my head high, with elegance and grace. I hoped to change the negative energy swirling around me.

  After rereading my words, I realize it might appear as if I were on one long lavish trip, but it really was the huge generosity of great friends who happen to live in exquisite places and were my gateposts when the tornado hit. Dorothy and Toto held on tight and so did I.

  I traveled to Málaga, a lovely harborside city on the southern coast of Spain. I stayed with a dear friend of my mother’s, Edwina, who had named her son Hector after my Argentine stepfather. Hector is my godson.

  I was given young Hector’s room (Hector was eighteen). As I looked around, I saw a photo of my mum, cradling newborn Hector in her arms, and looking at me and smiling. I smiled back at her beautiful face and felt her presence all around me.

  There was also a photo of Hector, my stepfather, on the wall. The room had the soothing smell of polo and horses, wafting from Hector’s polo boots, which were slung in the corner, as if he would appear any moment to put them on. Suddenly I felt as if I were back in the old life I once knew with Mum and Hector, with its wonderful culture and sublime ways. Back then I had no reputation and I could simply be myself.

  I saw Michelle, my lovely lady who has looked after me and my family for more than nine years while we are in Spain. She greeted me with her usual loving embrace and mischievous smile. She radiates positivity—it is infectious—and shows the purity of a golden loving heart. I saw tears in her eyes; she read my heart. “We can do this together. I know you and love you,” she said gently.

  Despite her words, I felt inadequate because I had let her down. She was one among so many others.

  At bedtime, I put on my pink pajamas. They made me look like an uncooked sausage. I hoped that young Hector would not jump into his bed, forgetting that his jet-lagged godmother would be snoring loudly in the boiling heat of a non-air-conditioned room.

  Before drifting off to sleep, I scribbled furiously in my diary: How could I have dishonored myself and made so many people call into question their loyalty, love, and friendship for me? What they saw on that diabolical day, May 23, was not who they knew and loved. How could they possibly love Fergie for behaving in such a way? I feel I have let so many down. My self-hatred and self-punishment is rampant. I cannot forgive myself. I need healing.

  The British press once again plastered me all over the front pages, claiming that I was bankrupt with five million dollars in debt. It was a serious leak; someone had fed the press every ounce of my life.

  With negativity comes great positivity. I wrote to a friend who understands the brutality of the press: I am following your instructions and not going to give energy to these snakes, but I have to feel it is all for a reason. I have decided that if I change within, the outside will reflect it. So I shall give that a shot. If the vilifying stops, I know I have found the solution—a superb example for the world to see. I compare this to a lightbulb that cannot shine without the right connections within. You need positive and negative to make the lightbulb shine!

  I was asked to do Celebrity Master Chef in Australia. I sent the email to Oprah and asked if she could please advise me if I should go to Australia to learn to cook. She said, “If you do any TV, do a docuseries for the OWN network. I haven’t asked if you would do this because you are my friend and I don’t mix business with pleasure, but will you think about it?” And I did think. I was so very touched and that’s how I decided to do the docuseries Finding Sarah, in which I would share with viewers my personal struggle to rebuild my life—and in doing so, help other people. It would be a six-part series, in which I would work with experts like Dr. Phil McGraw, Suze Orman, and Martha Beck to rebuild my life.

  I couldn’t believe it. I looked at it cosmically: Here I was in retreat, doing the positive spiritual work of connecting with my greater self, feeling more at peace with who I am—and this opportunity presented itself.

  Was it luck? Was it coincidence? Was it a mystical force, some unknown and unpredictable phenomenon? Was it God? What was it?

  To me, it meant that we must be prepared for blessings, but blessings come in their own good time. They await the right time, the right attitude, and the right opportunity to surface.

  Doing the docuseries would be one thing. But truly finding myself would be another. There was so much more work ahead. And I asked my friends for any prayers they could spare.

  From: Sarah

  To: Paddy and Sarah T.

  My dearest Paddy and Sarah,

  After the last disastrous scenario, I stopped the treadmill, and got off the busy world of life. I know you will be happy for me that I have done this, what a shame it had to be such foolishness that stopped my old life. I took myself away, a long way away … And I am working hard on Sarah. I am trying to forgive myself for hurting so many people, mainly myself.

  We all make mistakes, but this one has caused me to face my whole life.

  Andrew and the girls are here for me, of course. But I have to be there/here for myself.

  I pray one day the old Ferg will return.

  All my love,

  Fergo

  From: Beatrice

  To: Sarah’s Diary

  Hello, diary. I was worried a little through all this learning, Mummy would be different somehow and I would have missed something on her journey that I am so desperate to share and learn from. I w
as so relieved to be back with my mum, but even more exciting, she is coming back to be the mum I know—the super mum.

  DIARY ENTRY

  July 22, 2010

  Well, it seems like we are a few days off bankruptcy, but my Ex is working flat out to help me. Bless him.

  It will be good to be free, but I am struggling with the emotional damage left in the wake. I love the unity of my family. Now that is magic.

  I cannot get over the miracle of being offered the docu-series. It will be amazing. It is all magic.

  7 Return to Dummer

  When you begin to wake up and realize that the life you thought you lived in is not real at all, and that you can really choose the energy of goodness and calmness, it is there for you.

  IN AUGUST 2010, I returned to my life in the UK, such as it was. It is strange to love the country you live in, but not be able to live there. After being gone for a while, I felt renewed, with a soul mostly cleansed of desperation and fear, and I was beginning to like the new me. Being back was something akin to rewatching a favorite movie that no longer thrilled me. But the movie hadn’t changed; I had. Yet, back in London, I always had a gnawing sense in my heart that my new feelings weren’t real and that at any minute everything could come tumbling down.

  I was there with my daughters to attend the wedding of my half sister Alice Ferguson in Dummer, where I grew up. Alice, who had been a bridesmaid at my own wedding in 1986, was marrying banker Nick Stileman of Singapore.

  This was the first time I had been back to Dummer Down since my father died in 2003. My stepmother, Sue, lived on there after Dad’s death. Before the wedding, I spent time walking around the house and grounds, remembering my childhood. It is so special and beautiful. There are tall lime trees growing all around, and lavender bushes with white roses threading through them.

  I saw Michael Borlase, our farm manager. He has been in our family for forty years. We reminisced about my childhood when I wore my Wellington boots under my very smart party dress, so that I could pat my ponies on the way to the parties. All the old staff hugged me and said no matter what, they would always stand firm in loving me. I cried over their goodness and care.

  As I walked around the house, I experienced a form of time travel: the house smelled exactly as it did when I was a little girl, a particular kind of musty warmth; the lemony, ubiquitous scent of just-laundered clothes; and delightful aromas wafting from the country kitchen.

  The experience engulfed me in waves of nostalgia. Home. It is where the heart is. (So they say.) It is sausages cooking in the kitchen and childhood memories—the place that shaped you, the place you return to on holidays to find family and friends.

  Many hate the idea of visiting a previous residence and discovering that the backdrops of their memories have been altered, but I love the little jolts of recognition … the old oil-fueled stove … the spot where the dog bowl used to be … the scrubbed pine table in the kitchen … These fragments of time popped into my head like the name of a forgotten classmate. It was comforting to see that traces of my occupancy had somehow outlasted almost forty years. Every surviving detail was a pushpin holding the past to the wall.

  The service was shared by a special gathering of family and friends, held at Dummer’s All Saints Church. All Saints Church, Dummer, is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086. The oldest visible part of the present building is the south doorway of the nave—which dates from the twelfth century. The pulpit is one of the oldest pulpits in the country, constructed about 1380 in the Perpendicular style.

  This is my brother, Andrew, driving our old gray Massey-Ferguson tractor, taking Alice and Nick away from the church.

  The flag overhanging the nave from the seventeenth-century balustrade of the gallery is a Sovereign’s Standard of the Life Guards, laid up here after Queen Elizabeth II presented the regiment with a new standard. The battle honors borne on the flag range from Dettingen (1743) and Waterloo (1815) to Ypres and the Somme, between 1914 and 1918. The standard was given to the church by the late colonel Andrew Ferguson—my grandfather, who was a commanding officer of the regiment and who held the office of church warden here for several years.

  Jane Austen (1775–1817) lived in nearby Steventon for twenty-five years; her father was the rector of the thirteenth-century church of St. Nicholas. In all probability, Jane attended her friends’ weddings here at All Saints in Dummer.

  The bells of this small village church have been rung in Dummer for more than four hundred years. The oldest bell in the peal of five was cast in 1590, while the newest was installed to celebrate the coronation of King George V in 1911.

  Alice, who is a modelesque gorgeous blonde anyway, looked even more stunning in her beautiful big white gown with a lace shrug and carried a hand-tied bouquet of white roses. Alice and Nick left the ceremony in an old trailer and tractor, adorned with flowers.

  As I watched the happy couple, I prayed in my heart that Alice would never have to go through the learning curve of life as I have had to do. I hoped she would come to terms with the feelings in her heart and soul and not have to learn them by being totally humiliated.

  Friends my age—I am fifty-one—tell me that they, too, often find themselves caught up in the details of their childhood, but I wonder if they ever find, as I do, that going home again brings a tinge of loss, of seeing who we were in our innocence, and our youth being gone, replaced with a harder, often scarred maturity.

  As we parted ways, we all hugged good-bye. “Take care of yourself,” said Sue. “You’re the best.”

  Dummer will always be a part of who I am, what I feel, and how I look at life—part of my scrapbook of life. In a way, we all can go home again. In fact, it can be a very important part of moving forward.

  DIARY ENTRY

  August 13, 2010

  Phew … we signed with OWN last night. We start to roll …

  A whole new start. I am so grateful.

  And now I must further reflect … I have a desperate fear of abandonment and a need for constant reassurance. I guess this goes back to my mum leaving so hastily for Argentina, and seeing her in such pain and anguish for so many years, and I could not fix her.

  I felt her absence from me so profoundly. I felt her own suffering, losing Hector at age 50 to cancer. All so tragic.

  I must have turned into a people-pleaser at age 10. I wanted desperately to do anything to lift Mum’s sadness.

  I fear if I am not perfect, everyone will leave. I know this is not real, but it lives in my tormented, troubled darkness.

  8 Sister Act

  Tell the ones you love that you love them whenever you can.

  WHEN I WAS eight years old, my sister Jane used to pick the heads off roses and put them in my pocket, then tell Mum I had done it. As children, we would fight so much, and Jane loved nothing more than getting me to lose my redheaded temper. One time, I lashed out and poked her with a pencil. To this day, she carries a piece of that lead pencil lodged in her hand.

  A little exasperating, a little sweet, but always the perfect shoulder to lean on. Here’s what sisters do for you: They provide you with a reality check. They are the ones who tell you when you have lipstick on your teeth, or when you look fat in a dress, or when you’re being an idiot. They tell you the truth because you need to hear it, but it doesn’t alter the bond between you. And they are ready to take on the world for you and know you inside out.

  I look at pictures of Jane throughout our lives. I see a beautiful, delicate-looking English girl with high cheekbones, long colt legs, beaming brown eyes, and a lovely slim tapered figure. Someone familiar with our family might mistake her for our mum.

  As I mentioned earlier, when I was sixteen, Jane disappeared from my life: She married Australian farmer Alex Makim on July 26, 1976. Our father did not approve at all. We later found out that he had written a letter to Alex’s father, which said, “My daughter goes to Australia not with my support, but with my cooperation.” It was a gentlemanly letter; he was
trying to protect Jane. He had already spoken to Alex and told him they were doing the wrong thing. At one point, Dad tried to stall the blossoming love affair by sending Jane on a seven-month trip to Africa. But the separation only made the couple’s feelings stronger.

  After Jane returned to London, Alex met her and proposed. Dad, who had finally mellowed over the romance, hosted a wedding reception for Jane and Alex at home. Mum came, of course, and everything was fine until the party was over and those two women I loved so much had gone. Jane’s marriage took her from our rural English home to Australia’s tough outback.

  In Jane’s new country, there was no hired help. She did everything, mustering cattle on horseback, driving a tractor, farming, branding, cooking, and cleaning. There was no phone and the only way that Jane could keep in touch with her family back home was by using a primitive Morse code device, which she dubbed “the party line.” At times she was engulfed by homesickness, but she refused to cave in and kept herself busy. Of course, for Jane, life in Australia was very much a romantic dream. It taught her much about resilience and survival and had a great deal to do with the person she is today.

  Jane lived in the outback for thirteen years and had two children with Alex: Seamus, now a cameraman based in the Canary Islands, and Ayesha, a former model who teaches English to Japanese students.

  During those years, Jane traumatically lost four babies at different stages of pregnancy, and each time was as hard as ever. Four babies died, at four and a half, five, and five and a half months. She was once forced to carry a baby that had died inside her womb. She was sent home from the hospital to “let nature take its course,” but it didn’t, and after three weeks of hell carrying a dead baby boy, she begged the doctors to take it out.

  The fourth was born alive at eight and a half months, but died of a rare disease. Jane held the infant, a baby girl, in her arms, while being told that the child would not live that long. The baby was wrapped in a soft blanket and crowned with a tiny pink cap—beautiful to behold. The nurses let Jane cradle her for as long as she wanted. Someone in the hospital asked her what she wanted to name the baby and what kind of coffin she wanted. As you might imagine, Jane was traumatized by the experience, and it will never leave her.