by Ann Romney
In reality, few people have overcome more than Stephanie. The way she went about doing it is similar to my own experience and, as I’ve learned, that of so many other people as they learned to deal with the weight they were carrying. Stephanie had already built up a considerable readership for her blog, NieNie Dialogues, her way of sharing her joy in being the mother of four small children and a member of the Mormon faith, when she and her husband, Christian, and his flight instructor took off one afternoon in a small red-and-white Cessna from an airfield in St. John’s, Arizona. They were heading home to Mesa, where she had left pizza dough on the counter that she intended to bake for dinner. “We took off,” she remembers, “and we just weren’t gaining altitude. Our landing gear caught in power lines and got ripped off and we nosedived into the ground. I can remember seeing my feet dangling out of the airplane. It felt like the Flintstones. When my plane was actually crashing down from the sky, I covered my face and saw my children and I said a prayer, Oh God, please don’t take me right now. I don’t want my children to know that my last moments on earth were of fear.”
The plane exploded in flames. The flight instructor, Doug Kinneard, would pass away from his injuries. Christian managed to get out of the burning plane and ran around the other side to try to open the door. Stephanie woke up and looked around:
And I thought everyone left me. I was really frightened. I could smell myself burning. I couldn’t get my seatbelt off because it was too hot. I started thinking about my kids; and I thought, please let this happen to me fast. I know it’s going to hurt really bad for the next few minutes, then it will take me and I’m ready for that. But then a miracle happened.
I sensed my grandmother, who had passed on several years before, was there with me. “Calm down, Stephanie,” she said. “Just lift that seatbelt off, push open the door.” I ran into a field and remembered that my third-grade teacher had taught us to drop and roll. I did that. We had crashed into the yard of the bishop of the Mormon congregation in that area, into a woodpile that burst into flames. He came to help and I told him, “Can you please help me get up. I have to get home. I have pizza dough waiting on the counter and we’re making pizza tonight.”
There was little he could do to help; Stephanie had suffered burns over more than 80 percent of her body, including her face. Christian had burns over about 35 percent of his body. Stephanie’s heart stopped twice in the rescue helicopter racing her to a hospital. At best, pessimistic doctors gave her a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. She was in a coma for ten weeks, fighting infections, shock, twelve operations, and unimaginable pain.
She woke up to her new life. The fire had disfigured her face so badly that her children didn’t recognize her.
I was so depressed I couldn’t look in a mirror, but I could see from the way other people were looking at me that something was terribly, terribly wrong. My five-year-old daughter was the first of my children to see me. She looked at me and went as white as a ghost. She wouldn’t look at me again for five months. When she left my hospital room I heard her tell the other kids, “Don’t go in there, you don’t want to see Mom.” My heart broke in half. I remember thinking, just tell the kids that I died and send me to a hospital far away. I went into a deeper depression.
There were times, she admits, that the depression and pain were so unbearable that she prayed that she would die.
Stephanie’s depression lasted more than six months. Then she experienced the first moment of joy. She was at home, lying on a couch. It was a magnificent fall day, and she looked outside and watched as a breeze simply blew the leaves. As those leaves fluttered, she realized she was alive; she had survived. And in her mind, she remembers:
I could see all of the other burn survivors I had known in the hospital. Most of them were not as badly burned as I was, but their injuries were worse. They didn’t have fingers, or a nose. I had all my fingers, all my toes, all my limbs; I had a nose, I had a mouth and I could talk, my hair was growing, I had my children and our relationship was growing back, I have my husband who loves me and stuck by me, I have a huge group of people who pray for me and offer encouragement and I have a Father in Heaven who loves me. I get to be at my little girls’ weddings. I realized, I have everything. I won’t let this accident define me. And at that moment I decided, that’s it. I’m not going to spend any more of my life sitting here feeling sorry for myself.
Her depression didn’t just disappear. But the moments when she just forgot all about it continued to expand. Finally she began to set limits: “I told myself, okay Stephanie, you can have five minutes of just feeling sorry for yourself and crying and screaming. I was so mad at the situation. Well, at first it was twenty minutes, but over time I would make it less and less.”
As with so many of us who have dealt with challenges, there was the medicine that made her feel better, but prevented her from really feeling anything. The medicine numbed her senses. “It took away my depression, but it didn’t help me feel.” Weaning herself off those pain-killing medications was difficult. To accomplish that, Stephanie set out to regain her passions. With her hands still encased in gloves to keep scars from rising, she made a list of all the things that she had done before the accident that gave her pleasure. The list of things she loved to do included driving a car, making dinner, hiking up a mountain, tying her shoes, riding a bike, changing a diaper, riding a horse, and perhaps most difficult of all, having another child. Her goal became accomplishing everything on that list. Through the years she crossed them all off. It was a long series of small victories. Big and small, each had great meaning. “To cross off ‘change a diaper’ was such a great day for me,” she writes. “Just being able to do the things that I had done before was so empowering to me.”
Among the first things on her list was closing a Ziploc bag, and among the last was riding a horse. Stephanie, like me, had grown up riding. “I rode all the time when I was younger, but when we all got older my dad sold our horses. I hadn’t been on a horse for years until my husband decided to give me riding lessons for my birthday. It was very hard, I had to adapt to everything. But more than anything, sitting on a horse as I had done when I was a little girl just made me feel normal. Everybody’s normal is different; for me it is being Mom, a wife and a mother, and riding a horse.”
It took her several years to regain control of her body. For some time after the accident she was scared even to walk up a flight of stairs, frightened that she would fall and be unable to protect herself. But eventually her fears became too limiting; they were preventing her from living, so she forced herself to climb the stairs and took small steps forward. She would stretch her new skin by practicing yoga. There was a secluded path behind her house, and she would walk and jog there, going a little bit farther each day, until finally it came time to hike up the mountain. Her plan was to make the climb on the first anniversary of the plane accident, as a way to celebrate her recovery.
This particular mountain is known as Y Mountain. It is called that because about halfway up, a large white concrete Y serves as a reminder that the mountain overlooks Brigham Young University. Stephanie had climbed it many times, even running to the Y when she was pregnant. She had taken her children up there. But this would be the first climb of her new life. She climbed the 5,808-foot trail in forty painful minutes. It was, as she described it, “a beginning and an end.”
Physically she continued to make slow progress; psychological progress was equally difficult. The memories were awful; sometimes she had to push them away. “There were nights when I couldn’t sleep very well,” she said. “I would lie there thinking how horrible this was and wonder why it happened to me. All I wanted to do was be a mom and raise my kids to be good citizens and this plane crash was just cramping all that. Then I began forcing myself to think about things that I was thankful for, and they totally outweighed the things I was going through. Pretty soon that list just grew and grew until instead of counting sheep I counted those things that brought me happine
ss.”
In public, the accident was impossible to forget. At first she didn’t want to leave the house. She would stay inside with the blinds closed. When she did go out, people would look at her reconstructed face strangely. She worried that as her children got older they would be embarrassed to be seen with her, that they would not want to bring their friends over. There wasn’t much she could do about that, she knew.
There was still one more thing to accomplish on her list. She wanted to have another child. Eventually her doctors told her there was no physical reason why she shouldn’t. She and Christian got pregnant. That in itself was a great victory. As the months passed, she embraced her new face, remembering that beauty starts inside. Once she felt that self-confidence, she stopped caring what other people thought of her. She says, “I would stand in front of the mirror and look at myself and think, you’ve been through something hard and you did it. And that’s what’s beautiful about me.” Then one day, when she was about eight months pregnant, her son Oliver, who was in kindergarten, forgot his lunch. She knew she had to bring it to him. For most mothers, this is a simple errand; for Stephanie, it meant being seen by her son’s classmates.
I got there during recess and they were all playing outside. I waved to him and he came running up to me and three or four of his friends followed him. They kind of stood back and were whispering to each other and I knew they were wondering, what’s wrong with Oliver’s mom? I had heard those type of whispered remarks a lot. I handed Oliver his lunch and gave him a big hug and told him I’d see him at home. As I walked away one of Oliver’s friends asked him, “What’s wrong with your mom?”
Oliver got kind of a weird look on his face; he looked at me then looked at his friend and asked him, “Haven’t you ever seen a pregnant mommy before?”
Working simultaneously on her body, mind, and spirit enables Stephanie to continue to deal with her challenges. Just as I had done, Stephanie also relied on her faith. When asked how she managed to get through it, she always begins by crediting God, but also always adds, “If you don’t believe, the important thing is to find something bigger than you, bigger and brighter than you are. Surviving is so much easier when there is something you are reaching for.”
NieNie Dialogues is now one of the most popular blogs online, with more than three million readers. Through her blog, Stephanie conveys the message she learned, the message that all of us, the Paralympic athletes and everyone who has been through a life-altering experience, have learned: You can get better. And what’s really important is to look outward, not inward, and become a source of strength for others, helping them work through what you’ve already experienced. I get calls all the time from people who have been diagnosed with MS and other disease and give them much of the same advice I got.
Mitt and I frequently meet people who have been through daunting challenges. We are continually inspired as we learn how they overcame those challenges to lead as full and as productive lives as possible. During Mitt’s 2012 campaign for president, he met Sam Schmidt in Las Vegas. In January 2000, Sam’s Indianapolis racing car hit the wall. This father of two young children spent five months on a respirator and was rendered quadriplegic; he can move nothing below his neck. He and Mitt spoke about his life since then: his morning begins with a two- to three-hour routine for bowel, bladder, teeth, shower, and dressing. That would be enough to make a lot of people give up. Instead, Sam owns and manages an Indy car racing team, which regularly dominates the Firestone Indy Lights, having won sixty races. And he himself has actually begun to drive again. He has a Corvette that has been outfitted with special controls. To accelerate, he blows in an air tube. To brake, he sucks the air out of it. To turn left or right, he looks carefully left or right, respectively. Accordingly, he warned his racing buddies, “You gotta keep the bikinis out of the grandstands, because you don’t want any sudden movements.”
Sam’s disability is still there. He endures it every day, every hour. But that has not kept him from fully engaging in life.
Through the campaigns, through our work with different organizations, Mitt and I have met so many people who have carried their bag of rocks up a hill or into the winner’s circle. While their challenges have included almost everything imaginable, there are similarities in the way people have dealt with them. Inevitably, it comes down to body, mind, and spirit.
By the conclusion of the Olympics and Paralympics, my disease was in remission—not cured, but in remission, which is a medical term for managed. It means it is under control, for now. Mitt and I had become accustomed to living with it, and making the necessary concessions, but we continued preparing for the possible. We knew it wasn’t gone, it wasn’t defeated, and that on occasion it would rise up and remind us, but we weren’t going to allow it to dictate our choices in life. Mitt referred to our being irrationally hopeful.
He used to talk about his mother: “Every year she would gather us around her and tell us, ‘I love you all very much, but this could be my last Christmas. I’m not well; this could be my last. Your father’s so healthy and strong, but I have all these conditions.’ That was her annual Christmas message. And the first few times we heard it we really worried about her. Of course, my mother lived to be eighty-nine, outliving my father by two years.”
As we prepared to leave Salt Lake City, I remained irrationally hopeful.
Six
SEVERAL TIMES in the months leading up to the Opening Ceremonies, Mitt and I had paused to take a deep breath, look at each other and wonder, what are we going to do next? For the first time in our life we had no plans. After the Olympics ended, we could go anywhere and do anything we might choose. We didn’t have to be anywhere, we didn’t have to worry about getting the kids to school, and we didn’t have to go to meetings or fulfill responsibilities. We were people who had spent our entire lives following schedules, racing to fulfill endless obligations, and suddenly we were going to have a life with absolutely nothing planned.
We were financially secure; with the exception of Craig, all our boys were on their own; and Mitt didn’t have a business to run.
Neither of us was very good at doing nothing. We’re the kind of people who are happiest when we have to complain about being too busy. After spending years worrying if I even had a future, and then being given at least the possibility of a productive one, I certainly didn’t intend to waste it. I needed to be involved in life. And Mitt could never be content watching life pass by. He’s a problem solver, that’s what he does, and I knew he would be lost if there were no problems to be solved. For some people, that type of life might sound ideal, but it didn’t fit us.
Mitt’s success in turning around the Olympics had attracted the attention of political professionals. Some people in Utah had asked him to consider running for governor of that state, but Utah wasn’t our home, and it already had plenty of conservative talent. Kerry Healey, the chairperson of the Massachusetts Republican Party, quietly flew to Salt Lake to ask him to consider a run for governor. The then-governor of Massachusetts faced dim prospects for reelection.
There is a saying among people who have spent time in politics: if you have politics in your blood, get a vaccination! Mitt had politics in his blood. Many people remember that his father, George Romney, had been a very popular three-term governor of Michigan and a leading candidate for the presidency. It wasn’t so much that he enjoyed politics, but he believed that being an elected official was a very good way of helping people. Fewer people remember that Mitt’s mother also ran for political office. Lenore Romney was certainly a memorable woman. During George’s presidential campaign, a reporter asked her to comment on the old saying “Behind every great man there is a great woman.” She didn’t hesitate, replying, “I think that behind every great man there is a very surprised mother-in-law!” Lenore Romney won Michigan’s Republican Senate primary in 1970 for the right to run against the popular incumbent, Philip Hart. Hart was so popular, in fact, that the Senate named its third office building
in his honor. There was little chance she would beat him; in fact, years later Mitt would compare his own 1994 Senate campaign against the popular Ted Kennedy to his mother’s unsuccessful effort. So while Mitt sat at the table with his father, he also learned politics from his mother, serving as her driver and advance man. Politics was in his blood on both sides.
I come from a political family too. My father was the first person in our family to win an election, when he became mayor of my hometown. In early 1977, I ran for a seat representing our precinct in the Belmont, Massachusetts, town meeting. The big issue was whether to move the fire station. I had placards printed with my picture and platform, walked around the neighborhood, and rang every doorbell. I won my election. Campaigning was hard for me: I was shy, but I found that when I really believed in something, I could overcome my hesitancy. As long as I was speaking from my heart, and I wasn’t just saying things because I wanted to win, I didn’t have any trouble expressing myself. That was to prove true years later, when I stood in front of thousands of people explaining why they should vote for my husband.
Both Mitt and his mother were realists, they knew how difficult it would be to win their campaigns, but both of them believed it was important to try to offer their messages. Mitt once compared running against Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts to being in a ski race against Jean-Claude Killy. Though, the only thing the two had in common is that they both went downhill fast. Mitt’s 1994 race was a difficult campaign, and I received some criticism for being a little uncomfortable and out of touch. It was hard for me, and learning how to accept criticism was even more difficult. In fact, after we had lost the election, I told Mitt that this was the last time I was ever going to go through something like that. To paraphrase Mark Twain, I meant it so strongly that I’ve told him the same thing after every election.