by Ann Romney
When he returned home in December 1968, I met him at the airport with his family. I was afraid it would be like meeting a stranger, but instead the most wonderful thing happened. He walked through the gate, walked right past his parents, his sisters, his nieces and nephews, and embraced me. It was as though those two and a half years evaporated instantly. We were as close and as connected as the day he left. There were dozens of family members at the airport, but we had eyes only for each other. We climbed into the third-row seat of an Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser for the drive home. When the hour-long trip was over, we shocked everyone by informing them that we had waited long enough and we were getting married in three weeks. You can imagine how that went over. The next day, Mitt and I walked into my home to find both sets of parents, arms crossed, brows creased, and jaws set. I loved Mitt’s dad forever for cracking a smile. He clearly was enjoying watching young love at work. We compromised and waited four months.
Our wedding was far more lavish than either of us wanted. It really was more for our parents than for us. Mitt and I just wanted to get married and get on with our lives. But that wasn’t possible. George Romney was a very prominent man; he had been the popular governor of Michigan, a presidential candidate, and a Cabinet member, so our wedding became a large social event. But as I eventually learned, for my mother it had an even more special meaning. Several years later, we were in my kitchen when suddenly, for no apparent reason, she burst into tears. I couldn’t imagine what had caused that—and then she explained: “I’ve never told you this, Ann,” she said. “But when I got pregnant with you, your brother was only a few months old. I didn’t know how I could handle it. Your dad and I decided we would have an abortion. We made arrangements to have it done abroad because it was illegal here. I had my tickets, my luggage was packed, and I was ready to go. But I got so sick that I couldn’t go, and after that I knew I couldn’t do it. And … and I can’t believe what joy you’ve brought into our lives. When I think how close I came…”
I’m certain that this was on her mind as Mitt and I walked down the aisle on our wedding day.
Mitt and I were very happy to get away from all that attention on our honeymoon. I can remember wondering about our future. There were so many wonderful possibilities. Then Tagg came into our lives. Many people might not believe this, but Tagg was the first baby I ever held in my arms. I had grown up in the country, and there were no children around; my cousins were all my age, and I’d never even been a babysitter. So it was the most frightening thing to me when two weeks after we brought Tagg home, my mother decided to leave. “You can’t leave me with this baby,” I told her. “I don’t know what to do with it.”
She looked at Mitt and me and said, “Oh, you’ll figure it out.”
Mitt literally had to teach me how to change a diaper. Growing up in a large Mormon community, he’d had a lot of experience with babies. I learned quickly, though. I had to, to survive. I remember so very vividly going for walks at night with our new baby. It was May. The lilacs were in full bloom and their fragrance just filled the air. The sky was filled with stars, and I was so happy I could have burst with joy. It was an idyllic time, and when I focus on it I can still smell those lilacs.
But life isn’t always as simple as a peaceful walk on a beautiful May night. I’ve heard people use the expression “our faith was tested.” That was never true of us. Instead, it was our faith that helped us get through several difficult times. For example, our then-ten-month-old son Ben’s illness shook me and reminded me how vulnerable we all are. In an unbelievable tragedy, my aunt and uncle and their eight-year-old daughter were killed in a fire set by a deranged arsonist. And in 1992, when our youngest son, Craig, was ten years old and we were convinced we were done forever with diapers, I became pregnant again.
This was at the same time both my parents were suffering from what would be terminal cancers, and our son Tagg was planning his wedding. We were on an emotional roller coaster, never knowing whether the next phone call was going to be wonderful or sad news. When I began showing, we talked about the irony with our friends. “Being pregnant in your son’s wedding is downright tacky,” someone said. But before that could happen, I miscarried.
As we went through each of those experiences, and the many others of normal life, we relied on our faith. Throughout our marriage Mitt had remained very active in our church in Boston, for a long time spending as many as thirty hours weekly involved in church activities. In the Mormon religion we rely on lay clergy, people who volunteer their time to the church. Mitt served as a teacher, counselor, and leader; he chaperoned teen groups on trips; we sang together in the annual church musical and went caroling at Christmas; he worked with others on church business and finances. In 1982 he became a bishop of the church. Mitt’s father had served as stake president, or leader of the Mormon Church, in Detroit; and in 1986 Mitt became president of what is known as the Boston Massachusetts Stake, serving in that role for eight years. So while Mitt and I did not try to make our religious beliefs an integral part of his political campaigns, our faith has always played a central role in our lives.
In some ways, Mitt’s expression of belief actually is similar to my father’s. As Mitt has said, he doesn’t know when God intervenes in the affairs of humankind. He tends to believe that God lets us go about our life’s work, and while He may weep when He sees people He loves suffering, He doesn’t always step in and stop bad things from happening to good people. He doesn’t always cure the sick or heal the afflicted. He doesn’t get involved in business or financial affairs; He isn’t going to get someone a promotion. Mitt says to pray as if it’s up to God and act as if it’s up to you.
To illustrate this, he often tells a story about one of the leaders of our Church, Brigham Young. It was Brigham Young who led the wagon train of Mormons into the West, finally reaching the Salt Lake. It was a tortuous and deadly journey. Once, as the wagons crossed the North Platte River, one of them became caught in the current and was about to be swept away. It was carrying provisions for several families. The wagon driver dropped to his knees and began praying for God to save him and the wagon. Brigham Young rode his horse into the river, grabbed the man by the scuff of his neck, and pulled him up, telling him, “This is no time for prayer! Grab the reins!”
We had moved to Salt Lake City, the center of the Mormon Church, because Mitt was offered the Olympics job, but it also turned out to be essential to me. Although I had left a support group behind in Boston, I found a new and welcoming world in Utah. Boston is a wonderful city; we always will love it and be grateful for everything that happened there. We’re Bostonians; we were educated there, we raised our family there, some of them still live there, many of our closest friendships were made there, and the world-renowned Boston hospitals that made all the difference in my life are there. But when we moved to Salt Lake City for the Olympics, it was as if we’d moved in with family.
For the first time, most of the people I was dealing with on a daily basis shared my religious beliefs, and this simply created a comfortable environment for me. Margo, for example, is Mormon. That is unbelievable, I thought. Back east, nobody I’d known professionally or worked with at any level had shared my faith before. But here everyone around me was Mormon: the police officers, the shop owners, the sanitation workers. I felt surrounded by a big family. While I know that Margo and I would have become close whether or not we shared a faith, that common bond certainly expedited the process. We would spend hours talking about the eternal perspectives. Although in a million years I never would have predicted it, moving to Salt Lake made being sick easier.
My faith proved essential after my diagnosis. I didn’t look to it to explain why I had MS. When I wondered Why me? I never expected to hear an answer. I didn’t believe that my getting MS was part of some master plan. It simply was part of my journey through life. But that faith sure came in handy in several different ways. Dr. Weiner is a strong believer in the powers of hope and optimism. He always te
lls other physicians to leave patients with hope, and my conviction that God loved me was that and more.
It is a teaching in our faith that if you become seriously ill, you may ask two or more priesthood holders to place their hands on your head and pronounce a blessing of healing. We believe that if it is God’s will that you are healed, and if you have sufficient faith, you will in fact be healed. In some cases, this may happen in an immediate and miraculous way, as Christians of all faiths believe it did many times in the New Testament. My experience has been that healings from these priesthood blessings can also be less immediate, but just as miraculous.
Soon after arriving in Utah, I asked Mitt and Henry Eyring, one of his cousins and also a priesthood holder in our church, to give me a blessing of healing. In addition to their placing their hands on my head, Elder Eyring spoke words, much like a prayer. He said that my sickness would help me draw closer to Jesus Christ, to better understand His condescension to live among mankind, and to more fully appreciate His enormous sacrifice for us. He said that I would go through a healing process and that I would be guided to find people who would ease that path.
There is no question in my mind that Dr. Weiner and Fritz Blietschau were among the people that the blessing promised. I am also convinced that God has helped me recover much of my good health. I acknowledge the hand of God in every good thing in my life, while at the same time I know that in some cases He may not have actually pulled the strings that made those good things happen. One might argue that my improved health was the result only of Dr. Weiner’s medical treatment, or only of Fritz’s reflexology, or only of my genes, or only of my blessing by priesthood holders of my church. But I believe that all these things are connected, and I am thankful for each of them.
Some people reading this will understandably say that my improved health came about in part because of what I believed. I don’t have a problem with that. In fact, that may be one way that God works to heal us. The brain is the greatest computer ever known; we still don’t understand why things suddenly go wrong or, in many instances, what to do about it, but we also don’t really understand the powers of the brain. We don’t know what part hope and optimism play in the physiological as well as psychological treatment of a disease. I got my hope and my optimism from my faith. Beth Myers, our friend who served as Mitt’s chief of staff while he was governor, has had to deal with her own challenging medical issues. We’ve talked about it, and as she reminded me, “You can’t just rely on medicine, and you can’t just sit in a ball—although certainly that’s tempting. What you really need to do is make certain that your body, mind, and soul are all working together to reach the best possible outcome.”
I was waging a full-scale battle against my disease. Dr. Weiner was taking good care of my body. My horseback riding and reflexology were taking care of my mind. When I was with Margo or Fritz, I would forget my illness and focus directly on the task at hand. But it was my faith that soothed my soul. It was my faith that allowed me to be at peace and to have confidence I would get better. While I was worried about the future, I was never angry and I never, ever gave up hope. I prayed. Mostly in my prayers I gave thanks for all the blessings I had been given and asked for the strength to deal with my challenges. Prayer has always been an important part of Mitt’s and my life, a way of reminding us that we are united with a higher power. When we pray we don’t generally ask for material things for ourselves, but in times of crisis we have asked for guidance and the wisdom to understand how to navigate troubled waters.
For me, prayer has always been a time for personal meditation, when I slow down everything going on around me to the point where I can simply listen. At that point, I can hear those things that don’t have a voice or are normally drowned out by the clatter of life. Prayer gives me the time to be quiet and be completely present in the moment. It takes me to a place where everything around me dissolves: no worries, no cares, just in the moment.
In our Church, we believe that the Bible is scripture, the word of God. We also believe that God has inspired another book of scripture, the Book of Mormon, which gives an account of an ancient people who came to the Americas from Jerusalem. And we believe that some of the writings of our Church’s founder, Joseph Smith, were also inspired by God. Among these is one of Mitt and my favorite scriptures. Doctrine and Covenants, Section 90, verse 24, reads, “Search diligently, pray always and be believing, and all things shall work together for your good.” That promise has always comforted and reassured me.
Less than two weeks after the Winter Olympics closing ceremonies, Salt Lake hosted the Winter Paralympics, in which eleven hundred handicapped athletes from thirty-six different countries competed in five winter sports. Coincidentally, the theme of the Paralympics was “Awaken the Mind, Free the Body, Inspire the Spirit.” Mind, body, spirit. When Mitt welcomed the participants and spectators to “the friendliest place on the entire planet,” he said they should feel at home in Salt Lake because “Here, the human spirit has dreamed and built, it has strived and achieved … You reawaken in us the spirit of this place. Welcome home.”
Like most other people fighting a life-changing condition, my focus had been pretty narrow: me. But with my own disease in at least temporary remission, I began to look out at the world from a very different perspective. I had crossed a line and I would never again go back. I don’t think I identified with the Paralympic athletes. I knew I didn’t have either their handicaps or their skills, but I did understand their struggles. And I became their greatest cheerleader. We were out there every day to root for them. And while I believed that the old cliché “just by participating you win” was true, it was clear these athletes didn’t think so. They were there to win, and they competed that way. It was impossible not to admire their determination.
The person I got to know best was sit-skier Chris Waddell, who would become the most decorated athlete in Paralympic history. We got to know each other making appearances to promote the games. Chris became the face of the Paralympics. He was the perfect choice: he was handsome, charming, outgoing, optimistic, and cheerful—and in 1998 he had been one of People’s 50 Most Beautiful People.
Chris had been paralyzed from the waist down in a skiing accident in 1988. He was a promising twenty-year-old ski racer when his ski popped off in the middle of a turn. In literally a split second, his life changed forever, but as he eventually came to believe, for the better. “If I hadn’t had the accident, I never would have been the best at anything,” he told a reporter. “That accident turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. I defined myself as a ski racer. That’s what I was. But the accident forced me to look at myself differently.”
The stories he told really affected me. He was an amazing athlete, and by the end of the decade he would climb Kilimanjaro’s first 18,500 feet using a wheelchair that he operated himself, raising and lowering the wheels over rocks more than a foot tall. But only 840 feet from the top, he realized he couldn’t make it. The terrain, the chair, the elements—it was all just too much. So he allowed members of his team to carry him to the top. It was an amazing feat, but for a time he felt like a total failure. Then he realized that accepting help is a defining aspect of living successfully in a society. “If I had done it alone,” he told me, “it meant I wouldn’t need anyone.” That would have set him apart from others, which was precisely the thing he was determined that his wheelchair not be allowed to do. “I would be what I was trying to eliminate.” One of the people on that climb said that Chris “made John Wayne look like a pansy.”
Chris’s lesson was reinforced a few days later, when the Czech team had some of its specially made skis and other equipment stolen. It was an unusually cruel thing to do. Those athletes couldn’t afford to replace their equipment, and it looked as if they were going to have to go home without competing. But the word got out in Salt Lake, and suddenly people began contributing. They replaced the team’s equipment, bought them new uniforms, put them up in their homes
, and came out to the mountain to cheer for them. Spending time with Chris, with all the athletes, reminded me once again of that bag of rocks we all carry, although few of us actually carry it to the top of a mountain.
Another American athlete, Paralympic cross-country skier Mike Crenshaw, probably said it better than I can before the Games began, “As you go along, you realize that everyone’s messed up somehow. Physically. Emotionally. Mentally. We’ve all got problems. It’s a matter of what you do with them.”
One of the recurring themes I heard from several athletes was the fact that they had found a way to take that bag of rocks and build something wonderful out of it. That doesn’t mean they overlooked their situation. One of the Paralympic athletes told me that he hated the fact that he didn’t have legs, but because he didn’t he was experiencing things he could never have imagined. What Chris meant, what I learned, is that none of us had a choice in this. What happened to me happened, but eventually it brought me, all of us, to places I would never have found or gone without it.
What we all learned is how to build on our new foundation.
Having MS made me part of a large community of people who have crossed a line. For some people, like me, it was a slow journey—with aches and pains, numbness and balance issues, eventually leading to a diagnosis. For others, like Chris, it happened instantly—a bad turn, a distraction, being in the wrong place, an accident. But the end result is the same: life is changed forever.
As a member of this new club, I began to meet so many people who were able to teach me lessons about the human spirit. One of them was a woman I eventually got to know in Utah named Stephanie Nielson. As Stephanie explains, “There is a camaraderie of people [sic] who have been through very traumatic experiences. It doesn’t matter what it is, we sort of cling to each other because we know what it feels like. We survived, and our stories connect us because of how we overcame things.”