Staying True

by Jenny Sanford

  All of these dramatic changes in him suggested a deep emptiness inside, too. Even a young body needs time to rest, to recharge, but all Mark did was charge ahead, ignoring how his worst fears about aging were manifesting in his body. Mark has long had trouble with his back and has suffered a sore shoulder from time to time, but that fall it seemed as though his body was completely falling apart as he clung desperately to the desires of youth. It was apparent that he was suffering. The yogis refer to suffering, or dhukha, as the resistance or reaction to pain. When I looked at Mark, I saw a man in so much pain: physical, intellectual, and emotional. Somewhere inside of me I knew he was in moral conflict as well, but that was honestly something I chose not to explore. My concern and my pleas for him to slow down, to soften, went unheard. There was so much on the surface that seemed to need my attention, that the idea of scratching that surface and confronting Mark with what I saw was just not tenable.

  On one level, you might say that Mark was having a classic midlife crisis. Yet to label it as such, pack it neatly in a box, and place it on a shelf denies the way his adherence to political principle, the public acclaim, government pressure, and media attention aided and abetted this episode. Of course, he had the tendency to view his life as a quest that was never completed, and this would have existed within him even if he had never been elected. In a way that is just what drives him. I can see Mark’s break with his values now as probably a combination of these forces: the unreal way in which being a public figure distorted his sense of self compounded by the coming crisis that was turning fifty.

  Mark had long lived in a world where he never had to perform the normal tasks of life nor suffer the consequences of his lapses of decorum in the office or spikes of bad temper, albeit often with a gentle voice. No matter his private failings, his staff protected him from exposure. But now, the media, the hated media, was lavishing positive attention on him, and he found it irresistible. He was the man of the moment, the stalwart hero who was standing on principle and refusing to accept money from the federal government. In all ways, he was a man who stood apart from the quotidian world. He was lauded, celebrated for his constant seeking of new ideas, new horizons, and, unbeknownst to me, new sensations. Was it so much of a stretch then for him to think that if he worked hard enough at it, he might beat this aging thing too?

  Here again, our difference in approach is profound. I have always looked forward to getting older. As someone who has dozens of things to do on any given day, or at a particular moment, I expect that when I reach my senior years all of that will gracefully, gently subside. As each year passes, I feel more and more content with who I am and how I have lived my life. As my body began to slowly age (I too have had health and age-related issues, including many skin cancer scares and many minor surgeries to remove them), I was more and more awake to the precious gifts surrounding me each day, but Mark’s angst was growing about what was to come. Where I was learning to accept gracefully the challenges that have come with aging, he had tried to deny them. As he faced the prospect of turning fifty and his time as governor was coming to an end, Mark continued to live in an increased frenzy, as if something were missing and he had to find it before he died.

  Perhaps the foundation for the differences in Mark and my approaches to aging is the fact that all four of my grandparents were still alive when I was a child. Mark briefly knew two of his grandparents, but perhaps he never saw the beauty or wisdom in their age. My mom’s parents, Honey and Bumpa, were full of fun and energetic almost until they died. Bumpa was tall and bright and could make me laugh. I remember sitting on his lap as he blew smoke rings from his pipe. His other classic grandfather trick was making a silver dollar magically appear from behind my ear. Naturally, he let me keep the silver dollar, making it that much more special. Honey, my grandmother, is my real model for aging well. In many ways, she blossomed as she aged. She was soft-spoken, petite, and graceful, and her grace increased in her later years. She walked daily, stretched her mind by reading, and even took up painting late in life.

  My father’s parents showed me a different advantage to the later stages of life. My Gramps awed me with his wisdom about business and his insights into character. Older people have so much time—time to listen, reflect, and share magical memories. All my grandparents had experienced great joys and successes, as well as tribulations, but they had reached a state of contentment and enjoyment. With them as my examples, I had never been fearful about aging, recalling John Greenleaf Whittier’s lines: “Strike when thou wilt the hour of rest,/But let my last days be my best.” The family did our part to make the elders feel as if their last days were indeed their best. We celebrated milestones in our grandparents’ lives, such as birthdays and fiftieth anniversaries, and we always welcomed opportunities to be with them.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh said, “only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough is true security to be found.” When I think of those words, I recall how gracefully Honey lived after Bumpa died. She could have withered at the prospect of living her last years alone. Her security came from living in the present. I see the same quality in my mother as I have watched her play tennis, paint, and enjoy time with her grandchildren, living far longer than any doctor projected. I am reminded of how special each day of life is and how important it is to seek to enjoy each step along the way. As with meditation in yoga, I am mindful that I need to learn to become present and familiar with myself so I can feel my experiences and not just react to them.

  As I felt myself happily relaxing into my age, I was pulling away from Mark’s world. Weekends at Coosaw and time at our beach house have helped balance the demands on our time while in Columbia, and we have all cherished these getaways. I think the boys and Mark have been most happy at Coosaw, where they could just be boys, kayaking the rivers or creeks or swimming to the banks of pluff mud at low tide. Mark is the Pied Piper there, able to round up all the children and get them working on some big project.

  Some weekends he rented a track hoe, and he and the boys replaced a floodgate or repaired dikes. Other times all of them, even the little guys, took to the woods to set a big fire—a controlled burn—to cut back the underbrush. I didn’t fully partake of these manly events but I often watched for a while. I enjoyed the peace of walking at Coosaw, finding balance on the shifting terrain. Uncluttered time in nature has been my personal time to recharge, and then I rejoin the noisy men. I relish the delight on the boys’ faces as they return covered in soot or mud, hungry for a hearty meal I have cooked, followed by discussion around the fire after dinner or a Jeep ride under the stars to spot deer in the woods. My eyes were trained on the horizon too, but my vision of it was us at the beach, Mark at home, while we as a couple cherished the launching of our four fine young men into the world. As Henri Bergson said, “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” As I faced the realities of my aging and dealt with my various health crises, I wanted to grow to understand them, to deal with them, to learn from them, and to live wholly with them. We had lived our time in the public eye, but my vision of our future as we grew older was one where we could be as vital to the world around us in a much more private context. I was moving inward, slowing down, reveling in these changes and the changes to come. Little did I understand, as I started to draw more strongly on my inner life and look toward my goals, that January would bring me a revelation that would derail that strong vision I had of my years to come with my family as I knew it.

  TWELVE

  I ALWAYS BELIEVED THAT MARK AND I HAD NO SECRETS. AFTER ALL of these years in the public eye, our lives were open books to one another, let alone to the public. Though we drifted apart a bit during his time as governor, we were partners in parenting, and we were still intimate. The physical space we shared even remained close: In the office adjacent to our bedroom in the governor’s mansion, our desks were next to each other. So it was not at all odd on an afternoon back in January for me to be look
ing in his desk.

  The beginning of the year is the time I put things to right after the holidays. Mark’s State of the State speech and the Obama inauguration had already taken up catch-up time but with Mark away hunting Thursday and Friday that week, I had the time to tackle a few lingering issues. One of them was to search for some documents I thought would settle a question about Coosaw that had come up between Mark and his siblings. While the boys were at school on Friday, I searched the files we kept in storage but didn’t find what I was looking for there. Later that day, it occurred to me that Mark’s desk might hold the needed paperwork. If what I was looking for wasn’t there, I told myself, I’d call it quits and let Mark search further himself when he got home.

  I walked into the tall office with long windows overlooking the mansion driveway and went to Mark’s desk. Ignoring the scattered papers on top and the stacks of books on the floor that Mark planned to read, I went straight for the drawer on the left side, where I knew Mark kept files about current issues. In random order, one labeled simply “B” caught my eye. I opened it and saw quickly that this was not a file dedicated, as I thought, to correspondence with Mark’s brother Bill—often called just B by his siblings. Instead, a letter, an article clipped from a magazine, and a printed email exchange inside told me that B stood for Belen, a woman, I learned sitting there, Mark had slept with and whom he believed to be his eternal love.

  I suppose it’s cliché to say that I felt as if I had been punched in the gut. But that’s the best description I can muster for what this surprise felt like. I was short of breath. I began to shake. Stunned, I wasn’t sure of what to do next. I had so many questions. How could I not have known? Had I really known, on some level? When and where had he been seeing her? How had he found time for an affair? Did he really love her? How could he do this to me and to the boys? I read the letter again and saw the depth of what he professed to be his feeling. I looked at the article, but it didn’t mean anything to me; for all I know even today, it may have been misfiled.

  The email made things still more clear. It showed Mark had arranged to use a friend’s apartment in New York City for a visit he had scheduled in the coming weeks. I knew that the ostensible reason for the trip was to meet with publishers interested in his idea for a book on conservative values, but I could only assume he was also planning to see his lover then. He had been gone so much recently … where had he actually been? I don’t know how long I sat in his chair. Eventually I got up and moved to my side of the office and sat motionless at my desk a bit longer, the thin file in my lap. I tried to think of what I should do. Should I call him? Should I call a friend? A lawyer? Should I cry? Was this even happening? I was shocked into stillness, until I heard Mark’s voice downstairs.

  I put the file on my desk and stood up when he walked into our office. Fresh from the hunt, he was disheveled, and his plaid shirt was untucked. He looked as if he hadn’t slept all night. He kissed me hello and then went to his desk. Still dumbstruck, I calmly handed him the letter and confronted him very simply with what I’d discovered: “Please tell me about this.”

  Mark glanced down at the letter, and his shoulders slumped immediately. Again I noticed that he looked very tired. “Jenny, I’m sorry. I’ll end it,” he said.

  The next thing I said had been looping endlessly through my mind and seemed to be what mattered most of all: “Well, do you love her?”

  “No,” he said emphatically. Despite his declaration of love in the letter, I believed him. “She doesn’t mean anything. In fact I was up really late last night telling Jim Kuyk that this was crazy and that I had to end it.” Jim is an old friend—he was in our wedding, in fact—and Mark’s lawyer. I didn’t think there was any legal significance in Mark’s having confided in him, but I wondered immediately how many people knew about this affair before I did.

  We heard the sound of a few of the boys running up the stairs to greet Mark.

  “Let’s finish this discussion downstairs,” Mark said and then turned to his sons and tousled heads and caught them up on his successful hunt. I would have given anything for this to be a discussion that had an end point, but I suspected it wasn’t something we could dispense with simply “downstairs.” Still, downstairs I went.

  A few minutes later, boys scattered to other parts of the house, Mark and I sat together on a couch in the library. I sobbed softly—still unable or unwilling, I’m not sure which, to rant and rave with the hurt I was feeling—as Mark tried to explain himself. I was hoping it was just a one-time event, an act of passion, but Mark admitted that he had seen this woman in Argentina and then twice in New York. I asked if there had been other affairs and he insisted that this was his only transgression, the only one. Insisting Belen didn’t mean anything to him and avoiding any real details of the logistics of their time together, Mark promised to end the affair. His voice was kind and apologetic but he didn’t reach out to comfort me. A profound sadness came over me sitting there. A fundamental part of what I believed about my husband and about our life together had just died and it seemed as though I might never get it back.

  My mind raced, looking for an explanation better than the one he was providing. Mark had abstained from sex and drinking during college while his dad was so sick. Having gotten a few things out of my own system in college, I could appreciate that he had long wondered what, if anything, he had missed by not experimenting in those years. I knew that he was under almost impossible pressure on the job. I understood how something like this might have happened theoretically, though I couldn’t wrap my head around how Mark—this man of his word and of faith—could have made such terrible choices. Still, I knew that I could and would forgive him. It might have been my survival instinct kicking in, a willingness to forgive and move on, perhaps even the hope that in forgiving quickly I could eradicate the ugly knowledge I’d gained that day. But my immediate impulse to forgive Mark has not proven to be only that. I can see now that forgiving him was an essential part of healing for myself as well.

  Through tears, I told Mark that I wanted to forgive him and to believe that this was it, that it wouldn’t ever happen again. My simple condition was that he had to fully commit to the marriage in a way that he had not done in the past. It had to be better, not just a return to the same. Still sitting apart from me—perhaps a posture that should have worried me—he agreed.

  At dinner that night, I tried to keep up the normal patter for the boys’ sake, but I left the table early, explaining that I simply wasn’t feeling well. I sobbed upstairs in my bathroom. I don’t know how long I sat there, but at some point in the evening Mark came in, hugged me gently, and assured me everything was going to be okay. How I wanted to believe that! What a wonderful thing it would have been to just believe that and try to move on. But as anyone who has ever been betrayed knows, we can’t really outsmart or overrule the part of the brain that has registered that betrayal.

  Forgiveness, too, is a willful and deliberate act and it takes such effort. I made the effort, but I lost sleep over it. For many nights—and many months—I often had trouble getting to sleep and had a terrible time staying that way. I often got up in the wee hours of the morning, read my Bible, and stared into space. I began to keep a journal of my thoughts and some of Mark’s comments and found that doing so helped me focus on what mattered. I was beat down, exhausted, and deeply sad, but the first thing I wrote in that journal shows me that even in that dark hour I was determined to continue to see my glass as half full. I started with Psalm 118:24 “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

  The next day, Saturday, Mark and I were scheduled to attend a black-tie dinner in Charleston. Ostensibly to get ready, but really just to clear my head, I went out for a pedicure and a massage, soaking up every minute of the solitude. Discovering Mark’s affair had somehow made me feel ugly, unwanted, and even dirty. For just a little while, the pampering and the fancy dress I put on that evening made me feel good.

  I as
ked Mark to drive instead of taking a security detail to the event so we could speak frankly during the hours in the car. As we talked, it became clear to me that, contrary to what he’d said the day before, Mark had real feelings for this woman. He touted her wealth, bristled when I asked questions, and defended her when I referred to her plainly as his “whore.” “She is not a whore!” he protested. He seemed to be oblivious to his ability to pierce my heart.

  We also spoke of the trip to the world economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, where we were scheduled to go the next day. I told Mark that I didn’t see how going to Davos could be a priority at this time. Instead, I thought we should stay home and we should be together without other people, or dinners or speeches. Mark resisted upending our plans, but he ultimately agreed we would stay home and even go away together for a weekend.

  A few days later, I asked Mark if he had told Belen that their affair was over. He said that doing so wouldn’t be quite that easy. Though I had understood that they had got together while Mark was on a commerce department trip to Argentina in June 2008, their relationship, he explained, had actually started—albeit platonically—seven years earlier via email. She had been a friend, and he didn’t think he could just cut her off so quickly. He still hoped he could travel to New York in a few weeks to see her. He promised he would end it there in person. I wouldn’t have it—he had to end it immediately on the phone.