In This Together

by Ann Romney

  After that I was able to open myself up and allow other people to provide whatever assistance they could, whether physical or emotional. Within a few years, I would become the person on the other end of the phone, talking to people newly diagnosed with MS or other debilitating diseases, or to people who were recovering from serious accidents. I would do my best to reinforce the fact that this was not the end of their lives. I would provide encouragement and tell them about the lessons I had learned. And I would tell them about my caregivers, my family, and my old friends, and all the people who came into my life directly because of my disease and made such a tremendous difference. Some who came into my life as caregivers have subsequently become close and long-lasting friends.

  So much had changed in such a short period of time. Reluctantly, very reluctantly, I found myself at the beginning of a new and unexpected life. So I set out to explore all the possibilities. After all, I was my father’s daughter.

  Three

  ANY LIFE-CHANGING EVENT also changes all your relationships. It isn’t just you who has to learn to adapt; everyone else has to learn how to deal with the new normal. Only after I began to accept my diagnosis, and my initial depression began to lift, did I begin to understand how incredibly fortunate I was. I know how lucky I am. Unlike many other people who are suddenly faced with a significant challenge, Mitt and I had the resources to do whatever was necessary. But more than that, I had a husband who loved me unconditionally, who always put my needs before his own.

  During the 1994 U.S. Senate race, I told an interviewer that Mitt and I had never had a real fight. This was such an unusual claim to make that most people believed that either we weren’t being honest with each other or I was saying it for political purposes. But it is absolutely true. We’ve certainly had our squabbles, we’ve gotten frustrated with each other, but we don’t fight. I like to believe that Mitt knows how fortunate he was to get me (!) and he doesn’t want to rock the boat.

  The fact that we don’t fight is sometimes comical. In the late 1980s, I bought Mitt a used BMW for his fortieth birthday. That car is still in the family, and he loves it. He has always treated it with great care; it was one of those cars that he would use only when the sun was shining. Unfortunately, I drove the car one day and left the sunroof open; I forgot all about it. Naturally it rained that night; it rained a lot. In the morning I was in the kitchen with the boys when Mitt came storming in. There were about four inches of water in his car. He was so angry that smoke was coming out of his ears. “Who did it?” he said to the boys. “Which one of you left the sunroof open?”

  The boys looked at each other, assuming one of their brothers had done it.

  I said, “Oh gosh, it was me. I’m so sorry, Mitt.”

  He looked at me and said brightly, “Oh that’s okay. It’ll dry out. We’ll take it in and get it fixed.”

  That basically sums up our relationship. But it isn’t one-sided. I feel the same way about him. So when I got a phone call asking if I would agree to another significant change, a change that would force us to uproot our lives, I agreed almost immediately.

  In late January 1998, about two months after my diagnosis, I received a call at home from Kem Gardner of Salt Lake City, Utah. We had come to know Kem several years before, when he served as president of our church’s missionary program in Massachusetts. In the Mormon Church, most young men and many young women voluntarily serve two-year missions to share our faith with others. Missions are also a growing experience for these young people, the concept apparently being that maturity increases with every door slammed in your face. Because Mitt held several leadership and pastoral positions, he and Kem frequently worked together, and had become fast friends. After his stint in Massachusetts, Kem had returned to Utah to resume his successful business as a real estate developer.

  Kem’s call was about the Olympic Winter Games, which were scheduled to be held in Salt Lake City in 2002. I already had heard that the Games were in serious trouble as a result of a scandal that had shaken the Olympic world. The media reported that Salt Lake’s Olympic organizers had made large payments and gifts to members of the International Olympic Committee in order to win the bid to host the Games. It looked and sounded like bribery. Some said that the Olympics should be moved elsewhere. Furthermore, the FBI was investigating to see whether the Salt Lake organizers had violated federal law.

  Kem explained that someone from the outside, someone with unquestioned integrity and unmatched capability, was needed to come to Utah to get the Olympics back on track. In Kem’s mind, that someone was Mitt. I asked him why he was calling me instead of Mitt. “Because I know that if I call him,” Kem said, “he will just say no. But if you’re convinced, you’ll be able to convince him too.”

  I’ve lived a lot of my life based on what I feel in my heart. As soon as Kem finished making his pitch, I felt it was the right thing to do. This was something important for the country, for the state where Mitt’s parents had been raised, for the American athletes who had trained for years, and for the Olympics in general. I also knew that this would not be an easy decision: we would have to move to Utah and give up Mitt’s compensation from Bain Capital. But it had been obvious to me for a long time that Mitt was going to need a greater challenge; he would never be happy in life just making money.

  As I was my father’s daughter, Mitt was his father’s son. George Romney was a remarkable man. He had been a tremendously successful auto industry executive, but quit that job to enter public service. He became one of the most popular governors in Michigan history, a leader of the civil rights movement, and a very strong contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968. Eventually he served as President Nixon’s secretary of housing and urban development, where he became a champion of fair housing. After leaving government, he served as head of the National Center for Voluntary Action for almost two decades. So Mitt had a compelling model of dedicated public service to follow.

  A job like this fit him perfectly. We were just finishing building our dream ski house in Park City, which was not far from Salt Lake. Even the towels were there, so we could move right in. But after my initial reaction to the Olympics idea, I paused and looked at reality: How would I be able to handle it? Dr. Weiner, my family, and my growing support group were all in Boston, a long flight from Salt Lake City. I wasn’t certain how much time I’d physically be able to spend out there, and neither Mitt nor I do especially well when we’re separated for long periods of time. And Mitt had already taken an extended leave of absence from Bain, when he ran against Ted Kennedy. It wouldn’t be fair to his partners to do it again; if he accepted the offer, he would have to leave Bain permanently. Besides that, our youngest son, Craig, was completing his senior year in high school and we certainly weren’t going to take him away from his class and friends.

  Realistically, it didn’t make a lot of sense. But that just wasn’t how Mitt and I made our decisions. Many years earlier, Mitt had to decide whether to go on a church mission, as his grandfather, father, and brother had done. Normally it would have been an easy decision to make, but by that time, Mitt and I were deeply in love. We were still teenagers, though, and most teenage romances don’t survive extended separations. When his father was in a similar situation, he asked the woman who later became his wife, Lenore, to promise never to kiss another man. As she later said, “I kept that promise, but it took some fancy footwork … One boy did kiss me, but I didn’t cooperate!”

  Mitt didn’t want to risk our relationship, so he decided not to go on mission. I insisted that he go, telling him, “If you don’t you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life. And I don’t want to be part of that.” After that, he did go, and of course our relationship survived. That experience taught us the benefits of taking risks. Neither one of us wanted to live our life with regrets about those things we hadn’t done. At the end of our lives, we didn’t want to have to look back and wonder how differently things might have been if we’d taken the riski
er path; we didn’t ever want to have to say the two saddest words in the English language, if only.

  If I had told Kem we wouldn’t be able to accept the Olympics job, and had hung up the phone, Mitt would never have known about this phone call. While I couldn’t be sure Mitt would accept the offer, I wanted him to make that decision. When I called him at his office, he responded exactly as I would have guessed: “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I would never do something like that.”

  Well, Kem had been right so far: Mitt would immediately reject the idea out of hand. But I didn’t give up. “I think we should do it,” I said, “and I don’t want you to say no without giving it a lot more thought and without more time to talk it over.” Mitt reluctantly agreed.

  I knew how hard a decision like this would be for him. He had spent over ten years building a successful company, and taking the Olympics job would mean walking out the door for the last time. He would be leaving Bain Capital behind just as it was poised to become much larger and even more lucrative. He’d be stepping into a turnaround where the consequences of failure could be severe and very public.

  We made a trip to Utah and met with Governor Leavitt and several other board members. Like Kem, they were convinced that Mitt was what the Olympics needed. Our ultimate decision was the result of our growing appreciation for what the Olympics meant: The Games are one of the few things on the world stage where young people see the great qualities of the human spirit. They see dedication, teamwork, sacrifice, hard work, determination—all these and more are displayed day after day in homes across America and around the world. We felt it was important that the Games succeed, and we believed that Mitt had the experience and skills needed for that to happen.

  We gave a great deal of thought to how this decision might affect my health. Mitt said that if taking the Olympics job would exacerbate my MS by even the tiniest amount, we would turn it down. We spoke with Dr. Weiner. He assured us that he would direct the treatment I would be given in Salt Lake. In some ways, we wondered whether walking away from all my responsibilities in Boston might actually improve my condition, not hurt it. I was too tired to serve on my boards, too tired to drive around Boston looking for a place to park, and too tired to keep up with all my friends and activities. In Utah, I would have fewer responsibilities and I would be living in a beautiful, peaceful place.

  It was a go. We discovered pretty quickly, however, that this was going to be a great deal more difficult than we imagined. I had been to Park City many times, but that was before I was struck by this disease. In Boston the changes had been gradual; each day, I was able to do a little less. But when I got to Park City, the toll my disease had taken was obvious. I was a different person from who I’d been the last time we were there. Things I had done countless times without ever thinking about them suddenly became obstacles. Park City is built on the side of a mountain. Walking up Main Street really means walking uphill. I remember standing at the bottom of the street and thinking, Whoa, I can’t do this. This is just too much for me. I even lacked the strength to make it just once around the block.

  Meanwhile, Mitt was surprised to discover that the Olympics situation was much worse than he had anticipated. The Games were running a deficit of $379 million. The federal government was balking at providing transportation and security funding, and the community we would rely on for the needed twenty-five thousand volunteers was dispirited. After going through the financial reports line by line, Mitt warned those involved that the Games would have to be downsized, even joking that it might be necessary to use a backyard grill for the Olympic cauldron. He started by cutting back on expenses, substituting $1-a-slice pizza for the catered food at board meetings and deferring his $280,000 annual salary until the Games were over and financially successful—and then donating it to charity. Then he went to work raising the money that was needed, even going so far as to recruit the first Olympic meat sponsor and first Olympic job search website sponsor.

  There wasn’t much I could do to help him. From time to time, when I could manage it, I went to Mitt’s office, mostly just to help build morale among the staff. It very quickly became a tight-knit group.

  Dr. Weiner helped arrange for me to get infused at the University of Utah hospital. While we certainly had halted the progression of the disease, I wasn’t getting any better. Once, I remember, we were in an airport waiting room, getting ready to fly back to Boston, and I just had to lie down on the floor. I was overwhelmed. I couldn’t stand up without losing my balance, and I didn’t have the energy to sit up. As I lay there, I thought, I don’t know if I can do this. Just getting on an airplane seemed like more than I was capable of. Sometimes I felt like I had a dark cloud over my head all the time. My disease had gone into remission, and while it had been temporarily stopped, that fear of when the other shoe was going to drop was always in the back of my mind. Always.

  Yet, as time passed, being in Utah began to make a difference to me. When I was physically able to walk, I set goals for myself. Each day, I was determined to walk just a little farther than I had the previous day. Sometimes I managed only a few more steps, a couple of feet, but even that was a feeling of great victory. I was getting stronger. I could measure my progress.

  When Mitt and I started construction on the house in Utah, which seemed in some ways a lifetime before, one of the things I had promised myself I would do was take advantage of the rural setting and start horseback riding again. As a child, it had been my passion, and while other teenage activities had replaced it, it was something I had never forgotten. The thought of being on a horse again was very exciting. In fact, I actually had gone online and found a woman in Park City who was selling a horse. I called and explained to her that I wasn’t interested in buying her horse, but that my husband and I were building a house in the area and I wondered if she could recommend someone to give me a few riding lessons.

  She gave me a name and phone number, which I wrote down in my daily planner.

  That promise had been pretty much put aside with the onset of MS. But when I finally arrived in Utah, I decided that if, eventually, I lost the use of my legs, I was to take advantage of whatever mobility I had to pursue my passions. I flipped through the planner until I found that number and then picked up the phone to renew that youthful romance.

  I grew up in a neighborhood with few homes and lots of space. I was pretty much the only girl in the area, so for survival I learned to play baseball and football; but mostly I played on my own. Like so many other young girls, I fell in love with horses at a young age. I started taking riding lessons when I was eight, and quickly became a barn rat, happily mucking stalls, grooming horses, and learning how to care for them. One of the horses in the barn was a gentle creamy white mare with blue eyes named Sobie, who quickly became my best friend. I would tell her all my secrets, confident she would not share them with anyone. For Christmas 1979, in addition to the usual pile of presents, I found a note telling me, “Go to the mailbox.” In the mailbox, I found a second note: “Go to the olive tree.” A further series of clues directed me to the garage my father had just built at the bottom of our hill. I hadn’t been the least curious about this new project, even after my father put up a white picket fence around it.

  I pushed open the garage door and stood there dumbfounded. Rather than a large open area for cars, the structure contained two stalls. And standing right in the middle was Sobie. My Sobie. She was as sweet as any animal possibly could be. For the next few years of my life, I practically lived in that stable. We got another horse, presumably for my brother, but it was really so Sobie wouldn’t be alone, and I took care of both of them. I cleaned and filled the troughs, swept the barn, made sure they were fed, and kept them groomed. In the winter, when the pipes froze, I would carry buckets of water down the hill. One freezing cold morning I will never forget, I went down to the stable and broke the ice covering the top of a bucket, reached in to pull out the debris that had settled into it, and instead found myself holdi
ng an enormous frozen rat. After that, my father added a metal feed room with raised bins off to the side.

  During the school year, I would be in the stable before I left in the morning and go right back there when I got home in the late afternoon, to muck the stalls and feed the horses. I would ride often after school and on weekends. In the summer, that’s where I would always be found, and we would go for a ride every day.

  Sobie and I were connected emotionally. I learned how to read her moods and communicate with her; I never had to say anything, she would respond to my touch. She must have understood me, too, because somehow she always gave me the response I needed. Eventually, I was so comfortable with her that I didn’t really need a saddle or bridle to ride her. I would direct her with my knees.

  We had some apple trees not very far from the house, and sometimes, on beautiful summer or fall days, Sobie and I would go there and I would let her roam free; it was a place she loved, too. I would turn around on her, lying on my tummy with my head on her butt, as she walked around eating apples and grass. I felt completely safe; I knew she was going to take care of me. I would watch the drifting clouds, and her gentle movements would rock me. We would wander around for hours like that, listening to nature, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the gentle breeze, feeling totally content. Being with Sobie was my happy place during my childhood.

  As I got older my interests changed, and I had less time to care for her. It was the normal cycle of life; I had my life in high school, I had boys to giggle about with my friends, I had all those magical things that occupy the lives of teenage girls. So our rides became less frequent. Then one day I came home from school and she was gone.

  My father had sold her. That was him, always practical. He had spoken to me about it, pointing out that I wasn’t paying as much attention to the horses and maybe it was time to move on. “You’re getting older,” he said, reminding me that I was going to leave for college soon. “No, no, no,” I’d said, completely dismissing the idea, and then I’d probably gotten on the phone with a friend and forgotten all about his warning. Then Sobie was gone. I knew that it was the right thing to do—I wasn’t giving her the attention that any animal needs—but I felt that an important part of my childhood had been yanked away from me. I was so upset. I never saw Sobie again. I hoped she’d found a home with someone with a little girl. I was angry with my father, but that feeling passed over time, and not too long afterward I met Mitt.