Where There's Hope

by Elizabeth A. Smart

  “I had nine months to think of that,” says Mom. “We belonged to that infamous group of parents who had lost children—whose children had been kidnapped. Frankly, there weren’t any happy stories. I never heard of a happy story from any of them.”

  But there were other stories. Mom and Dad began to hear from people all around the world who were praying for me, searching for me.

  Mom says, “I don’t know why, but the community—really, it felt like the world—got behind us and expressed their sympathy and told us stories about how they were looking in every vacant lot and shed, checking up on people and going everywhere. And to see the search go on for weeks and months … They never let it die. That was so faith-promoting for me. We were just an ordinary family. Nothing special to the world. They were special to me. Someone told me this was the biggest story of a kidnapped child since the Lindbergh baby—not that this brought comfort to me, but in a way, it was like you were everybody’s child. I found some peace in knowing that everyone was out there looking for you. There were so many kind, good people.”

  As that crucial forty-eight hours stretched to forty-eight days, weeks turned to months, and the entire summer went by, Mom forced herself through each day.

  “When school started, I couldn’t look for clothes for Mary Katherine without thinking of you or wanting to buy you a dress. I went and bought your school clothes and shoes and had it all in your room waiting for you, because I knew you were coming back. Then Christmas came, and you weren’t back. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t go out. It was hard talking to people. As kind and as good as they were, it was hard. I couldn’t even bear to go to a store to even look for Christmas gifts for our family. It was like, ‘We love you, children, and we want you to be happy, but…’ I couldn’t do it, because I was a mess,” Mom admits, her voice full of emotion. “But on Christmas morning—and I don’t know who did it to this day—there was a mountain of gifts on our front porch for all the children. It was probably the best Christmas they ever had. I was so thankful that somebody, or many people, got together and did that for us. Something I just couldn’t do at the moment.”

  I’m so grateful to whoever it was that performed that great act of kindness. When I returned home, I was completely overwhelmed by the love and support that the community showed us. I received boxes of mail. Our house turned into a florist shop with flowers on every table, including the bathroom countertops. There were so many thousands of people praying for us and rejoicing in our reunion that, although I was completely overwhelmed by all the attention, I think I understand what Mom meant when she said, “It brought comfort to me that, in a way, you were everyone’s child, and everybody was looking for you. I found peace in that knowledge.”

  Kindness, love, support, prayer—it all makes a difference. It made a difference for my mom while I was kidnapped, and it made a huge difference for me when I was rescued and brought home, to know that I wasn’t an outcast or someone to be shunned for what had happened to me. It’s a bit miraculous, isn’t it? That people who don’t even know you can make—and are making—such a difference in your life. Every time there is a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, or some kind of major accident, just think how many people immediately begin to pray, to care and wish for a positive outcome. All of that builds and strengthens hope—if we choose hope. But that can be a very hard choice sometimes. Like the choice to get out of bed when every moment of the day is agony. The choice to make toast for your hungry preschooler when your life and soul are in ruins and you don’t even want to open your eyes, much less open your heart. That’s when the kindness of a stranger or loving support from a friend can make all the difference.

  * * *

  Back when I thought I might resume my original plan for my life—to be a musician and a mother—I jumped at every opportunity to put my name out there as a harpist. As a teenager, I was thrilled at any opportunity to get paid for playing my harp, so I readily accepted when a friend of a friend asked if I would provide the background music at a fund-raising dinner at a beautiful restaurant in Millcreek Canyon, not far from my home. Ann Romney was there. (This was years before her husband, Mitt, ran for president; he was governor of Massachusetts at the time.) I don’t remember if I even spoke to her that night, but I noticed her, and since then, I’ve admired her from afar.

  Candidly, I love it when the Romney family attends our church, because they draw so much attention, hardly anyone notices me. It’s not that I don’t appreciate what people have done for me—I do, and I always will—but I also like to feel like a normal person and just sit in church with Matthew and Chloé and listen without overhearing whispers. Yes, that’s the girl who was kidnapped. The Romneys have the process of entering and exiting the church building down to an art. They must have a countdown set on their watches, because they walk in and sit down as the first chords of the organ music play, and it’s like a magic act the way they get out of there. I would love to learn the trick to making a quick yet completely gracious exit.

  When I wrote Ann’s name on my list of potential interview subjects, I had no idea if she’d have the time or if she’d even remember me, but I summoned the courage to ask, and she invited me to give her a call.

  “Hang on one second,” she says when she picks up the phone. “We’re up at the lake. I found a quiet corner, but sometimes people find me.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  We spend a little time on small talk while she gets settled. I use the time to summon my courage and consult my notes. Having done my homework before the call, I know that Ann has been coping with the devastating effects of multiple sclerosis since 1998. I don’t want to overstep what’s polite, but I need to know, so I ask her, “When you found out you had MS, did you have anger about it?”

  “I think I went through pretty much the stages of grief that people go through when they lose a loved one,” she says, and for the first time it occurs to me that sometimes the lost loved one is yourself. “Anger is one of those stages. Denial was one. Boy, that was there!” She laughs a little at that. “Denial was strong. I’m like, This is impossible! I cannot believe this! Yet I’d wake up and I’d have these complete MS symptoms—numbness, weakness, fatigue, loss of the use of my right leg. It’s like, Yeah, what were you thinking? Of course that’s what you have. You have the MRI imaging that shows the sclerosis on your spine. What else do you think it is? But I did go through anger. It wasn’t fair that I was not going to have … that my life was going to be different, or my life was over, and I was ruined, and I was never going to have another good day. I was angry. Thinking that, I moved into an eighty-year-old body and could hardly get out of bed. I couldn’t help my family anymore. I couldn’t do anything for anybody anymore. I could barely take care of myself.”

  She pauses, and I wait. I feel her considering what she wants to say next.

  “I think everybody stays at different stages for a longer or shorter time, depending on what you finally decide you’re going to do,” says Ann. “I finally decided, Well, this is my life. These are the cards I’ve been dealt. I better just live the best I can with what’s been dealt to me. That’s where I think I started to say, Okay, now what can I do to fight this a little bit? This is not acceptable to me. This is not my choice to live this way, so what can I do to make myself feel better? That’s when I started finding alternative strategies and different things. It took me a long time to get there. It took me about a year to get to the point where I was willing to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to fight it, and I’m going to learn how to deal with this the best I can.’”

  Ultimately, that’s what it comes down to. We have a choice to make every day: Are we going to allow our problems to overwhelm us or are we going to move forward?

  I love Ann for being so honest and sincere, for openly admitting that she went through a whole array of negative feelings. For taking the time to acknowledge what she felt and finally accepting it, but not just accepting it lying down. She takes a courageous
stance, exploring every avenue to make small steps forward. I know it’s easy to become overwhelmed; we all do sometimes, especially if we place so much pressure on ourselves to “get better” or “just get over it” or “move on.” In reality, it’s the small steps that take us the farthest. Ann Romney is a great example of exactly that.

  “So much of the rebuilding that I did came from my faith and my belief that there was a better way,” Ann says. “That there was going to be a better life. That there was going to be peace and strength again. It wasn’t like I was—boom—healed. I went through a healing process where I was able to rebuild my life and rebuild my strength.”

  Today Ann Romney is back in the saddle, literally and figuratively. Our conversation takes a welcome turn to a topic we both love: horses.

  “I’m riding like crazy, and I’m competing,” she says. “The last horse show, I actually beat a couple of Olympians. Talk about feeling powerful! I never, ever, ever thought I would go down this way. It is the biggest kick in the pants, and I’m just loving it. I keep getting better, and I keep fighting and getting stronger. My horses are my partners. They’re my buddies. I love them to death, and they really brought me through a hard time. Get me in the saddle, and my heart sings.”

  This strikes me as a great metaphor: Get me in the saddle, and my heart sings. But before I can say that, Ann says, “I have questions for you.”

  “Oh. Okay. I’d be happy to answer. If I can.”

  “What made you decide to write about this?”

  “Well … whenever I say I’m not going to do something, I always end up doing it. I should probably just stop saying it.”

  I tell her a little about this quest I’m on: to ask the people who inspire me the questions other people always ask me, to find the answers for myself and then share those answers with others.

  “Harold B. Lee, the great educator and LDS president, was a friend of Mitt’s mother,” says Ann. “She had a lot of health issues and was going blind at the end of her life. He said to her something which I have never forgotten. He said, ‘Only the wounded can fight in the Lord’s army.’ I thought … wow. Only the wounded. Only those who’ve been through the breaking of the heart, and then the opening of the heart, and then the transformation of the heart, which then makes you more powerful.”

  The vivid image strikes me: the breaking and opening and transformation of a human heart. But then I wonder—though I don’t disagree with the idea that you don’t know how strong you are until you’ve been tested—haven’t we all been through something? Aren’t we all wounded in some way? I’m certain that we are, and I hate comparisons that make one person’s pain outweigh another. Who gets the biggest tragedy award—the kidnapping victim or the cancer patient?

  “There’s nothing more painful than thinking that your child is being mistreated,” Ann says with genuine empathy. “Your parents must have such extraordinary strength with what they went through.”

  They did—and they still do—but it can’t be a competition if we truly have compassion for others and for ourselves. Life has a way of teaching us that lesson, whether we want to learn it or not.

  “These experiences,” Ann says, “they completely humble you. They break you down. They basically smash you to pieces. Then you have to start figuring out how to rebuild the pieces, and you do it through hope.”

  “Do you believe in happily ever after?” I ask. “In this life, I mean.”

  I expect her to confirm my conclusion that “happily ever after” is a myth, but without hesitation, Ann says, “You can have happily ever after in this life. But no one is going to escape this life without pain or suffering. I call it gathering our bags of rocks. Basically, as we go through life, we have our bag we carry over our shoulder, and each painful thing we go through in life—we just keep throwing more rocks in our bag. Oftentimes, other people don’t see the bag of rocks we’re carrying, but all of us will accumulate our bags of rocks.”

  I agree with her, but later in the day, contemplating our conversation, I decide that it’s important to stop every once in a while, set the bag down, examine the contents, and leave some of those rocks behind. Otherwise, we might find that we don’t have the energy to make it to our destination.

  The day after I was rescued by police officers in Salt Lake City, I flew in an FBI helicopter over the camp where my captors had chained, raped, and tortured me. During those long, agonizing months, my deepest prayer, my most fervent hope, was that I would somehow be able to fly away from there. I watched and waited for an opportunity, praying that someone would help me. I remember a few times when helicopters were so close overhead that the wind from their blades beat down on the tent, making it shake. On those occasions, Mitchell would grab me and pull me into the tent lickety-split, and once Barzee was in the tent as well, he would zip the tent door shut and hold me in an iron grip. The helicopters never stopped for long; soon they were gone, soaring upward. The wind would die down, the tent would stop shaking, and my heart would once again feel like it had stopped beating.

  That day nine months after Mitchell put a knife to my throat and took me from my home, there I was, looking down on the no-longer-hidden camp, surrounded by FBI agents and my mom. I went there again a week later with my parents. We hiked up the three and a half miles from our home. I wanted to take them there, because the most important thing to Mitchell was that this place be kept secret. He said it was a “sacred” place where he had thought up most of what he called his “revelation from God” or “divine inspiration”—which, in truth, were torture and foulness. Only someone who’d lost all compassion and human kindness could have thought those things up.

  Standing there with my mom and dad, I felt triumphant. Mitchell would spend the rest of his natural existence in a hell of his own making, but I was standing under the blue Utah sky, and his dark secret was laid open, exposed to the bright sunlight. The shroud of secrecy had been stripped away and could no longer harbor all the abhorrent details of what these people had done to me. Returning to the hidden camp, I faced the terrible memory of what had taken place there, but I also realized that it wasn’t the mountain, trees, or plants that had hurt me, and now they were all that remained. My small, precious kernel of hope had outlived everything my captors could do to take it from me.

  South African human rights activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote, “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” Hope is real. And it holds great power. Each one of us has the capacity to hope, but there are moments when we must ask ourselves:

  What is the unique anatomy of my hope, and where do I find it?

  How do I harness the power of my own hope and keep it alive as I move my life forward?

  2

  Forward at All Costs—Never Retreat

  Do not go gentle into that good night …

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  —DYLAN THOMAS

  Sometimes the struggle to survive within the human race is a visceral, physical fight for life. Sometimes it’s not that obvious. It’s not the knife wound or black eye. It’s what’s going on behind the perfectly coiffed hair and wrinkle-free attire. Survival comes in different forms: sometimes it’s physical, sometimes psychological, sometimes emotional, and sometimes spiritual.

  Breann “Bre” Lasley is a Salt Lake City entrepreneur who started a business teaching English as a second language. In the wake of a harrowing assault that left her fighting for her life, she found a new purpose. In 2016, Bre founded an organization called Fight Like Girls, hoping to encourage and empower girls and women. Since then she’s spoken to thousands of people, telling her story and inspiring others with her strength and spirit.

  When I read about Bre’s experience, I thought about the visceral elements of survival and self-preservation that play a part in cultivating hope. I decided to ask her if she’d be willing to talk to me about that—and about anything else she’d like to talk about—and she readily agreed to sit do
wn with me.

  The plan is to meet up at the Salt Lake City Public Library this afternoon. But I have a one-year-old, so things seldom go as planned. Chloé squirms in my arms when she hears Mom’s voice over the car’s Bluetooth phone.

  “Mom, can you please watch Chloé while I meet Bre Lasley? Everything has gone over schedule today, and—”

  “Elizabeth, I told you to call Bre six months ago,” Mom says in her I-told-you-so voice.

  “What?”

  I vaguely recall Mom’s message on my enormous to-do list. A girl had been badly hurt. Mom thought it might help if I talked to her. But until this moment, I hadn’t connected that wounded girl to the dynamic woman I’m scheduled to interview today.

  Mom says, “I’ll watch Chloé as long as you tell Bre that I told you to call her.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. I’ll tell her.”

  Chloé is always excited to see Mom, and today is no exception. I drop her off with a quick hug and kiss and jump straight back into my car, speeding toward Salt Lake City. I had suggested the library as a meeting place, thinking it would be the perfect spot, filled with quiet people studying or working. A safe place for difficult questions. It’s a beautiful building I’d like to explore further. Luckily, a parking spot is available. I’m running late, so this couldn’t be more perfect. I pull in, check my recorder, and head toward the library, which is surrounded by a grassy lawn, trees, and … homeless people.

  My heart turns over.

  Please understand: I have great compassion for homeless people, because I have been a homeless person. During the time I was being held captive, I walked the proverbial mile in their shoes, sleeping on the hard ground, begging for spare change, eating from garbage cans or going hungry. But I’m worried about Bre. I’m trying to put myself in her shoes now. It’s been years for me; for her, it’s been just a few months since a homeless man invaded her home and almost killed her.