Remarkable Changes: Turning Life's Challenges into Opportunities

Feeding the ducks at Hyde Park on a weekend outing with my parents and preparing for a life of remarkable changes.

Remarkable Changes Tu r n i n g L i f e ’s C h a l l e n ge s into Opportunities

J an e S e y m o u r with Pamela Patrick Novotny

To Mary and Stacy Keach Sr., Mummy and Papa P, Kalen, Jenni, Katie, Sean, Kris, John, Annie, Sally, and my entire extended family, and to James, without whom nothing in my life would be possible, and who supports all of us on our remarkable journeys

C on t e n t s

Preface by Christopher Reeve

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Introduction

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Take an Honest Look at Yourself

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Find Comfort Where You Can

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Let Go of the Past—the Heart of Change

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Imagine Who You Will Become

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5

Connect with Someone Along the Way

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Find Guidance in the Spiritual

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See the Gifts That Change Delivers

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Acknowledgments

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About the Authors Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher

P r e fac e

So many of our dreams seem at first impossible, then improbable, then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable. —Christopher Reeve, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, 1996

I n 1 9 9 5, I m a d e a conscious choice to deal in a positive way with a life-altering change—I decided to live. My injury was severe and required immediate surgery, but the doctors gave me only a 50-50 chance of surviving. Beyond that, I struggled with the knowledge that because of a freak accident, I had, in an instant, stopped being an active, athletic husband, father, and actor and became a vent-dependent quadriplegic. Despite my deep outrage at the unfairness of it all, the simple reality was that I was paralyzed. I thought it would be selfish and unfair to my wife and three children to remain alive because of the care I would need. But it was my wife, Dana, whose words gave me the courage and the

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motivation to live, when she knelt by my bedside and said, “You’re still you, and I love you.” Those words sent both of us on a journey we could not have imagined. But that’s the way it so often is with change in our lives. In Remarkable Changes, Jane Seymour talks about how one decision can create a cascade of challenges in our lives that require us to work harder and try more diligently than we ever thought we could. How do we find the will for such tests? I’m often reminded of the adage, “Fake it until you make it.” Sometimes it seems that setting a goal and taking the first small steps toward it are all you need to really get rolling toward significant change. Just doing that can help us find the inner resources to actually make a change we need. I, like Jane, believe that we all have a choice in how we live our lives every minute of the day. Even though I’m paralyzed and in a wheelchair, I still have freedom of choice. I’m still making the decisions that govern my life and I’m as much in charge of me as I would be if I were on my feet. What happens to many people who are fully functional physically is that they become paralyzed in an emotional or psychological sense. Perhaps they have low self-esteem, are still influenced by their upbringing, or failed too often to be willing to try again. But just as surely as we can allow ourselves to become paralyzed within, we can also choose to set ourselves free. Jane and I have been friends from the time we met more than twenty years ago while filming Somewhere in Time. When she ’s been in a difficult situation, like having to give up her career as a dancer, or when her marriage to David Flynn became unbearably chaotic, she had the courage to take action, to make changes. Accepting change and creating change have been at the heart of Jane ’s life, and it’s at the heart of the message of this book.

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I hope that the stories Jane shares with you will help you face unforeseen change or adversity in your own life. Let this remarkable book serve as a guide toward making your dreams seem not impossible, but inevitable. Christopher Reeve April 2003

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My mother, Mieke Frankenberg, taught me so much about turning challenges into opportunities. I only hope I can pass on to my daughter Katie what I have learned.

Introduction

A ro u n d m y f i f t i et h b i rt h day I found myself more reflective than usual about life’s transitions, and I very much needed to sit back and take stock of how I had come to the place where I was. I had just finished making the second Dr. Quinn movie, The Heart Within, and the themes of life and death, growing older, and building a rich, meaningful life in spite of obstacles were fresh in my mind. I also knew that it wasn’t likely there’d be another Dr. Quinn movie, and I felt saddened because that era of my life, one I’d loved so much, was well and truly at an end. At the same time, although I’d been working regularly, I found I wanted something more fulfilling from the films I would work on in the future. My family life was changing as well. My oldest daughters, Katie and Jenni, were away at college, my son Sean was in high school already, and the twins, Johnny and Kris, were happily learning their letters at kindergarten. Some days the house was almost eerily quiet. And so it was that during my morning walks, or when I sat alone with a glass of wine by the fire after the children were in bed, I spent

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time thinking about where I might go from here, what I might do with the time left to me. It came to me then that once again, change was overtaking me, and that I was in the process of remaking my life one more time, just as I had so many times before. And that’s when I began to see that there was a brilliant thread that had woven its way through all my years: it was this idea of great change inspiring new starts—again and again, fresh each time. I could see that so many times even the most painful change, once I had worked my way through it, had actually brought a kind of gift and fulfillment that I wouldn’t have thought possible while I was in the midst of the turmoil—or indeed if it had never happened. Embracing change can produce such a remarkable life. The most amazing things happen if you allow the extraordinary to unfold before you. It will unfold, and it comes from out of the blue, from something as random as taking a walk in a different direction from the one you usually take and commenting on someone’s dog and finding you have something in common. Or it can be a feeling you have for helping someone else, for making a change in others’ lives, and out of it you discover you have an ability you’d been unaware of. Perhaps it’s an ability to convince people to help themselves or an ability to find help for other people, or a sense of accomplishment in an area you never had any reason to be involved in, and now discover you love. I think when you put yourself out there like a blank canvas, with open arms and open soul and an open spirit, and you just say, “Why not? Maybe I can; maybe I will,” you become remarkable. When you really hear what’s happening around you, even if it has nothing to do with you, who knows what will happen? You may learn about a certain situation, or someone else’s predicament, and your gut or your spiritual self tells you, “I could do a little something to make a difference here; I could produce a change.” You may never have tried it, but why not give it a go? To me, the most remarkable changes come from living in the 2

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moment, being open to something brand-new, not limiting yourself to what you trained for in high school or college or your whole life. Not limiting yourself to what you feel is expected of you, or what your family said you have to do. All the changes that have happened to me have occurred spontaneously, without my looking for them. Not at any point with any of the crises in my life have I said, “Now, what am I going to do next? How am I going to change?” For me it never works that way. For me it’s more just being receptive, being open to what comes and having an open attitude. That may sound risky, but I really believe that my only failure would be in never trying. I believe it’s best not to worry so much if what you’re doing is successful—it’s often the path itself that is remarkable. Over and over in my own life I’ve been in situations I thought would work out in one way that ended up falling through. Then I see that what does work out actually gives me more joy, and I find I do better at it in any case! However it was they came upon me, it seems that each of these changes, these turning points, has transformed me in its own way. Each time a life-altering event has come along, I’ve had to learn something new if I was to do more than just survive. I’ve always wanted to grasp the deeper meaning of each challenging situation, to allow that change to bring me to a better understanding of myself. And countless times I’ve asked myself the same question you may have right now: Just how does one learn to do that? Now I understand that I have learned so much by watching others and by being inspired by them. Like you, I have looked to my family for that sort of teaching and inspiration. I’ve found it in my mother’s enthusiasm for life, in my father’s steadfastness, and in the honest and creative ways my sisters have lived their lives. I’ve learned it from others, too, from friends, acquaintances, and even from people I’ve never met whose stories and personal transformations have touched and uplifted me. 3

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As I’ve gone out to the kids’ sports events or hiking the hills around my house with my girlfriends, or caught up with relatives on the telephone, it has occurred to me that what we do to bind us together is to share stories of what is happening in our lives. Listening to these stories, I’ve noticed that while some people seem to have been dealt more crushing blows than others, it seems those most challenged so often rise up with remarkable spirit. In rising, they seem to find hope and a reason to embrace the life they have, whether or not it is the one they would have chosen. Not only that, they do remarkable things with the abilities and strength of purpose that come from facing the challenge of change in their lives. There ’s so much to be learned from each of them! And so this book took shape—because I have become convinced that by sharing our stories, we can guide one another and be guided in turn. In these pages, I will share with you some of my own stories as well as the stories of others. Some you’ll read are of people whose turning points have sent them on a quest, or whose own life changes have been a calling for them to act in large ways to help others experiencing similar changes. Others are stories of quiet victories, everyday miracles that have come about because of the transformational power of change. Many of them are about what we do with the surprises that come to us all when we least expect them—when life throws us into an experience we never wanted, planned, or anticipated. Some of those events that change our lives forever may be truly tragic; others can look to the outside world like great good fortune. But, whether it’s a wonderful thing that’s happened to you or a not-so-wonderful thing, when it has turned your life upside down, I know from my own experience the kind of turmoil you can be in. But what about when we turn our own lives upside down—when we know we just can’t live the way we’ve been any longer and we make a huge change for ourselves? You’ll find that kind of story in 4

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these pages as well. You might think, as I did at first, that the changes we make for ourselves are quite different from things that happen to us. That’s true in some ways, but the amazing thing I found as I collected, read, and reread the stories here, was that change throws us all into a similar process, no matter how it was instigated.

Signposts of Change Every one of our lives is a story in itself. And every one of our stories tells of constant change. My own life is no exception. In my story, which you’ll find woven throughout this book, you’ll see that I—and the people whose stories are collected here as well—have visited what I call signposts of change, and taken some direction from each of them. These signposts are stops we all make along the way as we undergo any kind of transition. While the process of change never proceeds in a straight line, it does seem to have similar signposts along the way for everyone. And so each chapter in this book focuses on one of those signposts that we all visit and perhaps revisit as we make our way through the turning points of our lives. If you’re in the midst of a life transition, you might recognize some of them, and I hope that you’ll draw strength and inspiration from the stories. If you’re contemplating making a change, perhaps the signposts will help you see a little of what the path you’ll take may look like. Take heart—no one visits the signposts neatly, in order, one after the other, nor is there any “correct” path through the signposts. Two things I’ve learned for certain are first that change is not tidy, and second, that it doesn’t happen all at one go or necessarily in the way you intended. I hope that the stories you read here will give you a special spark of inspiration that can lead you through changes in your own life, and that they will uplift you as they have me.

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Mummy and Daddy, Mieke and John Frankenberg, provided me with a strong foundation.

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Take an Honest Look at Yourself Examine Your Roots W h e n e v e ryt h i n g s e e m s u p in the air, and I don’t instantly know what to do next, I’ve found that if I take an honest look at myself and at my predicament, I have a stronger starting point from which to make decisions. If I do not, my decisions all seem to be off center. Taking a hard look at myself isn’t something I was born knowing how to do, but something I came to understand a bit of as I was growing up. However, I don’t believe I fully understood just what this particular signpost meant until I was nearly forty years old, and I was faced with one of the most painful episodes in my life—divorce and near bankruptcy all at once. As my life crumbled in little pieces around me, and I found myself at a total loss as to what to do about it, I had no choice but to take that honest look at who I was, and then at what was needed. Luckily, long before that, there was the groundwork lovingly laid by my parents, who helped me to develop an honest and positive image of myself—one that started with understanding and accepting who I was. 7

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While I must admit I haven’t always acted on that image, still, so many times it has proved to be the element deep inside myself that has allowed me to find a way to rise above even the most painful episodes. I was the firstborn, and I came into the world a year and a day after my parents were married. When I was a child, I used to tease them, embarrass them in public, by saying simply that I was born the day after they were married, ignoring the year that had passed. Of course in those days it seemed very shocking. My mother, Mieke, who is Dutch and from the town of Deventer in Holland, was in her thirties when she had me, and she was very beautiful, with dark, dark hair, high cheekbones, and beautiful eyes. My father, Dr. John Frankenberg, had jet-black hair and a little mustache, and he was often mistaken for David Niven. After my birth in 1951, my two sisters appeared in rapid succession. Sally is one year and four months younger than I, and Annie is one year and two months younger than Sally. Our first home outside of London was very small, with just two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, in the not-so-nice part of Wimbledon. My mother had a home business at the time, selling wine, tobacco, and other luxury items to the foreign embassies in London, so our tiny house was filled with people working all day. My two sisters and I shared one bedroom, sleeping in beds that folded up against the walls when they weren’t in use. When all the beds were down, it was almost impossible to walk from one side of the room to the other! We had a long garden behind the house that led down to some railroad tracks—and we truly thought we lived in heaven. When I was about ten, we moved to a large Victorian house in a nicer part of Wimbledon, and now we really thought we had it all, with an even larger garden, where we grew vegetables and flowers, and lovely neighbors all around. The house still stands, and looks just as it did then—a happy reminder of my teen years. We finally settled in a beautiful house in Hillingdon Middlesex, not far from Heathrow Airport, and nearly in the country. My mother, who is eighty-eight 8

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now, still lives in that house, and she fills it with people and parties at every opportunity. Sadly, my father died in 1991, in October, just before my mother’s birthday. I was very close to both of my parents, but particularly to my father, who treated me like an eldest son. We didn’t have any boys in the family, so I didn’t realize until later on that sometimes in those days the boy in the family would be given the better education and taken more seriously in terms of what his future and prospects would be. I felt I got that kind of attention, especially from him, and I look back with gratitude at what he offered me. In many ways, both my father and mother led me to believe I could be anything I dreamt of being. As young girls, my sisters and I had a lot of adventures. My father would read to us from the tales of the Greek heroes as we sat on his lap; that was the big treat. My parents were very keen on the theater, ballet, and opera, and we all listened to opera from a very early age. My father had been the doctor for a number of the opera singers at Covent Garden. Sometimes the singers would give us tickets—or sometimes we ’d purchase the cheapest ones ourselves and sit high up in the theater looking down on the expensive sections, waiting to see who hadn’t shown up so we could upgrade our seats at the intermission. We would go into London on the weekends and he would show us the architecture of the city and take us to the museums and to the library. We weren’t wealthy, so luckily a lot of these entertainments were free. My father worked for the National Health system, so although he worked very hard he never made a lot of money. His income was never remotely like what people in America think all physicians make. As a family, we belonged to an organization called the Scientific Society, which stemmed, I’m certain, from the fact that my father was a surgeon and my mother, who was passionate about all science, had worked as a nurse before she met him. The Society held lectures every week and we ’d go as a family. Once a year they had an exhibition, at which we always had a booth where we displayed a presentation on a 9

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As members of the Scientific Society at Merton Park, my family and I enjoyed participating in science exhibitions, and I learned about presenting ideas before an audience.

topic that we ’d all worked on. One year, for example, we researched milk—my father described the medical ramifications of drinking milk, my sisters did the science on the composition of milk, and I did something on how it was produced and sold. For the project we did on water, the head of the local water board was so impressed he invited me to go on a visit to all the water boards. I was a young girl, only ten or twelve, as I recall, and I met a bunch of executives. I remember how out of place I felt in my little party dress, listening to them talk about water quality while helping themselves to gin and tonic! All this enabled me to learn from an early age that if you really wanted to make something happen, you had to go to the top, and if you did that, invariably you’d get an answer of some kind, at the very least. Our projects for the Scientific Society were my first experience 10

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at learning how to maneuver in those higher circles. But I also learned volumes on how to present ideas, how to use art to put the presentation together, and how to stand in front of my project and explain it—skills that became important later in my life. From the time I could walk and talk, my father worked three weekends out of four, and he had to stay at Hillingdon Hospital, where he worked, which was quite far from our home in Wimbledon. So we three girls would go work with him on weekends at the hospital as auxiliary nurses. We had our own little uniforms—where some kids would play dress-up and pretend hospital, we were dressing up and doing some of the real thing. We’d be assigned to roll cottonwool swabs, or cotton balls, from huge rolls of pure cotton, tearing off small pieces and rolling them up into little round puffs, then packing them. We used to cut gauze and turn them into swabs for operations. We had to sew tabs on the back of operating gowns for the nurses and doctors. Eventually we progressed to sorting the nurses’ linen, which was not much fun, and feeding and helping take care of preemie babies, which was the most fun. Everything about my father’s work fascinated me. My father would take us into the operating room so that we would not be afraid of blood. I saw my first surgery at age ten, and because of my earlier experience in looking at blood while working in the rooms after surgeries, to everyone’s astonishment I was able to watch and not faint. During the surgery my father showed me the organs of the body— how they fit inside, and how beautifully designed we are. Had I ever been able to manage mathematics, I probably would have liked to be a doctor. From the time I was seven years old I had a real microscope and my father would show me how to make slides. We dissected earthworms. My favorite thing was getting samples of pond water and looking at all the things in there, and then I would draw them. I was encouraged by my parents to join the British Red Cross, so I used to 11

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go to those meetings. Through them I took courses and exams in home nursing, sports nursing, and general first aid. I even had a volunteer commitment through the Red Cross—I looked after a girl who was physically and mentally disabled. I’d never known anyone like that. Of course initially I would have preferred to be assigned to the rugby fields, where I could have smiled while putting Band-Aids on young men’s knees. But over time I developed a relationship with this girl and persisted until I could communicate with her. I felt an enormous sense of achievement not only in being able to deal with her, but in learning not to be frightened, and to work as a team with the girl’s mother, who initially had not been at all sure about having such a young girl helping her. Through all of this I was introduced into the world of science and volunteering. My sisters were, too, but I think it was much more taken for granted that I would do something with it. Perhaps I simply liked that world more than they did. I know I certainly felt comfortable in it. But there was also the idea that I, as the eldest, was in line to take on that kind of responsibility, in the way some families look to the eldest son to do so. None of us knew at the time, of course, that what I would do, years later, with this early interest in science and medicine would be to have a wonderful time in a television series playing the role of a woman doctor! When I was a child, our whole family would travel during our holidays in a broken-down old car, a Humber Super Snipe. Eventually we had a Rover—not a Range Rover, but an old English Rover, which is more modest. It was quite amusing, really, because my mother would pack just in case the end of the world came. Later, as an adult, I understood that her nearly obsessive planning for the worst had so much to do with what had happened to her as a young woman in Indonesia during the war, when she was held prisoner by the Japanese. I’ll share that story later, but for now, suffice it to say that when we were children, and she took us traveling, the roof rack 12

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of our car would be jammed with all our clothing and a host of other items she deemed our necessities. I recall times when she actually brought lettuce plants and tomato plants and squeezed them up there as well so she could plant them wherever we would be staying just in case we ran out of food—which by the way, we never did! In many ways I had a wonderful childhood. But there were difficulties, too, of the sort many of us have at one time or another. While I got on well with my sisters, when we were children they were much closer to each other than either was to me. They always went to school together, but I attended a school for the arts from the time I was a young teen. Consequently, my sisters were more of a team, and I was separate. Although we’re all very close today, that has always been the dynamic. Perhaps it was because I am the oldest—I’ve never really understood why, but that is how it has always been. My feeling of being left out only worsened when I went to school. I often think of my own childhood when I’m dealing with my children today. Johnny, one of my seven-year-old twins, came to me recently to report that he had been bullied at school, teased and called names that hurt his feelings. As I tried to explain to him how to make the best of it, my words brought me right back to when I was a kid, when I was dubbed “Weed,” right from the beginning of school, in first grade. In England at that time there was a television show called Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men—the characters were flowerpots. There was a woman in the middle of one of the pots who was not a flower as she was supposed to have been: she was a weed. At school my classmates immediately referred to me as Weed because I was different. I loved classical music, ballet, and painting. I didn’t play hockey and I wasn’t big, and strong, and tough like other kids. Whereas everyone else was gung ho about playing field hockey and net ball, I hated those sports. I hated gymnastics, too. The only thing I was good at was climbing a rope. They used to have this game called shipwreck in which everyone had to chase and tag one another 13

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on the gym equipment. I used to just climb the rope to the top of the gym and sit there very quietly, and I usually ended up being one of the last two or three people getting caught because no one else was that keen on climbing ropes. I was separated from others at school in another way as well. I was born with rather flat feet. Nevertheless, I’d always loved dancing. From the time I’d heard music my mother tells me I was constantly dancing in the kitchen, so apparently my feet couldn’t have been all that bad. Still, when I went to school I was placed in mandatory classes in how to walk properly so my arches wouldn’t fall. And I also had to do a special speech therapy class because I couldn’t say my Rs. These were considered deficiencies, although at the time I felt the way you often do when you’re told you have to have braces or glasses—it’s kind of interesting at first. But after a time of being singled out and pulled from my regular class once or twice a week to attend these two remedial classes, I was embarrassed. However, I did end up taking those special lessons far to the extreme. By the time I was a teenager, I attended a full-time ballet school, and I had developed ferociously strong arches as well as great determination—I danced with the London Festival Ballet, and at Covent Garden with the Kirov Ballet from Russia. And by the time I was a young adult, I had apparently overcome my speech difficulties, because I came to America, where I was asked to learn to speak with an American accent. I can assure you that pronouncing your Rs is very important in getting that accent right! At school overall, I was not the popular girl; I’ve just never been popular my whole life. I was shy and afraid of feeling isolated, and I often was. My mother used to say that people were jealous of me, but I couldn’t see that. I couldn’t understand why they would be. We were all given the same opportunities. And so I was an outsider at school, and I hung around with all the other outsiders no one wanted to make friends with. Two of my best 14

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friends were budding graphic artists, wonderful artists really. I used to spend time with them and we were always drawing things, painting things, making things. The rest of the time I spent dancing. Actually, in retrospect, they were by far the most interesting students there, but at the time I didn’t find being excluded from the popular group interesting at all. My sisters, on the other hand, were always the most popular girls you can imagine. Sally and Annie were always with friends, and these issues never came up for either of them. Even though those awkward early years were difficult for me in many ways, I have to say that many good things came out of them. When I think back on it, even though I wasn’t keen on my remedial classes, had I not been in them, perhaps I would never have been introduced to dance or to speech and eventually to theater. And if I hadn’t been too shy to go up and make friends with people, I probably would not have wanted to become an actress, which is a classic way to hide from who you are, behaving like your character. The story of how I became an actress rather than a dancer is also rooted in disappointment and difficult times full of changes and reverses I couldn’t have foreseen. From the time I was a young child I actually had my heart set on being a dancer, specifically a ballerina. By the time I was a young teenager that’s all I wanted in the world. I was always taking dance classes, and I had heard about auditions for the Royal Ballet School. I had to struggle to convince my parents to let me audition at all; they didn’t like the idea of me putting everything into something as ephemeral as a hoped-for career in dance. They would have preferred that I continue with my more wellrounded schooling instead, but eventually they relented. As it happened, the Royal Ballet School turned me down. I was told it was because my body wasn’t the right type for classical ballet. I was devastated at first, but soon afterward, I found another school for youngsters who wanted to be professional performers, called the Arts Educational Trust, now the Arts Educational School. It seemed this was 15

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where the rejects from the Royal Ballet went, and were reprocessed into being rather more well-rounded performers than strictly classical ballerinas. I still primarily focused on ballet—it was my major course of study—but I was also required to take classes in modern dance, tap, character dance, ballroom dance, acting, and singing—every form of the performing arts. However, I still believed I was on my way, but by a dif- Ballet was my first love, and being asked to dance with the Kirov Ballet at Covent Garden was a ferent path, to fulfilling my dream come true. Posing before my performance dream of being a ballerina. I as a snowflake in Prokofiev’s Cinderella, I was still blissfully unaware that my dreams of becoming a thought I’d just keep going, great ballerina were not to be. work hard, and overcome whatever it was the Royal Ballet thought I couldn’t do. Then came the day in my jazz class when we were doing a type of particularly wild dancing—very much not my style. We had to do a move called a knee roll on the floor. One knee roll and I was out—both knees were injured. For weeks I nursed these injured knees, spending a lot of time before school with the hospital’s physiotherapist. When I returned to my ballet classes, I began to collect other injuries: a pulled groin muscle, sore and twisted ankles. Soon I was positively plagued with injuries. Slowly the truth began to dawn on me: my body was indeed not built for ballet and the stresses of that kind of dance, and when I was turned down by the Royal Ballet I really hadn’t accepted that fact. Eventually, my head mistress at the Arts Educational Trust, a very 16

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famous ballerina in her time named Beryl Gray, took me aside for a little chat. “Joyce,” she said (for that was my name before I changed it), “you have a beautiful quality when you dance, but you just are not built right for classical dance.” I was devastated once again, but fortunately in the next breath she added that I did have an equally good stage presence. “I think you should stop trying to do what your body can’t do and embrace another art form that you can do, like acting.” Now, at last, I had to truly let go of my dream of dancing. It was a very rocky time for me. I felt propelled into what seemed a rather frightening void—a place where I suddenly felt I didn’t know who I was or where I might be going. Eventually, Miss Gray told me about Franco Zefferelli’s Roman Holiday, a film I could audition for. Even though the film didn’t work out, indeed, was never made, I was screen tested for the first time. I had gained a vision of another kind of life that might be possible for me, and I was able to have a particularly soft landing from the first really cataclysmic change of my life. It wasn’t so difficult to give up ballet when I had something wonderful like acting to go to, and that was truly a gift. I can say from long experience that most changes don’t have such happy endings. I soon saw, too, that the world was not as black and white as I had thought it would be. While ballet couldn’t be my whole life, it could be a part of my life. A few years later, in my first movie, I played a ballet teacher, and in other movies I have invariably been able to use my knowledge of dance in various ways, so as it turns out I didn’t have to leave behind every shred of my love of dance. I also found that the training was invaluable for self-discipline, as well as technique and deportment. All these difficulties have taught me something. As a result of feeling left out and separate, and later of losing my passionate dream of dancing, I began to see that although we don’t always have a choice in what happens to us, we really do have a choice in how we react to what’s happened. My reaction to being excluded was that I retreated 17

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into working hard at what I did. At the Arts Educational School, my parents couldn’t afford the education I was getting. I was on a partial grant, and I was so incredibly grateful to be allowed to study what I loved rather than cope with regular school that I did not want to waste one second of my life and wanted to prove it to be the right choice. It’s a feeling that’s carried over to my life today. How grateful I am to live in the moment! Before I left school, the strongest lesson I learned in choosing how I would react in the face of terrible bullying and rejection came on my first professional dancing and acting job. When I was about fifteen and still dancing, I auditioned for a part in a special Christmas production. I was turned down at first, but then someone dropped out, and I auditioned again and this time was accepted for the chorus. All the other chorus girls, about ten of them, were in their midtwenties, and I was so excited and grateful for this opportunity. Right off the bat, I was teased by the other girls because I took it all very seriously. The more experienced girls—almost everyone except me—didn’t practice before a show. They’d just put on their costumes and go. But I was still in a training mode, and I would do a full ballet warm-up as we had done at school. There was one other young girl who, like me, took dancing seriously, and who also considered this show to be but a step along the path to a larger career. She and I became friends, which was a comfort. While we were rehearsing, we all tried out to be the understudy to the leading lady, and to my great surprise, they picked me. So I earned an extra pound a week, which is about a dollar fifty, more than anybody else, because I had to learn all her lines and attend extra rehearsals so that I’d know her part. I think I was only earning twelve or fifteen pounds a week anyway, so this was a lot of money. Studying for the lead part was a fantastic education for me, and a very frightening one. I kept having that actor’s nightmare that this woman had gotten sick, and I suddenly had to go on for her. In my 18

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dream, I would be in the costume on the stage and have no idea who I was supposed to be, where I was, or what I was supposed to say. She did get sick one day, right at the beginning, when we hadn’t rehearsed yet. When I found out she was ill, I raced to the restaurant next door to the theater, and sat, desperately learning the lines as quickly as I could. I looked up from my script to see a young woman next to me, avidly studying the same script. I asked her who she was, and she told me she was the star’s older sister and a professional actress herself. Her father, who ran the theater company, had asked her to step in during the early days for her sister. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. “Whew,” I thought. “Thank God for that!” I never did have to go on for her, but still, I was further ostracized from the rest of the group— because of jealousy, I suppose. To top it off, the leading man had a crush on me, and I had a huge crush on him. I was really just a girl, and he was quite a bit older than I. Our mutual crush amounted to nothing more than a really beautiful, very nice relationship. We’d go for walks and talk. I believe we had tea once or twice, and he kissed me once. It was quite innocent, and he was very respectful of me, but the other girls in the chorus were amazingly jealous, and extremely cruel. During the show we had about ten or fifteen very quick costume changes. For each, we’d have to run up the stairs the moment we left the stage, take off one load of clothing, throw on another load of clothing, run downstairs, and be backstage just in time to go on again. It was very quick, and very stressful. During one particular show, I came running up to change clothes, and the rest of the chorus were all there, waiting for me. They stripped the clothes off me and threw talcum powder all over me so I couldn’t go on for the next scene. Then they ran off, leaving me there naked, calling to the boys from the chorus to come up and look at me. I was the only girl from the chorus who didn’t sit topless while doing my makeup. They all did. They’d wear a G-string and nothing 19

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else, while I was still wearing proper school underwear and covering myself up. I had never been naked in front of them, and so their cruel trick left me mortified and devastated. I had taken up my mother’s tradition of keeping a visitor’s book, in which people could write their names and a memory or a message about the show. At the end of the show, even though the girls from the chorus had bullied me unmercifully, I offered my visitor’s book to them to write in. True to form, these mean girls wrote terrible things in it, telling me I’d never amount to anything. That was my first professional acting experience. As a result of experiences like this one, perhaps especially because of experiences like this, I began to understand that just because one did not like the options at hand, it did not mean one had no choice in what would happen next, or in how one would fare in life. I remember my father reassuring me, saying, “First, remember that you can only ever do your own best. Second, you can’t control whether or not people like you, or even how they treat you.” With the support of my parents, I continued pursuing my own special interests and tried not to fret about my social situation. True, there are consequences to every choice we make, and the consequence of that one was that my social position didn’t change. But that wasn’t as important to me as understanding that there always was a choice to be made in how I reacted, and that I could choose to carry on or to quit! And so my school years were a time when I began to understand who I was, especially because it was so clear that I was different from many of my classmates. I came to accept the fact that I was not like everyone else, and rather than trying to bend myself to fit in, I decided to stand up and be myself and, as my father had encouraged me, to do my best at the things I enjoyed. I did not end up spending a lot of time wondering why everyone didn’t like me. I just thought, “Well, none of my friends are in this class, but I have this amazing opportunity, and this is not about making friends,” or, “I love ballet, 20

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so I might as well do my best with it.” As a result, I became a bit of an overachiever, which was good for my ballet, and later for acting, but not particularly good for my social position in life. As I look back, it seems that bullying and rejection were actually gifts that were given to me that helped me to see who I was. I could have become like a little dormouse, hiding down a hole, feeling unpopular, and that I was no good, too weak, unable and uninvited to join in. Instead, with the support of my family, and a strong sense of who I was, I created my own world. Eventually, by attraction rather than promotion, other children like me, other artists who took things seriously, became my friends. The truth is, accepting who I was, complete with all the things that made me different, gave me a first glimpse of the value of being honest with myself. I know now it was the key to making positive choices and to dealing with whatever life would have in store for me. As I grew into adulthood, however, more than once I seem to have neglected to take that good look at myself when I most needed to. I suppose you could call that denial—when we see only what we want to believe rather than believing what we honestly see. While the results of my own denial were often painful, luckily, they also eventually brought me to greater understanding of myself and of others.

Ah, Denial The first time my own denial kept me from seeing the truth was when I married Michael Attenborough, the son of the famous British actor and director Lord Richard Attenborough. It was my first marriage, and I knew before I did it that I never should have gotten married at all. By the time I understood that truth, wedding gifts were arriving and the wedding gown had been ordered. I was just too embarrassed to cancel and I didn’t have the guts to say I was not ready to get married, because I’d fought so hard to say I was ready to get married! I was twenty, and thought I knew everything, but I certainly wasn’t 21

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looking clearly at this situation. I knew I was very fond indeed of Michael. I knew there was nobody else—but then I’d never had a chance to meet anybody else. I met Michael on the set in 1968 when I was barely seventeen and a dancer in the chorus in my first film, Oh, What a Lovely War, which his father, Richard Attenborough, was directing. In fact, it was Lord Attenborough’s first film as well, and I was in the first scene he ever directed, with the great actress Maggie Smith. I’ll never forget that Maggie Smith took me aside during the filming and told me she thought I should become an actress. It was a good thing, because I really was a terrible chorus girl—I always stuck out rather than blending in as I was supposed to do. Luckily, though, this ended up working to my advantage. Lord Attenborough liked me, and at one point he directed the camera in a medium close-up to linger on me just for a millisecond. From that millisecond, a top film agent in England contacted me to represent me as an actress, and I guess you could say my film career really started there. Michael, who was about a year older than me, and a student at Westminster School, had come to watch his father work. The day I met Michael, I was dressed as a tart for my role, with a lot of makeup. He came right up to me, with his beautiful, sparkly blue eyes and wavy blond hair, and he asked me if I liked the theater. I didn’t know who he was, but I thought he was very cute, so I said of course I do, but I don’t have any money, so I seldom go. “Would you like to go to the theater with me?” he asked. “Of course, why not?” I said. He opened up his wallet and there was a whole load of tickets very neatly organized, two each for at least six different shows. He asked to see my diary so he could note the dates. I was never good at keeping a diary, but I gave my nearly empty book to him, and he filled in dates for the next five weeks. I was living at home, going to school and doing professional work 22

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Michael Attenborough was a wonderful young man, but we were both too young for the marriage we hoped we’d have.

on the side. I called home right away, and excitedly told my sisters about this boy. Sally immediately said, “I know him! I saw him last night at a concert with my friends.” She said he’d been with a girl who was crying a lot, and she surmised that he must have just broken up with her and that those theater tickets were the tickets he had been going to use with her. I felt horrible, but what could I do? The damage was done. It turned out that we had a lot of friends in common, and that Michael had actually been at a party at our house the year before, although I hadn’t remembered seeing him there. Michael and I were inseparable for about three years. He was a wonderful young man, very organized, passionate about everything he did. He told me he knew he wanted to marry me from the day we met. I was so flattered by his attention, and I did enjoy his company, so it was easy to be swept up in the excitement. We thought the obvious thing to do was to get married—you go to university or you get your 23

After appearing as Solitaire in the James Bond movie Live and Let Die, I was in for some big changes, including my first trip to the U.S.

first job, you meet your first love, and you get married, right? Soon, though I was only seventeen, I was sporting an unofficial engagement ring, a tiny, yellow citrine he bought for me. I was still at school and not allowed to wear jewelry there, but because we were “engaged,” they allowed my tiny ring. Although my mother thought highly of him, she begged me not to marry Michael. She had married too young herself, with bad results— before she married my father she’d been married at twenty-two to her first boyfriend. But of course everyone liked Michael, and his family liked me, so we took what really should have been nothing more than a wonderful first romance, and we tried to make it a marriage. The truth was that I didn’t know anything about marriage, or love, or passion. I didn’t even know who I was yet—who does at that age? It was very much a case of his taste becoming my taste, and his choices 24

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becoming my choices. I was working hard at being what I felt he expected me to be. Right after we were married, Michael went off to work as a director in the theater far away from where I was, so I didn’t see him as often as I’d liked to, and I was doing a miniseries for British television. Amazingly enough, the casting directors for a new James Bond film, Live and Let Die, saw me on the first broadcast of the series and hired me outright for the part of Solitaire. In a flash I was off filming this Bond movie in New Orleans, Jamaica, and England. It was one of the biggest films in England at the time, and very exciting. My family was equally thrilled—and relieved, I suspect. They’d always been nervous about a career as a dancer or an actress for me. They really wanted me to be a dance teacher, which they felt would be much more stable. I think the only real battle I’ve ever had with my parents was over whether or not I’d be a dance teacher. I was adamant that I would not. Now the Bond film represented a kind of turning point for me, and a step into the larger world of films. It all might have gone to my head, but every Sunday that I was in England, Michael and I had lunch with his family. His father felt he was there to bring my feet firmly back to earth. He would take me aside and say, “Remember, darling, the day you believe in your own publicity, you’re dead.” Through all of this, Michael and I were separate a lot and he developed other relationships—including one with an actress to whom he’s married today. He did break up with me, but I have to say that as much as I loved him as a human being, we just never should have been married. I’ve always found that absence absolutely does not make the heart grow fonder. You are each off having different experiences, living different lives, and soon it means you are not connected at all to each other anymore. Neither of us was ready for the sharing and sacrifice that love and marriage demand. To this day, he’s one of my closest friends. I see him often when I’m in England. He still behaves with me exactly 25

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the way he did when I was seventeen. He still calls me by his nickname for me, Poppy, and tells his kids about how he used to be married to me. I tease him about things he used to do that bugged me, and his wife laughs hysterically because those very things are bugging her today! So Michael left me, and at the time, even though I knew it was for the best, it was very confusing and frightening. The abandonment issue, the feeling of being left out that had been such a fear for me during my childhood, became a painful reality. We had married when I was twenty, and by the time I was twenty-one, our marriage was over. I was certainly shaken. However, I had a lot to distract me. When Live and Let Die came out, which was just before Michael and I separated, I was suddenly a Bond Girl and a star in England to some degree. Lots of doors opened to me, but not necessarily the ones I wanted to open. They all led to the same kind of movie, which involved a very glamorous woman running three paces behind a man with a gun—not what I wanted to do. I wanted to do the classics, Ibsen and Shakespeare. I did, however, do one movie straight after Live and Let Die. The day after I finished the Bond movie I worked on an American television movie that was made in Britain, called Frankenstein: The True Story, with Michael Sarazan. Because of that film I was eventually invited to come to America. Other than that film, I walked away from movies to do theater again, which made some people in the English media dub me a failure because I didn’t go on to make one movie after another. But by the early 1980s, most of my work was indeed in America, in films and television. (You’ll learn more in Chapter 2 on how I came here and what kind of changes that involved.) I needed a business manager here, and several friends recommended David Flynn. He was tall and boyishly handsome. We hit it off immediately, and embarked on an intense, romantic, sometimes coast-to-coast courtship. I think David represented security for me, and he seemed to love and respect me. As my business manager, he was able to make 26

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things happen for me, and to organize things well. He was fun, but mostly what attracted me was the sense of security I felt from him. I had found it to be very scary being the new girl in Hollywood. Everyone tries to date you, and everyone wants something—you know, the casting couch. In 1981, we were married in a fabulous fairy-tale ceremony at the Long Island estate of our friends John and Laurie Barry. In 1982, our daughter Katie was born, and Sean followed in 1985. We lived at first in Beverly Hills in a home I’d already bought, and David set to work remodeling it. It was something we both loved—I designed the interiors and he did the architecture. When it was finished it was breathtaking. Cheryl Tiegs came ’round one day and absolutely fell in love with it. We hadn’t thought about selling, but she loved it so much, the whole thing—the house and all the furnishings—that finally we sold it to her. We went on to build a more child-friendly house in Montecito after Sean, who was a toddler then, fell down the very elegant spiral staircase of our Beverly Hills house. I happily lived the life of a working mother, making a film here and a film there, and quite a few miniseries for television. I even wrote a book called Jane Seymour’s Guide to Romantic Living. In it, I painted a picture of the life I believed I was living. As it turned out, I apparently did not have that life at all. I see now that I didn’t allow myself to know anything about the reality of the life I was actually living. I didn’t know I had problems in my marriage. I didn’t know I had serious financial problems. I was blissfully unaware of it all. That is, until one day in 1989 when my instincts at last gave me a strange nudge. Instinctively, I had called a friend in England and I said I knew everything. “How much do you know?” he responded, and my heart sank. My mother was with me at the time in the kitchen, and she said, “What are you doing? Why are you calling him, and why are you asking that question?” My mother has since told me she didn’t know any more than I did about what had been happening in my marriage. At that moment I honestly couldn’t answer her question. To this day I do 27

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Our family as it was, about a year and a half before our breakup. David, Katie, Sean, and I were at St. Catherine’s celebrating the Fourth of July.

not know why I said that—I believe I was acting on a kind of random sixth sense, one that was so inexplicable I still have to wonder why it occurred to me to say those words, and why I acted on the impulse. I had certainly put my friend on the spot. Because his immediate response was to ask me how much I knew, I was shocked. Obviously there was indeed something I should know. The more I learned, the more distressed I was with myself for not having had the insight to realize things were seriously wrong. At the same time, many things became clear. I realized there were dozens of pieces of my own life that I’d chosen to look at through rose-colored glasses—and now I knew these were things I could no longer deny were happening. I understand now that when you live in a world of denial you don’t question things. I never thought my husband would have affairs—although he did seem 28

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to be happy to spend large amounts of time away from me. But I was simply overtrusting. It never occurred to me that one would be betrayed by one’s husband. That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? After all, most dramas and storybooks are about that very thing. Suffice it to say that what I discovered was that there was another world and another life that I had not been privy to. And ultimately there were a lot of issues that were very frightening and true, which could not be resolved. Not long after I’d made that phone call to England and the whole ugly story had begun unfolding, I spoke with my lawyer. With that conversation I realized that he especially, as well as the other people who had been representing me financially and looking after my business dealings, had tried to alert me a while previously to the fact that my finances might need looking at. But I really had chosen not to see it. At the same time the real estate market in Los Angeles fell apart, and David and I had quite a few investments there, which were now nearly worthless. All at once I found out I was in terrible financial straits, very nearly bankrupt. As I was still in shock, not knowing what to do, my agent and my lawyer called me and said, “Jane, you have to work— yesterday.!We ’ve already gone ahead and called all the television networks and told them that although you’ve always said you weren’t interested in a weekly series, you’d be interested now.” It’s true: I’d never considered doing a regular series; I’d been happy with an intermittent work schedule that allowed me plenty of family time with Katie and Sean, who were then only seven and four. Of course now that I knew I had huge financial problems, and would probably be without a home, become my children’s sole provider, and be required to pay huge amounts of alimony (which I later was), I very much needed to work and to be in Los Angeles. While my agent and lawyer worked out the details of finding a series for me to do, I was at home, quietly falling apart. I remember 29

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being very frightened. I felt like the solid earth beneath my feet, the planet that I had felt so firmly planted in, had disappeared. I was emotionally free-falling to I-didn’t-know-where, tumbling down a deep black hole, spinning out of control. It was the most terrifying feeling, and I felt there was absolutely nothing I could hold on to. It was a physical anguish as well, and I was very depressed, weeping and weeping, hiding under the covers of my bed to delay going out to face the world. I was embarrassed and upset that I’d ever written a book about how much in love I’d been. It was especially upsetting to me that the book would linger on even though it wasn’t now the reality of my life. Quite the contrary. What was worse was that I slowly began to realize that what I had described in the book may never have been the reality of my life, only my view of it. All the while I was so upset, I also felt an enormous responsibility to provide some semblance of normalcy for the children. I really did not have the luxury of time for a nervous breakdown. I had to get up in the morning and get the children to preschool and school, and I had to go to work. And so I tried really hard not to show my anguish to them. And I tried really hard not to be in a panic about everything. But it was not easy. Suddenly I was thrust into a world in which I was completely inadequate—lawsuits and legal issues went right over my head, and it made me dizzy to think about them. I found myself desperately swimming just to stay afloat. Emotionally I felt that I was obviously unattractive, unwanted, unlovable, and Less Than—that I must be truly stupid for this to have happened. My sense that I knew and trusted people and that I understood relationships was absolutely blasted. And there was an enormous sense of failure. I felt I’d failed in my relationship, but more heartbreakingly, I felt I’d failed my children because I’d promised to love, honor, and respect their father, and together we were going to be their parents forever and ever, and have a happy life with them. Now I couldn’t give them that. I couldn’t give them what I had been given and had taken for granted. 30

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To top it off my father had died from cancer just before this happened. Thank goodness he never knew about the divorce. David’s father, who lived with us in Montecito, had died of cancer as well, shortly before the divorce. And I was turning forty. What a horrendous year.

Who Am I? Needless to say, the enormity of change that engulfed me in that year brought me straight down to bedrock, to examining the very roots of my emotional foundations. It brought me back to thinking about who I really was in terms of the planet and the purpose of life, rather than who I was in terms of what I did not have anymore. It was crystal clear to me that now was the time for me to take a good look at who I had become, and to decide what I really wanted to be and what I wanted to do with my life. I admit I was at a loss as to how to accomplish that for quite some time. Had I then known John James, the founder of the Grief Recovery Institute, which is based here in Los Angeles but works all over the country, I believe I would have run directly to his office for help. Unfortunately, I didn’t meet John until years later, through my husband James Keach, who had been friends with him forever. But during those dark days after my divorce from David, I had indeed suffered a tremendous loss, and I knew that the loss of trust and love could be as huge as a loss experienced through death. I had to work through the changes this calamity had brought to me on my own. Eventually I lifted my soul from this enormous tumult in my life by learning to paint, which, I’ve found, always leads me to clarity about myself. But along the way, I experienced several of the healing steps John talks about as he tells his story: My first child, a son born in 1977, lived for only three days. My wife and I were devastated by our son’s death, and, as so often happens

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Jane Se ymour after the death of a child, we were divorced within months. By the middle of the next year, I found myself standing on the beach in Santa Monica with a gun in my hand. I couldn’t imagine being in that much emotional pain for the next thirty or forty years. Fortunately, as I stood there, I began to think. I, like most people, had experienced many losses in my life. Why then, I asked myself, did we heal relatively quickly from some losses and yet others felt so unendurable, and pained us for so long? I realized it was the losses that involved unfinished business that hurt the most. I’d been successful in most things I’d done in my life, and I couldn’t leave this alone without knowing the answers to my questions. So I set out to find out how to heal my heart. Honesty helped me all along the way—brutally honest selfexamination. First I tried to understand and complete my unfinished business—which was my emotional relationship with my son. The recovery steps I used, and use today in my Grief Recovery workshops, begin with acknowledging that you have suffered a loss. We tend to minimize grief in our culture, saying things like, “It could have been worse.” But if your child has died, if you’ve ended a marriage, or you’ve lost your job, it’s a 100 percent loss for you, and you need to acknowledge that. Next, I asked myself the old question “What ruins the picnic, the rain or your attitude about the rain?” It’s both, of course, but the only thing I can do something about is my attitude, my perception, my reaction to the situation. So as part of my rigorous, honest review of my brief relationship with my son, I had to discover what I wanted to do differently about my reaction to his death. Once I had done that, it dawned on me I was just as emotionally incomplete in all my other relationships and those had continued to affect my life negatively. For example, my younger brother died when he was twenty. I was heartbroken, although to be strong I hid it and kept busy. But that unfinished business subtly, negatively affected my ability to have friendships with younger adult men. I never would

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Remarkable Changes have discovered that if my son’s death hadn’t forced me to take a serious look at every other loss I’d had. I needed to identify anything that was unfinished with my brother as well. I asked myself, if I could have that last conversation with him over again, what would I say? Finally, and I came to see that this was the most important part of all, everything I figured out had to be verbalized by me and heard by another person—any human being. They didn’t need to respond. They were called upon only to listen and thereby to create the unconscious loop of a full communication. I tried a lot of things before I knew that—I tried talking to a photograph, talking to an empty room, shouting from a cliff—no relief. One time I went to the cemetery and talked to a gravestone. Still no relief. But as soon as another person was in the loop, it felt like a five-hundred-pound weight was lifted off my neck. Last, when I had done all this, I had to say good-bye. Not to the relationship I was completing, which was going to live in my heart forever. I had to say good-bye to the unfinished business—because I had completed it. And I had found peace.

John James has helped many people I know personally, as well as millions of others, through his Grief Recovery Institute, which offers educational presentations around the country and personal workshops for those who are grieving. His own remarkable change has touched more people than he could have imagined at the beginning. Now, sharing that gives him joy every day. That’s because so many of the things John says make sense. And so many of them were things I naturally did as I struggled to heal my own heart. Taking a hard look at myself straight off was the first step; acknowledging that this was indeed a loss of gigantic proportions came right along with it. Knowing that my attitude toward a difficult situation made all the difference helped me through particularly rough days while I was going through the divorce. Understanding 33

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my own unfinished business with my marriage and talking to someone about it in order to reach some completion also came naturally. My girlfriends listened and listened to all I had to say. Suddenly I understood the value of the quilting circles of the Dr. Quinn era. My turning point came about slowly, as I began to understand all these things, and as I was doing things for and with the children—usually art projects. We would sit and finger-paint for hours, which I found very calming and fun to do with kids. At a charity event, one of those silent auctions, I met Tom Mielko, an artist who I commissioned to do a drawing of my children. I thought, “Well, I’m losing all my money anyway, I might as well donate a little something to a good cause.” Tom came to our house, to take photographs as studies for the drawings. He was also a great watercolorist. He saw my finger paintings in the nursery and said, “These are terrific—do you paint?” I told him I had not painted for a long time, since my school days—and before I knew it he was offering to teach me watercolor. I could have said no. In fact, the practical response would have been to tell him I had too much on my plate, that I didn’t have time to take on something new. But an inner voice or some instinct said, “Why not do it!” Little did I know that after my first day I wouldn’t be able to stop painting. Morning, noon, and night I painted. When I lay sleepless in the middle of the night, I got up and painted. I painted when I was with the children, when I was alone, and when I was in front of the television. I couldn’t stop—I loved it. Painting took me over and lifted me directly out of all of my negative feelings and thoughts into a world of beauty and serenity. Those moments I was painting were like a refuge; all I was concerned about was the color on the brush and the wash of the paint and the lines and images that emerged. I loved the happy accidents that occurred when you paint wet on wet in watercolor and allow the paint to create its own dynamic. It’s almost like creating your own personal Rorschach test. 34

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In the midst of all this turmoil, I was amazed by one of the first paintings I did because it was so serene, and because I had not consciously planned it to be so. I painted an image of Butterfly Beach in Santa Barbara, near where we lived—the golden light and the ocean and the sand and the rocks. Perfect serenity. Looking at the finished painting, I saw that I had created the image of the serene life I unconsciously wanted, and I was truly surprised. I had imagined my paintings would be full of pain, but they were not. As I continued to paint, I could see that the more painful my life, the more beautiful were my images. Rather than the ugly images I’d thought I might be painting during this ugly time, I was painting my healing. After all the emotional struggle, and after using many of the ideas that, coincidentally, John James spoke of, I, too, had found a peace, a meditative state, through art. And through that peace, I was able to let this calamitous change, events I would never have imagined or chosen or even thought I could survive, transform and uplift me to a more creative place and a new creative pursuit.

Meeting James Not long after my divorce, I decided I would produce as well as act in my own television movie. But I was inexperienced in the producing end of the business and knew I needed a coproducer to show me the ropes. My agent suggested I talk with James Keach, a wellknown actor and director whom I had heard of but had never met. James told me later that my agent, Chris Barrett, had called him in Arizona, where he’d been working on a film, and asked if he knew my work. I told him I knew who she was from TV Guide, the Bond film, Somewhere in Time, and numerous ads I’d seen about her television movies, but, in fact, I did not really know her as an actress. I was much more familiar with the feature-film world in which I had spent

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James and I embarked on a new life together after we fell in love during the filming of Sunstroke, our first movie together.

most of my career as an actor, writer, producer, and director, and I hadn’t been doing much television until recently. So, I was embarrassed to say I was not familiar with Jane’s recent work. He told me he’d send some of Jane’s films. The next day some twenty cassettes arrived, featuring Jane’s work. I watched as much as I could before our meeting, and what I discovered was what the world had known for a long time. She was a remarkable actress, beautiful, human, accessible, and very emotional. She was also a chameleon, able to play many different colors of feeling. I went to meet her for lunch, and I thought we were just going to talk about the script, which needed work. We were to meet at Le Dôme restaurant on Sunset. It was filled with industry types, whose

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Remarkable Changes heads turned when she walked in, a little late for our meeting. She was beautiful, but I thought she looked upset. After some initial small talk, I looked at her and said, “What’s wrong? You’re upset about something. What’s bugging you?” “How do you know that?” “I can see the pain in your eyes. What’s wrong? Do you want to talk about it?” Well, instead of talking about the script, we started talking about Jane, and the devastation and loss in her personal life. And we ’ve been talking ever since. Little did I know that what I thought was going to be a script meeting would develop into a marriage and the birth of two beautiful boys, and the opportunity to parent Jane ’s other remarkable children. Over the past ten years, they have enriched my life so much. This single meeting changed my life.

That first meeting with James was just as hugely unsettling and surprising to me as it was to him. I was very wary of ever being involved with anyone again. And certainly the dating thing was not me—I was a mom, and I just couldn’t get into the whole idea of being a single person, or behaving like one. The truth is that the last thing I was thinking of when I met James was romance. When he said he could see the pain in my eyes, I was totally taken aback. He was a complete stranger! Here I had taken great pains to look as together as I could. I hadn’t been crying, didn’t think I looked sad; in fact, I thought I was looking quite perky. Obviously James could see everything, right through to the fact that deep down I was about as sad as I could be, quite beaten up emotionally. For some reason, probably because he was so honest with me, I decided to tell him, a complete stranger, the whole truth about myself and about what I had been through. That’s how the relationship started—with a major bout of truth telling. After that

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conversation, I realized that he was someone I was going to love working with, because he was very real and actually cared about people rather than just about projects. But he was also someone I could really communicate with, on a deeper emotional and spiritual level than I had with anyone before. I also recognized that being a director, he would take me to new places as an actress. We were great friends on that project, and when it was over, neither of us wanted to say good-bye, but we both had other commitments. Very soon I had to go to Austria to make the film Heidi in the Alps. James had to stay behind and edit the movie we’d worked on together, so we started writing to each other. Every day, two or three times a day sometimes, we’d write faxes to one another. I used to tell him his eyes were so huge, I said he looked like a fish. In an acting exercise he ’d done at the beginning of the shoot, he’d asked the actors what kind of an animal their characters would be. We decided my character would have been a cat. So he was the fish, and I was the cat. I signed my letters with a picture of a cat, or I wrote “Cat”; he signed “Catfish.” Hence the name of the film production company we eventually formed. And hence our courtship by fax. When James asked me to marry him several months later on the set of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, he had brought with him several diamond settings and asked me to choose the one I loved best. When I did, he was pleased, for the one I chose was also the one he loved best—one with steps on either side going up to the beautiful diamond in the center. That was auspicious! The ring seemed to embody the idea that we ’d change and grow, step-by-step, toward the relationship we wanted to have. First, though, James realized that he had some unfinished business to take care of, and it was his turn to take an honest look at himself. He had the wisdom to visit John James and his business partner, Russell Freedman, and participate in one of their Grief Recovery workshops.

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I thought it might have produced a turning point for him, but James explained it a different way. Was it a turning point in my life? I’d say it was more of a cleansing that allowed me to move on. What I learned from John and his colleague, Russell, was that grieving and dealing with loss—whether it’s a death, a failed business, or the end of a relationship—requires a process of completion. Without processing the loss, it’s close to impossible to move on and start a new chapter in life. I knew that in my past relationships, and in certain relationships that I still had, there were things holding me back or causing me pain. My hope was that before I entered a new marriage with Jane and the kids, I would be able to exorcise some of my demons from the past, say good-bye to them, and move on. I had, sadly, failed, for a variety of reasons, in my previous marriages and in many relationships. What I knew was that sooner or later, unless one works on it, the same patterns emerge and the same mistakes are made. I am talking about my patterns, my mistakes, and shortcomings.

James’s work with Grief Recovery helped us to continue to be quite honest with each other, and to really work in concert in the way we approached our married life, to be ready for the events great and small that test us all. Most of us would say it’s the huge changes of life that are the most significant, but when you think about it, perhaps it is the smaller changes, the little things that come up every day, that we should be thinking of as well. Those changes—the new colleague at work whom you find so difficult, the fact that your partner has overdrawn the bank account yet again, the impossible traffic when you’re late already—these are the mundane changes and challenges that can drive us mad, and they are often the very things that spoil marriages.

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How do you deal with those everyday things that can so easily throw you off track? James has one particularly great technique: I think I listen more than I used to. Instead of trying to tell somebody where it’s at, I listen to hear where it’s at. Listening is really important— whether to a spouse, a child, your body, your heart, your higher power. The truth is there—if we listen. What I discover more all the time is that those little voices that are saying things like, “Hey, man, don’t eat that cookie. Sooner or later you keep eatin’ that cookie you’ll have a heart attack.” If we listen and really hear, we’d just stop, or we’d do the right thing, and that would be the end of it. But we pretend we don’t hear the truth—or we don’t want to hear the truth. Where did I learn to listen? As a film director and actor—I learned it through my craft. One of my favorite things as a director is to work with an actor who listens. The great performers know that listening is what allows you to react appropriately to what’s happening. If you don’t listen when you’re acting, you’re just doing this performance that has nothing to do with what the other person is saying or doing. And you know, it’s the same in real life.

James and I call this living in the moment—being fully present, receptive, listening and hearing, and not living in the regrets of yesterday, or the fear of tomorrow.

Taking That Hard Look at Someone Else I try quite hard to follow James’s lead in listening more. It’s easy to see the impact really listening to someone can have, but I admit it’s not always easy to do. I think that listening carefully to others is in the same category as taking an honest look at them. As I’ve watched my friends go through momentous changes, I’ve seen that these two things can be as important a signpost in the change process as looking at one’s own self. Let me tell you about my friend, Sara. Taller than I, willowy, 40

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brunette, and bubbling over with energy, she is wonderfully willing to see herself honestly. She’s able to see her children honestly too, as well as their friends, who are often around the house. I think that quality of Sara’s may have actually saved the life of one young woman, a friend of her son’s. Sara’s willingness to listen and hear another person led eventually to her son’s friend’s addictions being healed. Sara and I met when each of us was pregnant with her first child— me with Katie and she with her son. I had been living in a little house on the beach with David. We’d just come from New York, and I knew no one. I immediately got into a Jane Fonda exercise program in the San Fernando Valley. I expressly did not go to Beverly Hills—I went to the Valley. I thought I’d find more regular girls there, not the movie-star types. I just wanted to be a regular person who was pregnant and who was looking for some exercise. I didn’t want anyone to know or care who I was or what movie I had done. I was still the ex–ballet dancer, however, and I exercised seriously. Sara was simply having fun with it, which is why I met her—I was doing the exercises properly, and I could see she was having trouble. So I approached her after class and said, “I used to be a dancer; would you like me to show you how to do some of these exercises to really benefit your muscles?” She was perfectly gracious to me and friendly as she accepted my offer, but she also pointed out that we must have burned lots of calories during class and we had to replace them—for our babies’ sakes of course—with frozen yogurt. I was immediately aware that, as usual, I had been taking the class too seriously and she was seeing an opportunity to bond, have fun, and refuel. That was the start of a lovely friendship that is still going strong. I remember that Sara had difficulties with this young woman, whose name was Erin, from the beginning—she was always challenging, but she was also beautiful and lovable. So lovable, in fact, that she quickly became like a member of Sara’s family. Erin’s own family had distanced themselves from her because of her drug problems. 41

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I had noticed Erin’s behavior when she was at Sara’s house, and had suspected she was involved with drugs. I took a chance and shared my suspicions with Sara, which, as it turned out, only supported her own. It was a risk, but I believe that real friends are willing to take the chance of losing a friendship by sharing honestly. Over the years, I have called her on attitudes, choices, and behavior. In turn, Sara will also tell me, in the nicest possible way, that I might be able to do something better. Instead of damaging our friendship, it’s made our bond tighter than ever. We know that nothing could rock our boat. Together we find ourselves helping not only each other, but friends of ours, too, so there’s quite a group of us. We don’t have sewing needles, but we are the Dr. Quinn quilting ladies all over again! Sara chose to travel a long road with Erin, who had no one else to walk it with her. Erin was in rehab off and on for four years. But she is sober now, and well. I shudder to think what might have happened to her had Sara not been willing to see her clearly, acknowledge her problems, speak honestly, and act courageously. One of the places Sara found support was at meetings that provide help for families of people struggling with addictions. There she met Deborah, a woman whose story is incredibly inspiring. Deborah always says that she and I share a great friend in Sara. Deborah is a lovely woman—dark-haired, petite, and always beautifully dressed and well put together. Seeing the active, vital woman Deborah is today, most people wouldn’t guess the hard road she walked to get here. I’ve been a diabetic for forty-two years. Having been diagnosed when I was four years old, I know no other way to live. I do everything I’m supposed to do in caring for my diabetes—I take my medication, I never miss a doctor’s appointment. As a kid I followed my diabetic diet and still went trick-or-treating. I had a great time, then handed

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Remarkable Changes the whole bag of candy over to my siblings. It was always my problem, not other people’s problem—which was fine with me. I can honestly say that diabetes is not a problem for me, but the complications are. All diabetes complications have something to do with blood vessels. In my case, there were extra blood vessels growing on the back of my left eye. They would hemorrhage and pull on the retina, threatening my vision. Treatment was different and not as effective in the 1980s—when I had this condition—as it is now, but surgery to correct it was available and my doctor said I needed it. It was right before Thanksgiving when I saw him about it, but he said the surgery could wait until after the holiday. “Have a nice Thanksgiving,” he said as I left his office. Ten days later he performed the surgery to clean up the blood vessels and save my retina. When I awoke from the anesthesia he was there. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We shouldn’t have waited.” That’s how I lost the vision in my left eye. By March the same condition was developing in my right eye, and of course both of us wanted to do something about it immediately. Again he said I’d retain my vision, but again, after surgery, he said, “I’m sorry.” This time there had been complications with scar tissue. I was twenty-eight years old, I had a master’s degree in business, and I worked in marketing and advertising. I owned my own home, had friends, hobbies—a rich, busy, full life. I had gone in for surgery to save my vision and I had come out blind. Fortunately I have a close family, very supportive. I moved in with my parents, and my mom simply decided this would be her life. She had a blind daughter now, and she would take care of me and not let me do anything—from clipping my nails to going near a stove. Shortly after I moved in with them, my family relocated from Boston to Los Angeles. I hadn’t grown up here, gone to school here, or worked here. Nothing was familiar. That first year I had a hard time facing that I was blind. I didn’t

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Jane Se ymour know how to be blind—in a way, I didn’t know who I was anymore. An uncle talked to me about using books on tape, but I wouldn’t listen—I wasn’t going to be blind and I wasn’t going to do the things that blind people do! I had this movie image of what blind people were like, and I didn’t fit. I was thin, attractive, stylish, and I thought blind people couldn’t be that. I remember that during the worst of my self-pity, I thought I couldn’t curl my hair anymore. I’d just have to wear my hair long and straight, I thought—because that’s what blind people did, according to my movie image. The truth is, I didn’t want to know how to be blind that first year. There’s a Braille Institute for blind adults in Los Angeles. The first time I called them I was shaking—it was during the first year. My dad took me there, and as we walked in, there was a choral group singing. I told my dad, “I can’t go here—there are happy blind people here and I don’t want to be a happy blind person.” How did I come to finally understand and accept myself as a blind person? After about a year I realized I was just tired of being a victim of my eyesight, so I decided not to be a victim anymore. It’s as if I was pushed one more time—right up to the edge. My real thought was that God wasn’t going to let me die over this, even though there was a time when I wanted that to happen. But in the end, I was tired of being nervous, upset, and depressed. That’s when I took a good look at myself, acknowledged who I was, and my life started again.

As Sara says, true change only comes from pain. Deborah decided she ’d had enough of being “in pain” as the victim of her eyesight, took a good look at who she was, and made a decision to move on with her life. Sara, who had come to feel like she was Erin’s mother, was in so much pain over her drug use and behavior that she was willing to do anything, which in her case meant seeing the truth and finding a way to get the girl to rehab. For both of them, and for so many of us, looking beyond the immediate pain of a situation, and being 44

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clear and honest about who we are and what is needed, is the first step in dealing with changes in our lives. I’m happy to tell you that Sara is now a trained counselor working with the parents of at-risk and drug-addicted youths. She told me, “Out of all this pain, I’ve ended up with hope, and I’ve ended up with more people in my life that I get to love and that love me.” And Deborah has a vital career in public speaking, educating both physicians and lay people about diabetes and about blindness. There are days when we all have a hard time taking an honest look at ourselves, when it takes courage to see the truth. When I have one of these, I think of Deborah and of Sara, and my own difficulties seem much smaller. Funnily enough, Deborah, who is such an inspiration to so many people, says she, too, looks to others for that spark. “I do take inspiration from others, except that first year when I didn’t want to be a happy blind person. Since then I think, if they can do it, I can do it. Just show me how.” How wonderful that we can all have a part in showing one another how.

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For Sean and Katie, finding comfort often means spending quiet time with family at St. Catherine’s.

2

Find Comfort Where You Can Seek the Calm at the Center

I d on ’ t b e l i e v e w e ever truly arrive anywhere in life. We, as well as our circumstances, are constantly evolving, constantly changing in large ways and small. When I hear people say if only they had this house or that job, or if only they could be in this relationship or out of that one, then all will be well and they’ll be happy—I want to say, “Throw that thinking out the window!” That’s just not the way it is. However, in the midst of our ever-changing lives, there has to be a way to feel comfortable while change is taking place. Coming out of a huge change—like my divorce for example—is difficult: I don’t think it all happens in one go. I think that bit by bit, one finds areas of comfort, of something that can lift one out of the circle of how did this happen, why did this happen, who do I blame, why me, now what? A bit of familiarity and comfort can help each of us leave behind the should-have, could-have, would-have attitude. For some of us, change comes quickly and we adapt quickly. For others, the transitions may be slowly evolving, and quite a bit of time may pass before we really take them in and make them part of our 47

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lives. In either case, we all have to do something in the meantime, between the upheaval and the settling in to a new situation. That’s what this signpost is all about—finding comfort and a familiar place in the midst of turmoil. What that comfort will be for each of us will be different, but it’s worth looking around your life and knowing what will help you to bridge the old and the new when change comes along. Immediately after my very ugly and very public divorce, one of the things I did was what I often do—I retreated to my hearth and home. I had at first been very fearful of losing my home in Montecito, but once the children and I moved out and settled into the tiny rented cottage in Malibu, I felt it was rather cozy. I ended up with a feeling of lightness, of not needing much. After all, I had all that I really needed with me: food, a few clothes, my children, and a phone. There was a certain enviable simplicity to this. We all became much closer because of it. I spent as much time as I could cuddling with my children in my bed. I felt I had to bring everyone back as close as possible to the womb, and so my bed became the center of the house. We all snuggled up, and Katie and Sean would fall asleep with me, curled up together. We ’d even have minipicnics in my bed. It became a special thing for us, and especially for me. I’d been used to relying on the physical contact of my husband, and now I didn’t have that. So it felt a lot less lonely, having the children with me, and I believe it also reassured them that this part of their lives, having me as their mother, would go on. Our physical contact set a standard for how we three communicated during this difficult time, and we’ve carried it through to this day. Indeed I still lie down and stroke Katie, who’s now grown up—she wants me to stroke her like a cat! So does Sean, who is now six feet, two inches tall, and he never says no to a massage. At that time my sisters, my mother, and I also became closer. We’d always been close, but now I felt their love for me as a real presence. My mother happened to be at my home in America when I first found 48

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out there was something very wrong in my marriage, and her physical presence was a comfort to me. In a real way, she provided a trusted shoulder to cry on when I most needed one. When I’m troubled and she ’s near, I can feel her strength and love radiating toward me, and that feeling calms me. The revelation that my marriage was over was not particularly a surprise to her, I suspect. My mother had never trusted anything about David from the beginning. All through my marriage she kept warning me to be wary of trusting him, sort of acting as my advocate, although I didn’t realize it then. I had huge rows with her, in which I’d tell her that she just didn’t understand, that my husband would never betray me. Her instincts told her otherwise, and ultimately she was proved absolutely right. My mother survived a prison camp, which you’ll read about shortly, and I can tell you, there’s not much gets past her. Once the worst was out in the open, my mother was more than a simple comfort. She was very supportive of me in every way, and became an adviser, urging me to get good help in sorting out the mess, to get good legal representation, and to investigate areas of David’s and my business life I wouldn’t have thought to investigate. My sisters were emotionally supportive as well, and managed to be this in spite of the great distances that separated us. All during the first months after my split from David, the telephone lines between my house and theirs were humming constantly, and there were many trips to and from England and the United States. The sense that I was loved so unconditionally by my family sustained me through this most difficult of changes, and it helped me to be ready for the next phase when it came. As time went on after the divorce, painting became the thing that comforted me the most. It never failed to give me the release I needed in order to get through even the toughest day. Painting joined snuggling with my children as a part of my process of breaking out of what 49

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wasn’t anymore and getting into what was. As I look at my friends’ lives, I can see that there are any number of ways people find comfort to see them through difficult times—it’s completely individual, and it seems it can be found in the unlikeliest places. Take my friend Deborah, for example. After she had accepted her blindness, it was the simple familiarity of a cooking class that really changed her life. I always loved to cook, and thought I wouldn’t be able to because I was blind. Then I took a cooking class at the Braille Institute. All the instructor really told me was how to turn the stove on, and it seems as if just like that, I went back to baking cookies, having parties. It’s really not the big things that change your life, it’s the small things that can make such a difference. That cooking class tripped a switch in me. Once I realized I could do this thing I had so loved in my previous life, I was off and running. From there I wanted to suck in all I could learn about being blind—I wanted to learn Braille and everything. All it took was someone putting my hands on the stove and my realizing that others in the class were blind, too, and still, they were laughing and cooking. I realized that nothing I was doing was unique—if I have a problem, someone else must have it, too, and someone has solutions for me.

Going Home Our homes can offer such solace in times of turmoil. I’ve often found shelter in being quite domestic—which I consider a creative effort. Home became a particular refuge to me after my first trip to America, which was a complete disaster. It happened when I was about twentythree. I was newly divorced from Michael Attenborough, and I had been brought to America by Howard Koch Sr. Howard was a wonderful man; he died not long ago. Even then, I’d heard of him, and his sterling reputation. He was considered in the U.S. film business to be 50

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one of the good guys, really a great part of the older generation. To this day, if you mention his name everyone says, “Oh yes, he was a gentleman.” In any case, he had seen my work in England, and called my agent, asking to meet me in London. We had a lovely meeting, and he invited me to come to Hollywood for a screen test for a movie in which I would play an American girl. When I came out, the director happened to be English, and it was his first big American movie. Needless to say, the last thing he wanted was an English girl playing an American. He definitely did not want me. Although I did the screen test, they hired someone else— Deborah Raffin, I believe. While I was in Hollywood, another producer, whose reputation I did not know, asked me to come to his house and watch a screen test I’d done for Howard. Although he had said there would be other people there, when I arrived, I was surprised to see that we were alone. He made many advances, and I quickly made the choice not to play the Hollywood casting-couch game, and he was not happy about my choice. He told me that if I ever mentioned the incident to anyone I’d never work in this business again, and made me swear to say I’d never even gone to his house. It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life—I was trembling, shaking with fear. Then I had to lie to everybody, which I didn’t like doing at all. The next day, my agent and the other producer, Howard, asked me how the meeting had gone. When I answered that I didn’t go to it, my agent said, “Oh, thank goodness for that. I almost called you to tell you not to go, because this man had quite a reputation . . . sometimes you could have a problem with him. If you’d gone there, something might have happened, and you definitely would not have gotten the part.” I was devastated, frightened, and confused—I thought my career was over. I was staying with a girlfriend who was a flight attendant; she was also a friend of my parents. I thought, well, she ’s not likely to tell anyone in the film business, and I had to let it out, so I told her. I 51

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remember crying all night in her apartment, saying this is terrible, what do I do, what do I do . . . ? What I did was, I went back to England, gave up acting, quit show biz, and became a full-time housewife. I had fallen into the arms of my great friend Geoffrey Planer, whom I called Geep. I’d known Geep for as long as I’d known Michael Attenborough, because he was a friend of Michael’s. They went to all the same schools from kindergarten through secondary school. Michael and Geep and a load of other boys I knew all went to the same boys’ high school in the center of London, Westminster, right next door to Westminster Abbey. Geep was always the most fun, innovative, unusual member of the group of friends we hung with. I didn’t realize how much I liked him until I was well and truly single after my split from Michael. At first Geep and I spent time together as friends, and then it became more serious. I remember the day my feelings changed, and I felt myself falling in love with him. Every year there was a famous boat race, the Oxford–Cambridge boat race, on the Thames. Geep lived in a beautiful apartment overlooking the river, and every year he had a boat-race party. We’d all squish into his apartment and peek over his balcony to watch the boats go by. It was at that party that I realized I liked him more than just “liking him.” We started to spend more time together and realized the feeling was quite mutual. It happened pretty quickly. What I loved most about Geoffrey was his creativity—he was truly an original. Everything he did then was a first for our group, from the lighthearted to the serious. For example, he grew interested in art and then began drawing the most appealing cartoons and leaving them all around the house for me to see—even in my luggage when I traveled. His interest in world affairs led him to visit Vietnam to see what was really happening there at the beginning of the war, just as his interest in exotic locales led him to Kathmandu before the Beatles made it so popular. 52

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On the very lightest side, he was also the best party organizer. One time, at his urging, he and his friends chipped in to rent a London double-decker bus, and we all loaded onto it with beer, wine, and picnic baskets, and set out for Runnymeade, four hours away, to celebrate the signing of the Magna Carta! What an amazing day that was. Geoffrey, whom I called Geep, and I had a When we married very cozy life together. His willingness to we didn’t want to ask push me out of the nest toward a life I truly loved was a huge act of selflessness. my parents to pay for the reception because it was my second wedding and they were certainly not wealthy. As it happened, it was the Queen’s silver jubilee that year, and it was common for everyone in London to have block parties or street parties. We lived on a dead-end street called Worple Street, and we asked the other residents if they wanted to have a block party to celebrate the Queen’s jubilee. They would invite their own friends and provide their own food and drink outside their own houses, and we would do the same. Amazingly enough, some of them showed us photographs of themselves having a block party on that street for the Queen’s coronation! The whole thing started to take on a kind of magic. We didn’t announce to the block that it was to be our wedding party. But we did 53

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tell our friends, and suddenly we were able to have a hundred and fifty of them over to celebrate our wedding, which we couldn’t have done if we ’d had the party indoors. Our home was a little tiny Victorian terrace house—two up, two down, they call it—a Victorian worker’s cottage. It was so small I called it the Mouse House. You really couldn’t physically put more than ten or fifteen people in the whole house if you squished them up. We hoped for good weather, invited our exes and all our friends, and asked them to bring what they wanted. Half of them brought wedding cakes. We also ordered kegs of beer, champagne, and wine. Another friend was in the music industry, so he put together a rock band and they provided the music, and some other friends set up a minigame of cricket. We were married in the morning at the registry office, and we’d borrowed a horse and carriage to take us there. We rented the rig from a film I’d been making, The Four Feathers, with Beau Bridges, as well as a wedding dress and hat, which had been loaned to me by the costume house. It was fantastic, and very affordable, because it was all borrowed. The party was so potluck, we didn’t know what we’d be getting, but everyone, because it was our wedding, was excited to bring the best they could prepare. So we used an adverse situation, which was not having the space or finances to entertain that many people, and somehow ended up with a fabulous party that couldn’t have been better. After the wedding, our tiny little house was my refuge, after what had happened in America. I was happy with Geep, and I basically stayed home and became a housewife. Acting was, for the first time in many years, not a part of my life at all. Strangely enough, I don’t remember that time as being one of depression. Rather, it was a period of simplicity in my life, with the simple pleasures of being a homemaker, baking bread every day, entertaining friends, cooking exotic meals, embroidering and creating designs for my embroidery, and making my house nice. It was something I think I had to do. I 54

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needed the comfort of the familiar and I had to see what it would be like not to be an actress or a dancer or any of those things I’d been driven to be. I have to admit I felt a kind of contentment and a lot less pressure. While we were both having a lovely time playing at house, eventually Geep said he could see this wasn’t who I really was, and he thought that I needed to be acting or somehow involved in my profession. I paid little mind to this at first—I truly wasn’t interested for a while. All I wanted was to feel comfortable in my own skin again after my harsh experience in America. Ironically, around that time I was offered the role of Nora in the play A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, which is all about a woman who strikes out on her own and becomes her own person. I’d been sitting at home, reflecting on nothing other than my ever-expanding tummy, which I was gaining through enjoying my own cooking, and which, by the way, didn’t bother me at all. The offer of the play came as a bit of a surprise, and I didn’t jump at it because I was convinced I’d never be able to learn the lines. I told Geep and I told my agent that I’d never be able to do this, I couldn’t possibly learn all those lines. I’d quit; I’d given up. Geep listened to my outbursts and then he said, “I don’t want to talk to you anymore until you’ve learned the first ten pages. Whether or not you do this play, I believe that you can learn those ten pages. And we won’t discuss it until you’ve learned them. After you have done that we can discuss the fact that you’re not going to do the play.” I was convinced he didn’t understand anything about acting and why I couldn’t do this play. But I sat down and thought, “Oh well, okay, I’ll just try it, then.” It was amazing—I learned ten pages just like that, really fast. And of course I really got into the play and realized that it was an amazing play and an incredible opportunity—and what a coincidence that it was this play at this time. It was a wake-up call. Before the play was offered, I knew in my heart that I’d lost my 55

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nerve to act. Ultimately, Geep knew it, too, and as only a very good friend can do, by insisting I at least try to learn the lines, he was gently nudging me out of the cozy nest we’d made. He did this not once, but twice. The first time was to do that play. And the second time was later, when he insisted I go to America once again. With A Doll’s House, I was back in the theater world, which I dearly loved. I also began doing other acting and, after a particularly good review I’d received for a television movie I’d done, Geep persuaded me to take the next step and go to America. One of the people who contacted me right off was an American casting director who is now a major producer. She said to me, “If you can lose your English accent, come to the U.S. and play Americans. You’ll never be without work.” That was certainly tempting. My English agent was furious when I announced that I was thinking about going to America again. He told me if I went he wouldn’t represent me any longer, and that I would be making the biggest mistake of my life. It was Geep who encouraged me to go to America anyway, and to seek my fortune there. In the end, I believe that finding comfort with him in that brief domesticated life we shared allowed me to regroup enough to step out into the world of acting once more. It was Geep’s clarity of vision and his desire for my happiness and my fulfillment that allowed him to encourage me to step out again. Those qualities also eventually allowed him to let go of me so that I could meet the changes that were being offered in my life. But that all came later. First, and so important, by encouraging me to return to America, Geep once again persuaded me to take on more than I thought I could handle. I took the gamble. Geep and I planned my trip; it wasn’t a publicity junket funded by a studio. I went to Los Angeles with no agent, no work papers, and five-hundred dollars. I gave myself six weeks to make it because my cut-price airline ticket would run out and so

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would my money, and then I’d have to come back to England. I was on my own. For much of the six weeks I’d allotted myself, it looked like I wasn’t ever going to get a job. I auditioned quite a lot, and was turned down constantly. One of the last roles I went out for was the part of a wicked witch for a Sunday morning children’s television show. When I finished the audition, they, too, turned me down, saying I was too subtle an actress. It was faint praise, and I was quite upset. My time was almost up, I was almost out of money, and it seemed my dream was fading. After the audition, I was crying in the parking lot outside the studio when the producer’s assistant came running out to offer some comfort. He said I shouldn’t feel bad because I was too good for this television show. He went on to become a producer himself, and although I appreciated his kind words, they did little to cheer me. I was still jobless, and time was running out. As I recall, my six weeks were up the day before the Bicentennial celebrations in the summer of 1976. A few days before that, I auditioned for a television miniseries, Captains and Kings. For the audition, I’d spent the last of my money having my hair put up in a Gibson-girl hairstyle, a style I’m now famous for because of Somewhere in Time and Dr. Quinn. To my enormous joy, they liked me, and offered me a part in the series! I was tremendously excited and thought this was my salvation at last. But sadly, my excitement was short-lived. I’d gotten the part but the production company soon found they could not get me a work permit quickly enough to allow me to work when shooting began, in a matter of days. So they rescinded the offer, and they gave my part to an American actress. I was absolutely devastated. It looked like I’d be leaving America in defeat once again, and in truth, I was so upset that I was ready to go back to England and quit Hollywood forever. Just as I was at my lowest, I got a phone call out of the blue from the producer of the television show

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McCloud, which was filmed by the same studio doing Captains and Kings. He’d seen me in the Bond film and said he wanted me for the lead in a McCloud episode. I explained about the work-permit difficulties, and he assured me that one needed a week to get the work permit, and that the other producer had only given it a day because they were to begin shooting the following day. So the McCloud producer got the work permit for me, and to my relief, I was granted a bit more time in America. My dream had begun to look a little brighter once again. At lunch break one day while I was filming McCloud, the people from Captains and Kings saw me in the studio cafeteria, and were very surprised to see I was still in the States. I told them about McCloud, and the work permit I now had, and they announced that in that case, they had another role for me. The role they offered was much better than the first—twice the size, in fact. So straight after I finished McCloud I did Captains and Kings after all, and it was a much better part! The best part was that the miniseries was so well received that the network ordered an additional two hours. They’d written the additional hours for me and Perry King, and later I was nominated for an Emmy for that role, as leading actress, no less. I look back in wonder at that series of events. So many things fell almost miraculously into place. But I believe none of it would have happened if I had not first had that comfortable nest with Geep for a while. Before trying my wings outside the nest, I believe the time I spent there, healing my wounds and happily baking and sewing, helped give me the strength to weather change and try a new life. As for the rest, all that happened during my six weeks in America, I believe that is a testament to staying with one’s dream through every kind of difficulty. It’s something we all can do, but it’s something we all need to be reminded of at times. Looking back, I realize that if I hadn’t been turned down for the role of the wicked witch, and if I hadn’t had the original Captains and Kings role taken from me, I might not have had the role, and the Emmy nomination, that ultimately 58

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helped me to stay in this country permanently. The lesson is that change seldom occurs at the end of a straight and tidy path. It’s our willingness to stay the bumpy course that so often gets us to where we want to be. And I believe that the nurturing we get by finding comfort where we can along the way can sustain us through that bumpy ride. After I started working in America, Geep and I slowly drifted apart. He used to refer to me as a butterfly—a free-spirited butterfly. He said I wasn’t like a solid stone, something to be put in one place with the expectation that it wouldn’t move. What really broke us up, he told me, was that he could not live in the U.S. and that he needed a kind of rock-solid stability. We both came to understand that, and parted ways as friends, but it was so painful to choose him or my career. He ’s been married for years now, with children, and his wife and I get on really well, although we are completely different. Geep is one of James’s favorite people as well. Now, all these years later, Geoffrey is like a member of our family, and James and I are writing children’s books that he illustrates, called This One and That One. In a strange way, one we certainly wouldn’t have predicted, Geep’s and my dreams ultimately came true. We have each other as close and trusted friends. Our love continues in a profound way, and we are now creating together.

Do What’s Familiar to You It’s true sometimes that finding comfort in the midst of change comes in the form of doing what is most familiar. If that fits your circumstance, you might take a cue from my mother, Mieke Frankenberg, who experienced enormous changes totally out of her control when she was placed in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. Even then, she quickly adapted to what life gave her. To this day she never fails to make something interesting, positive, and wonderful from whatever happens. She has a real gift for putting the familiar into the unfamiliar and then carrying on with her life. 59

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As a twenty-one-year-old native of Deventer, Holland, my mother went to join her fiancé, who had found a job on a tea plantation in the jungle in Java, an island in the Dutch East Indies, which is now Indonesia. They married there in January 1937. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, all healthy men between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five, including Mummy’s husband, were called up to join the military. Mummy left her home in the jungle to help a nearby friend look after her children, and then in mid-January, traveled to the town of Bandoeng to join her best friend, Juus. While my mother lived with her husband’s family just outside of town, Juus and Mummy took a course in Red Cross nursing, which proved useful when, at the beginning of March, the Japanese bombed Bandoeng. After five days, the Dutch had to capitulate, and the Japanese paratroopers took possession of people’s houses, raped and pillaged, and all law and order vanished. Several days later the Japanese army proper arrived, and stopped the looting—in fact, she saw a soldier shot in the street, presumably for his behavior before the rest of the military arrived. Within days, everybody, my mother included, had to register with the Japanese, their own passports were confiscated, and they were reissued Japanese passports. When the war broke out, Mummy had been given several months of her husband’s salary, which she put in the bank for safekeeping. However, when the Japanese came, all banks were closed immediately, and so she was penniless after all. Everyone needed money, and her friends suggested that she should make her cosmetics, and that they would sell them to the officer’s wives or others in the camp who did have money. Before the war, back at the tea plantation, my mother had made cosmetics as birthday and Christmas presents, and everyone had loved them. So now she rented a small shop with two rooms behind it, for very little money. The owner told her the man who had previously occupied the shop had been taken prisoner by the Japanese, and he was afraid that if his shop stood empty, the Japanese would take it over. 60

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Mummy and her friends were still free at this point, so she set up her little factory in the shop, and she would ride around town on her bicycle buying empty Elizabeth Arden jars and bottles to be taken back and sterilized for her creams. She ordered so many ingredients for her creams and lotions from the local pharmacy that they began to give her wholesale prices and order the products she made. Because of the war, no Just before World War II, Mummy was one could import similar a lovely young woman on the brink of luxuries any more, so her changes she couldn’t possibly have imagendeavor really did make ined. money. Mummy even had a few girls helping her in her tiny factory. After about six months, the Japanese put up notices that all European women, children, and civilian men over sixty-five, had to go into camps, supposedly for protection from the Indonesians. The Japanese cordoned off a few residential areas with bamboo fences, accessed by one main gate. Seeing that a camp was being built, and having heard that transports of women and children from other cities would be arriving, my mother found a small pavilion in the enclosed area for herself, and her friend Juus to move into. At her factory, Mummy loaded up a horse cart with as many of her ingredients and bottles as the horse could manage and drove it into the enclosure, 61

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telling the soldiers that she was bringing in medicine. The rest she left behind at the factory with the girls who worked for her. Because they were Indonesian, they were not interned, and Mummy never found out what happened to them or to her small business. My mother’s camp consisted of houses overcrowded with people, but she felt lucky to be there. She’d heard about other camps in villages where the houses were built of bamboo, with mud floors and roofs of palm leaves that couldn’t keep the rain out. In her camp, one Dutch woman was appointed to report to all the prisoners the orders from the Japanese, and to see that everyone obeyed. Just about everyone had jobs: some cooked for the whole camp, some carried in sacks of rice from the gate, others had to work in gardens growing vegetables, and some, like my mother, were nurses. Twice each day, they all had to report for tenko, or roll call, once in the morning and again in the evening. Everybody, thousands of prisoners, had to stand at attention and call out in Japanese their prisoner number, one by one. On the order jotzke, everyone had to stand to attention, and on the order kiri, everyone had to bow very deeply so that you could not see the officer in command. On the command nore, everyone could stand upright again. If one mistake was made in this ritual, or if the number of prisoners did not tally with the officer’s numbers, the entire process was repeated, until on some days, it took hours to complete while my mother and all the prisoners stood with the hot sun beating down on them. My mother was in an interesting predicament then. While I know she was concerned about her husband’s well being, I also know that she was secretly relieved at not having to deal with him. They’d had serious problems in their marriage for quite some time, and the fact is that she was afraid of him. The forced separation gave her a chance to focus on caring for herself, and for those around her, rather than on finding ways to avoid him, as she had been doing. As a result, she threw her energy into helping her fellow prisoners, and into making her lavender-colored cosmetics. I’m sure my mother’s efforts offered 62

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her a connection to the familiar, and thus were comforting to her. Having the face creams and lotions boosted everyone else’s morale as well. I think the women truly enjoyed this connection to normality in such abnormal times. They nicknamed my mother Miss Lavenda (with the accent on en). But her creams also served another purpose. Part of the money from the sale of these creams she gave to a neighbor, who made secret trips outside the camp disguised as a native Indonesian, both by tanning her skin and by wearing native clothing. Everyone knew that if she had been caught, she would have faced torture and death at the Kempei Tai, the death prison, but she made her secret trips anyway. This brave woman would sneak out of the camp, through the sewers to the village, where she bought eggs, meat, and extra food for the children. The only food provided in the camp was a small portion of rice and water in a margarine tin, which they got twice a day. In the beginning, there would also sometimes be a little meat and vegetables, but soon it was only vegetables, and late in the war, the rice came only with kankung, a plant that grew in a nearby river. After two years my mother was transported to a second camp, a place called Kota Paris, where she spent four months. Only doctors, nurses, and camp workers were sent to this small hospital camp, where my mother lived with two others in a room near a large house that had been made into a makeshift hospital. She had to leave all her cosmetics and equipment behind her, hidden in the roof of the pavilion, where it may well remain to this day! In Kota Paris, she nursed the sick and dying who were unable to survive the terrible living conditions in the camps. There were no medicines, so all she and the other nurses could do was try to keep their patients clean and offer the comfort of their companionship. For the last three months of her imprisonment, my mother was sent to a convent called St. Vincencius, which had been made over into a hospital with living quarters for the nurses in the nun’s dormitories. 63

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This camp was the final destination for all the dying prisoners from ten surrounding prison camps. No one sent there was expected to live for more than two or three weeks. Soon after she arrived there, my mother befriended a woman patient in her ward who was so ill, she’d had to leave her three young children behind in a prison camp, in the care of a friend. The woman apparently had a cancer that had eaten away the wall separating her rectum and vagina, so she had no control over her bodily functions. In addition, the poor woman had a terrible bedsore in the small of her back; it was so deep that her backbone was exposed. Every day, after her duty on the ward, my mother spent as much time as she could with this woman, listening to her talk about her beautiful children, and about how much she looked forward to seeing them again. The woman seemed to have no idea about the severity of her condition, and when my mother and the other nurses helped her to comb her hair or wash her face, they took care not to let her hold the mirror. One day however, the woman grabbed the mirror and looked at her back. My mother believed that one glimpse killed what hope the woman had, and she died the next day. Her death affected my mother profoundly, and she fell into total despair. Mummy, who had been able to be cheerful and positive with her patients through three prison camps, took to her bed, and lost all sense of waking or sleeping. She told me she recalls that her nights were filled with dreams of working, and her days were filled with confusion and tears. She felt she just couldn’t do this hopeless work any longer. Finally, the matron took her aside and told her that a good nurse has to keep her feelings under control, otherwise she can no longer help anyone. That evening, Mummy recalls she was given an injection, which was probably a sedative, and she had four days away from the ward. They allowed her to sit alone in the peace of a small garden in the center of the convent. At the end of her respite, Mummy was able to return to her duties with a renewed determina64

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tion to do her best, to look for the positive in everything she could, and somehow keep from dwelling on miseries that she couldn’t change. My mother’s initiative and positive attitude also helped her to escape from the camp once the war was over. The war had ended in early August, but no one in the camp knew it until notices were dropped onto the camp by plane. The food improved, but the Japanese commander had to stay to keep order, as there were no Dutch forces there to take over. All the other Japanese were imprisoned, and soon the surviving patients were transferred to a hospital outside the camp. Dutch women who were married to Englishmen— and the few English women who were in the camp—were taken to Jakarta to leave on the first ship to England. My mother was left at the camp with no patients to nurse, and the lack of purpose in her days was more than she could stand. So she ducked under the barbed wire (the armed sentries had gone by then), hitched a ride on an English military vehicle to Jakarta, and applied to the British Representative there to see if she could go with the ship to England, even though she was not married to an Englishman. She reasoned that as her marriage was most probably over, she might as well go to England. Her charm and audacity worked, and she was given permission to leave on the ship, but she had to go back to the camp first to collect what few things she had. When he found out, the Japanese commander of the camp was not impressed with her plan, and forbade her to go. Luckily, one of my mother’s friends came to the camp to say good-bye and carried Mummy out, hidden in her truck. Days later, as my mother flew on the military plane toward Singapore, where the ship to Liverpool awaited, her heart finally felt light once again. She resolved that from this moment on she would look only to the positive—she would look only forward. As it turned out, my mother was the first Dutch POW to go to England after the war, so she became a bit of a celebrity. And because 65

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she ’d worked in the crude prison-camp hospital, she knew who had died and who had survived, so everyone at the embassy wanted to talk to her. She was interviewed by the BBC as well, and for a time her story was in the newspapers all over England. She did look up her husband once after the war, and saw him in London. Although it was the first time she’d seen him since they were in Indonesia, it was not a happy reunion, and they quickly divorced. A couple of years later, my parents met and embarked on a love story that lasted more than forty years. The sweeping changes my mother underwent in her twenties and early thirties would be enough to make most people crumple. Recently, I asked her what it was that helped her get on so well with all she ’d been through. She answered without hesitation. “Two things have helped. First, I’m a positive thinker,” she said. I can vouch for that—she is the ultimate optimist. No matter what the circumstance, I can’t recall a moment in my life when my mother didn’t truly believe everything would work out for the best. “Second,” she added, “whenever I have felt, deep down, that I didn’t know what to do, that I didn’t know how I’d handle the next change coming, I looked around at others. I’ve always seen that no matter what, there is someone else worse off than you, and that puts your own troubles in perspective. I think I learned that trick during the war—I know it helped me then!” She also told me that the very adversity of being in the camp simply made her a stronger person. “From the nice girl I was at the beginning of the war, nice but afraid of my husband and not sure what to do about it, I became more myself, a stronger person because of what I saw and what I went through,” she said. “After the war, I was afraid of nothing. I really felt I could just do anything, anything at all.” My close friend Steven Bickel, an entertainment-industry executive, put all of this into perspective for me. He’s the one who explained to me how my mother can be so positive in the face of such 66

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Wonderful friends like Steve Bickel have been a great source of comfort to me, even in the most tumultuous times. Here we are in front of Buckingham Palace, just after I received my OBE.

enormous change, and why I am the kind of person who deals with change so quickly and then gets on with life. Steve and I met years ago on the set of Somewhere in Time, the romantic 1980 movie I did with Christopher Reeve. Steve was the associate producer, and he told me later that he was the one who suggested me for the role of Elise, the female lead. Someone else had wanted Bo Derek, who had just been such a hit in the movie 10. Happily, Steve convinced everyone that if they wanted a woman who looked like the Gibson girl of the period in which the movie was set, they’d better have me! We became great friends while working on the movie, and I learned more of what an extraordinary person Steve is. When he was only twenty-two, his older sister was tragically killed in a car accident, and Steve stepped up and took responsibility for rearing her five-year-old son, who is now a well-adjusted young adult. Steve spends loads of time with my family, and they all love him as much as 67

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I do. My mother tried to persuade him to marry one of my sisters, but he politely declined and has remained friends with us all in the process! Steve was best man at my wedding with James and he has spent Christmas and holidays with us for years. He truly is an adopted member of my family. Steve is the person who first told me that how I handle change is typical of a child of a survivor. “You’re just like me,” he said. “We’re both like the phoenix that rises from the ashes—we’re never beaten.” Steve ’s father survived Auschwitz during World War II, but he lost his wife and year-old child as well as his entire extended family at the camp. After the war, he married Steve’s mother and made his way to St. Paul, Minnesota, where Steve was raised. What it means to have a parent who has come out of a prisoner-of-war camp or a concentration camp is enormous and touches every part of a child’s life. Steve explains it best: I’ve always felt that children of survivors seem to have a similar drive and ambition—a certain go-to-it and go-do-it attitude. There ’s a sense that every day is to be lived to the fullest, an attitude that I believe both Jane and I acquired at a very early age from parents who almost didn’t have that opportunity. I also believe this drive stems from a basic need to validate to our parents that they survived for a reason. I call it the “Aren’t You Proud” theory. I saw those traits in Jane when I first met her. What struck me most, aside from her obvious beauty, was her consummate professionalism as an actress. She was driven by a passion to succeed—not to settle for second best and always to provide the very best she could deliver. This is true of her family life as well. She strives to give her family only the finest—not only in material terms (though she ’s managed to provide that as well) but in guidance, support, motivation, and inspiration. Another philosophy we share is that we never run away from prob-

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Over the years, I cannot count how many conversations Steve and I have had about this, and about things that have happened, good and bad, to both of us. I realize life is different for everyone, but being the child of a survivor has colored how I approach everything, and Steve 69

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and I are soul mates in this. It’s been wonderful to have his understanding and inspiration all these years.

Change and Choices Everything in my life—and yours, too, I daresay—is about changes and choices. Something changes, and we have a choice to make. The way I see it, there are two things you can do. One is to give up and mourn the death of the previous existence—and that’s all right, and necessary, for a while. But the other choice is to process your feelings about the change that’s happened, find a way to get comfortable with it, and press on. James and I have been in the midst of just such a change for the last couple of years, and we’ve made some new choices as a result. You might recall news reports a few years ago that said the Screen Actors Guild was threatening to go on strike. The strike never happened, but the threat of it changed everything for James and me, and for countless others in this business. Instead of worrying about whether actors would or would not be on strike, network executives took some preventive measures and invented television shows that did not require actors— what is now called reality television. The result was that made-fortelevision movies were virtually wiped out. Suddenly only a small number of movies were being made, and making television movies was how James and I had earned our living for quite some time. Faced with this huge—and honestly, devastating—change, we set about thinking of what we really wanted to do, since we couldn’t do as much of the thing we’d been doing. Going back to the familiar, in my case looking for comfort through painting, came in handy once again: James suggested we visit Monet’s gardens in France. He would film me painting, and I would talk about my reaction to working at the site of some of Monet’s most fabulous works. We showed our twenty-minute documentary to several acquaintances in the business, and the next thing we knew, the Red Cross was contacting us about doing a documentary in Africa. 70

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I am a celebrity spokesperson for the Red Cross, so it wasn’t a surprise that they contacted us. But the fact that we’d already experimented with the documentary form was a godsend. It so happened that the Red Cross was about to start their Measles Initiative, in which they intended to (and did, I might add) inoculate thirteen-and-a-half million Kenyan children in one week against measles, which is the leading preventable cause of death on that continent. We had the idea to invite eight young teens from a school in Los Angeles and took them with us, along with our family members and several friends. From the interviews we did with the American teens, before and after they saw the lives other kids their age endured, we know the visit was a life-changing one for them. Now we have reinvented ourselves as producers of documentaries, and we ’re the ones doing reality television! I couldn’t really blame the networks for choosing to do reality-based programming; I’ve always chosen as much as possible to do movies based on real-life stories and real events. Once the networks made their change, though, I had to figure out where I fit in in the new scheme of things. Consequently, James and I are at an interesting juncture I believe neither of us would have predicted we’d see—movies are no longer the only choice for either of us. Now we’ve made choices to be involved in projects that are about volunteering, about speaking out and trying to make a difference—and it’s incredibly satisfying. In our own way we’re trying to leave a legacy that’s not just about Oscars and Emmys—and it’s wonderfully fulfilling and so much more fun and meaningful!

Change for James—a Return to the Familiar When I look at James right now, as he deals with the industry changes we ’ve both been going through, I see that he, too, has naturally returned to something familiar to him as a way through the transition. Out of a weed-filled slope behind our house, he has created a beautiful orchard and a garden full of organic vegetables and flowers. 71

Jane Se ymour Gardens aren’t new to me. When I was a young actor, a year out of Yale Drama School, I came out to California to do theater. At first I was in Los Angeles, but wanted to find a place to live in Malibu. My brother lived out here and I wanted to live closer to him, and I wanted to get out of the city. So I put an ad in the newspaper. A fellow named Fred Roberts responded to my ad. He had a very large piece of property, about five hundred acres, out here in Malibu, which he called Roberts Ranch, and he raised exotic animals on it. He said I could live on his property, but there wasn’t much of a house, just a sort of shack, and that I had to garden. He said, “I just want you to plant a garden so I can come by and watch you tend the garden.” He was quite old, and, I think, not well. Maybe just having a reason to spend time outdoors was a comfort to him. Maybe he liked seeing the vigor of someone working the land; maybe he wanted, one more time, to really experience the essence of life, to see flowers, herbs, and vegetables rise out of the ground, grow, and bear fruit. I can imagine all that was true for him because those are the things that give me joy about gardening. I was happy to do what he needed, and I put in a full acre of vegetable garden. I was a struggling actor, so I had a little bit of time on my hands. Eventually I had so much produce that I sold it at the Malibu Colony Market. I fixed up the shack for myself, and it’s still here, right up in these mountains. His land is now a state park, and my little house is now a ranger station. I started gardening when I was a kid, and not by choice. I had my problems as a child, and my father would discipline me by making me pull weeds. He had a dychondra lawn, and weeds infested it. Dychondra is a very specific little leaf—anything that grows straight is not dychondra—so I had to pull anything straight. What I thought was a terrible punishment turned out to be something I loved. I became fascinated with plants, and my weed-pulling sessions allowed me to actually look at the lawn and see different

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Finding Comfort Can Be a Creative Act Our African documentary came about ultimately because James and I wanted to use our skills to communicate the needs and the actions that were being taken in Africa. Reverting to the familiar helped us begin. Sometimes something great comes out of just doing what you know. When I was a young ballet dancer, still in my teens and living at home with my parents, we couldn’t afford the large number of expensive, handmade ballet shoes I needed for class and performances. I had already learned to crochet, knit, and sew, and then how to embroider. I also loved to design and make a lot of my clothes. So sometimes I’d sell my crocheted clothing and my embroidery to pay for the ballet shoes. When I gave up ballet and became a full-time actress, I was always worrying about being unemployed, because actors are generally unemployed a lot. So I embroidered, crocheted, and knitted to earn money. I created designs and embroidered folk shirts and see-through cotton shirts—this was in the early 1970s, so that folk look was very

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popular. I crocheted red, white, and blue hats, scarves, patchwork. Hippie stuff. Everything that’s back in style now, I made then. I still have in my closet the original clothing I made for myself—all the peasant skirts and peasant tops. You know that adage—if you haven’t worn it for six months or a year, throw it out. I have things I haven’t worn for thirty years, and they’ve come back! Not to mention my collection of vintage (in those days, secondhand) pieces that have come in handy over the years for movie roles and as inspiration for my current designing venture. Back then, I took the crocheted and knitted things I made to a craft market in London that sold that kind of thing, and an Indian gentleman who owned a booth there bought them from me, and gave me a huge order to fill. I took the embroidered blouses to a very high-end clothing shop, a shop I’d never dare walk into because everything was so expensive and exclusive. It was called Brown’s, in South Molton Street in London. The buyer saw my work and loved it, and she just took all these silk, see-through Cacherel shirts and cotton blouses off the rack, handed them to me, and said, “Embroider these; do whatever you like.” I took them away and did all kinds of things—flowers and elegant designs. But I also did fun things, with a little sense of humor, like the British birds I stitched on a sheer shirt. Everyone did away with their bras then, and I wasn’t happy with nipples showing—too private. So, on a see-through blouse, I embroidered a bird sitting on a twig eating berries with some blossoms on both sides just so the nipples would be covered up. They were English birds, one called a blue tit, the other a gray tit. I got a little laugh from it—and years later, my daughter Katie wore that blouse all the way through high school, until it wore out completely. When it was time to bring the finished garments back and to ask for some money, I was afraid and had no idea what to ask. So I talked to my cousin Debra, who was a designer and was the only one I knew who’d worked in the garment business. She suggested we establish how much we thought my work was worth and then double it because 74

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the shop owner would surely negotiate the price downward, and if I’d doubled my starting figure, I’d then end up with close to what my work was actually worth. So we did that and decided to have a little lunch before we went, at a very nice restaurant, and had a glass of wine between us, to give me confidence. She was pregnant with her first child, and didn’t drink much of the wine. Finally we arrived at the shop with the embroidered blouses, and the shop owner fell in love with my shirts. “How much?” she asked. Debra looked at me, prompted me with a gentle elbow in the side, and I said triple the amount we ’d agreed upon! I don’t know what happened to me; perhaps I’d had more wine than I’d thought. The real surprise was that the shop owner said, “Fine.” At that moment my cousin fainted—she crumpled to the floor. She was fine later, but it must have been too much excitement for a young pregnant woman. My father was her doctor, so I felt a certain responsibility. In the meantime, the shop owner asked me if I had a triplicate order book so she could place an order with me. I didn’t know what that was—so I ran to the nearest office supply store and asked for a triplicate order book, ran back to the shop, took the order, took the money they paid me, ran to my father’s accountant, and said I needed a company. In England they had a system in which companies that were given up or no longer conducted business were called “on the shelf.” I don’t know if it’s the same in America, but in England you can instantly buy the name of a company that’s already been registered, and then you just use it as your company—it’s the easiest way to do it. I got a company called Billmill Ltd. By the end of the day I had my first income from my designs, and I had a company. Then the shop owner asked me to make twenty or thirty of these embroidered shirts, and I realized I just didn’t have the time to do it on a regular basis, so my company didn’t really get off the ground. I had to really resist the temptation to have a garment business 75

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then—and for many years, until just very recently. Now I’m happily designing a line of affordable clothing for Crossing Pointe, a catalog company, and having a wonderfully creative and challenging time at it. It seems like something new, but in fact, I’ve been doing some form of clothing design my whole life. It’s been part of the creativity that sustains me—and a way to keep my hands productively busy. On movie sets, when everyone else was smoking or eating too much, I found that if I did some embroidery, or later, on Dr. Quinn, my painting, I kept both hands busy so I couldn’t scarf down potato chips! The point is that doing what you know and love can not only sustain you and be a source of comfort in times of change, it can blossom unexpectedly!

Getting Comfortable in Order to Let Go Haven’t we all seen even more change than usual, especially job changes, happening since September 11? I certainly have. I see people who’ve worked in the same company, the same job, for years suddenly thinking in new ways about who they are, what they’ve done, and what they want to leave behind. So many, like James and me, have been following a career path that would give them all the usual credentials—money, property, prestige, awards. Perhaps what happened on 9/11 was a reminder that life can be far shorter and harsher than we expect it to be, and now many of us have stopped and found another way to use our skills so that our hearts are filled as well. In doing so, we all have the opportunity to make choices that are, in themselves, remarkable. But now less may well be more, and that “more” is feeling good about what you do, and knowing that you have made a difference for someone else. So many of us have lived with jobs we hate in order to maintain a lifestyle we don’t have time for. When that has been pointed out, or tragically ripped away, there can come a clarity that says, “Maybe I’m not doing what I really want. Maybe there’s something more for me.” 76

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I met a forty-one-year-old woman the other day who told me her husband had divorced her a couple of years ago. She’s going through a lot of changes in her life, raising her child by herself and struggling to find the money to support both of them. She works for a large corporation and she has a good job. But she was saying how hard it is to have a life again since her divorce. She’s having trouble finding that comfortable place. I spoke to this woman about how creativity has so often helped me find a comfortable path through change. She listened for a while, then she said, “Funny you should say that, because I’ve just had the opportunity to take another job elsewhere, and now I’m going to be working in the creative end of an advertising agency, a much more creative job.” “You know,” I told her, “I have a feeling that’s where you’re going to find your happiness. Working in something creative will make your job much more fulfilling.” I truly believe she may be standing at this signpost—that she’s been offered a way to provide herself with the bit of comfort she needs to help her let go of her old life, and be fully alive in her new one. Another woman I know through a friend, Marjorie, found herself in a somewhat similar predicament, looking for the thing that would give her comfort while she weathered a difficult transition. She, however, planned her transition carefully. For quite some time she’d contemplated her retirement from the corporation where she’d worked for twenty-eight years, and she’d planned her exit in every detail. Still, once she ’d actually walked out of her office for good, she found that in between letting go of the old life and constructing a new one, she, too, needed a way to feel comfortable with that feeling in limbo. I was just fifty when I retired, and while I did not know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, I pretty much knew what I did not want to do. I didn’t want to be the boss, spending my life sitting in meetings working to bridge differences with people, most of whom had politi-

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Jane Se ymour cal agendas. For twenty-eight years I’d dedicated twelve to fourteen hours a day to my company, being completely on call even when I wasn’t working. I imagine I shouldn’t have been surprised when I didn’t quite know what to do with my days. First I found comfort the wrong way—I had lots of time, so I went shopping and spent too much money. Right away I could see that I used shopping as a balm because I was uncomfortable with my days, and I cut it out. I also read a lot of books, many of them about financial issues. Actually I became obsessed with the stock market, which also wasn’t a comfort, and it made me worry whether I’d have enough money even though I knew I did because of what I’d set up earlier with my financial planner. Finally, I decided to just let it all be. I stopped reading all those books, which I had decided was a barometer of how dissatisfied I was with my life. I realized I was thinking about myself too much, so I started doing some volunteer work. It was nothing fancy, and I didn’t become Florence Nightingale. I volunteered for the local hospital women’s auxiliary in their thrift shop. I told them I didn’t want any responsibility, I didn’t want to deal with customers, and I didn’t want to work in the front part of the store. So I specifically asked for grunt work—I would unload, unpack, and sort clothing two days a week. My only requirement was that the job be mindless, and that I wouldn’t have to make any decisions. It was a blast. I could go there, really put in a hard day’s work, feel I was contributing, and enjoy the people I was working with, but I didn’t have to carry my job around with me at home. I needed that. It was completely different from anything I’d done before. I was not representing anyone, I wasn’t the boss, the decision maker, the policy setter, or any of those things that I was burned out from doing. I knew I wasn’t going to be a volunteer stock clerk in my new life; the job wasn’t a stepping-stone to anything. It simply offered me a sheltered bit of structure that helped me get comfortable with the time between the old life and the new one I was hoping to make.

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My calm spot and my comfort people—St. Catherine’s and my family. Left to right: Sean; my sister Sally; me, my mother, Mieke; my sister Annie; Katie; and, in front, Kris and John. James was home in the U.S. caring for his ill parents.

Sometimes Comfort Just Means Getting Quiet Steve Bickel gets comfortable and does his best thinking outdoors. James loves to be in his garden—usually working, but sometimes just being there. Just like everything else that has to do with change, finding your personal spot—a place of comfort—is an individual journey. It’s a journey David and I took in 1985 when I was shooting the movie Jamaica Inn in the area around Bath, in England. He was with me, and we really fell in love with the area, and thought how nice it would be to have a home, some place of comfort, there. We’d seen a lovely country manor called St. Catherine’s Court, and we checked at a local agency about it, but were told that it was under contract, about to be sold, and 79

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that we couldn’t even tour it. So we looked at other houses, found one we liked, and almost put an offer on it. Later that day, I received my call sheet, which tells actors when and where to show up for work the next day, and the location where we were to be shooting was St. Catherine’s Court! We were thrilled. Once inside, David fell in love with the house at first sight, as did I. There was just something about it, beyond its obvious beauty. We found time to explore the grounds and learn a little about its history. The house itself dates from about 950, when it was built as a Benedictine monastery. Later it became a manor house. On the fourteen-acre grounds there is a tithe barn, where farmers used to come to pay taxes to the lord of the manor, and there are two three-bedroom cottages as well as a small church, built in 1200. The more we saw, the more we loved it. We went back to the agent and found that if we made an offer for the full asking price, the house could be ours, and we did it. That was probably the craziest thing we ’d ever done, but the house has turned out to be the most meaningful thing I own. The whole family gathers there, and everyone loves it—a visit is like a spiritual retreat. Everyone who stays at St. Catherine ’s says the same thing about the effect the house has on them—it just makes people happy. We are so blessed and grateful to have a place like this, but a place of comfort need not be grand or expensive. I make it a point to seek comfort in many places, most of great simplicity. To find yours, look around you—be aware of what is already in your life that comforts you. For me, the simple place of greatest comfort is always around water. Every view from my house is of water—whether it’s a fishpond, the swimming pool, or the ocean. Growing up as I did in London, far from the ocean, every one of our family vacations involved water—to the ocean, to follow a river, or to be near a lake. At home, my father always had a fishpond where he did his best thinking, and now I do, too. 80

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The elemental nature of water is comforting to many people I know. Leslie is one of them, and I find her story particularly touching. She’s a mother of three who has worked as a social worker and an educational consultant specializing in alternative placements for adolescents in need. She, like me, finds solace in her connection to water, even after life-altering crises, such as the time her young daughter was seriously injured by a delivery truck that had accidentally rolled down her street. When I’m in the midst of a crisis, as I was when Catherine was so badly injured, what helps me is taking a walk and going to the water. I would walk to a nearby lake to be surrounded by water and beach, and just listening to the water lapping the shore helped to clear my mind. It’s the most soothing, calming force for me—I have to hear the water. In the winter, when getting near water isn’t as practical, I take a bath, and that’s when I do my best thinking.

When I can’t get near water and I need its calm nature, New Age music tapes with sounds of water are helpful. I have used music with all kinds of natural water sounds—a thunderstorm, waves crashing, every type of sound that water makes. They center me. If I’m doing something I have to concentrate on, I’ll plug myself into this sound—have it playing in the background while I’m working. Instead of scattered thought—I have a laser focus. I find comfort in that sound—and in the focus that comes when I listen. What will it be for you? Where will you find your comfort when change comes upon you? Near water, on long walks, alone in nature, cooking, doing crafts at home, painting, signing up for volunteer work? So many choices . . . so many ways to move from one signpost to the next, from finding comfort in the midst of turmoil to approaching the very heart of change—which is letting go.

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John (left) and Kris love to ride at St. Catherine’s.

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Let Go of the Past— the Heart of Change Loosen Your Grip to Let Change In S o c i et y t r a i n s u s to have expectations—if I do this I’ll get that, if I work hard then I’ll get to go to this university, if I get this degree I’ll get this job. That’s living a planned life, and to be honest, I’ve yet to meet anyone whose future came out in any way like they planned. This signpost is about the very heart of change—the ability to let go of what is in order to see what can be. At times that even means letting go of the plans you may have made. Planning is not a bad thing, mind you. We all have plans, and we all need them. I have plans, too, but I try to be sure they are so malleable they can change completely in response to what actually happens in my life. And something always happens! James says, “God laughs when I make plans,” and it’s so true. Nothing stays the same forever. Life isn’t stationary; it constantly evolves. Circumstances change, human relationships change, even a relationship with God or a spiritual being changes second by second as you grow and as your understanding and needs evolve. It seems that when we don’t allow this to 83

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happen, we get stuck in a past we can’t let go of— and that is not only so destructive and negative, but it also keeps us from experiencing the life we have right now. How do we keep from becoming stuck? How do we get better at letting go when we need to? There are several ways I’ve found, and stories in this Playing Maria Callas in Onassis: The Richest Man in chapter will show the World was the role of a lifetime, but I also you how they’ve learned about death. worked for me and for others. First off, I’d say that having a positive attitude (and a sense of humor) about change is huge. So are trusting in oneself to know when the time is right to let go of the past, and then actually becoming willing to do so. Letting go has never been complete for me without acceptance of myself and of the situation I find myself in, which can be very difficult. A huge part of this is forgiving ourselves for actions or decisions we may have made, as well as forgiving those around us when we need to. Once we can do that, then we can be free to move on in life.

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There ’s one more way I’ve learned to let go of what needs to leave my life. It happens when an unexpected event catapults me out of my past, like it or not, and forces me to see exactly what I want out of life, and what I want to let go of. Exactly when and where an event like that occurs is really a matter of luck, I suppose, but it seems that most of us will experience such a jolt sometime in our lives. It can be a marvelous jolt, a happy accident that reveals to us what’s really most important. Unfortunately, more often than not it’s a terribly painful event or moment of fear that pushes us toward growth. For me, it has happened more than once, but it happened in an extraordinary way in 1988. I was filming a movie in Madrid called Onassis: The Richest Man in the World, in which I played the part of the opera singer Maria Callas. During filming, I had gone back to London over a weekend and had come back on Sunday evening really sick with bronchitis. Normally I can push myself through, but this time I really felt bad, so I called the producers and asked if they had a doctor working with them I could see. The hotel doctor examined me and said I indeed had very bad bronchitis, and she advised me that in Spain, for bronchitis, they typically give a high dose of antibiotic by injection first thing. I was so sick that I didn’t really question him, and the producers were so anxious to get me back to work right away that they thought this was a good idea as well. Within an hour a male nurse showed up in my room. He didn’t speak a word of English, and I spoke only a few words of Spanish. I joked with him in my few words and a type of sign language as he prepared the injection, saying how much I hated those needles, but that after having had children it wasn’t such a problem; I’d gotten used to them. He proceeded to inject the antibiotic in my backside. Unbeknownst to me, he missed the target—a muscle—and hit an artery or a vein. Immediately I had a

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huge reaction. My mouth and throat started to close up, I saw little white lights, my heart thumped a zillion times a minute, and I said, in my very broken Spanish, “Yo muerto! Yo muerto!” He said, “No. Es normal,” and I cried, “No! It’s not!” I remember that he argued with me while I was losing consciousness. The next thing I knew I had a view from the top corner of the room. I saw my bare backside. Curiously, I saw three syringes in my bottom and a man screaming and yelling on the telephone, and then trying to resuscitate me. I knew without a doubt that I had left my body. I was not in a panic. I actually saw a white light. I had no pain. But I saw my body there below me, and I said in my heart to Whoever or Whatever there is, “I have children! I need to be in that body! I have more to do in my life!” Somehow, I don’t know what the time period was—the next thing I remember was that I no longer had this outside view of me. I was inside me once again, but my body was out of control. Limbs were flying everywhere. People were holding me down, people were screaming. Somehow I grabbed the crumpled prescription that I saw next to my bed and fumbled it under my pillow. From the corner of my eye I saw a wastebasket with a syringe half full of blood. Something was clearly wrong. When we ’d all calmed down a bit, I made the producers and the doctor call my internist in America and describe what had happened to me and what medication I’d been given. They held the phone to my head because I couldn’t hold it myself, and he told me I’d nearly died, and that it was entirely possible I had indeed seen myself being resuscitated. “You had a potentially lethal injection because of the placement of the needle in an artery or a vein, and as a result, you have had anaphylactic shock,” he said. He also told me that after the initial injection I’d been given injections of adrenaline and cortisone to

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counteract the shock—hence the syringes I’d seen—and that now I was going to live. The worst was over, he assured me, and I should not worry. Eventually, everyone left my room. I was exhausted but I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t dare close my eyes—I feared that I’d leave my body again. I got someone to pick up the phone and dial my sister Sally, who works for an airline in London. I told her what had happened, and without even pausing, she said, “I’m on my way.” When she arrived, she climbed right into my bed and held me. Then she spent days, running interference for me with producers and doctors. When you star in a movie, a doctor always examines you first because the producers want to be sure you’re fit to do the movie, and you are insured against injury or illness. The English insurance doctor who had done my exam before the movie flew out the next day. He reassured me that I had not had an allergic reaction to the drug, but that, as my own doctor had said, the injection had mistakenly gone into a vein or an artery instead of a muscle, and shocked my heart. He then met with the producers, who wanted me to be ready to work the next day. “Over my dead body!” he told them. He stayed in the room next to mine, and he literally guarded the door and would not allow anyone but himself and my sister near me. He and Sally were determined to find some way to get me to relax enough to believe I could close my eyes and sleep and not die in the process. I returned to work a short time later. I was so grateful to be working again, and to my great joy I not only completed the film on time and on budget, but I won my one and only Emmy for that role. I have been at the brink of death—or have gone there and come back, actually—three times over. Each time I felt calm, but I also

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did what you could call praying or perhaps positive thinking, in which I made it quite clear to whoever would be listening that I hadn’t finished with my life quite yet. Each time I assured the powers that be that I had a lot more I still wanted to do; I was certain it wasn’t yet my time to go! It was about ten years after my experience in Madrid that the next near-death crisis occurred. We were in Puerto Rico filming a movie, The New Swiss Family Robinson, and I had a fever of 105 for five days running. The doctors at first feared I had some kind of incurable tropical disease, dengue fever. During my fevered days I hallucinated frequently, and was able to jot down notes when I awoke from one dream I had. In it I saw soldiers in World-War-I-style uniforms, covered in mud and climbing through the trenches. It was as if I was watching an old movie in black and white with a sepia effect. I could see the sprockets of the film, and it jumped and jerked as old films do. Suddenly there were close shots of gaunt, sad soldiers’ faces, one after another. Then just as suddenly the film stopped and there was a still picture of my father’s face. He was nodding like he used to do when we were children and came to him with every scratch and bump, and he was smiling as he said, “You’ll live.” Then he disappeared. The third time I came near to death was the result of a brush with preeclampsia I had during my pregnancy with Kris and John. Among other things, that experience taught me that whenever you embark upon dealing with any health issue, your body may have plans different from yours. I freely admit that to take on the challenge of giving birth at the age of forty-five is a major feat. I never once considered that anything bad could happen. I lived in happy denial. Had I listened to the advice of the doctors I dealt with, I might never have done it. I always had selective hearing when it came to the downside of that

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pregnancy. All I could hear was the optimism in my heart. All I focused on was the joy of having another child, in this case two, for James and me to enjoy raising. As it turned out, the emotional and physical challenge to my body was far more than I could have anticipated. Still, in retrospect, I feel the price was acceptable, even though I nearly died. My doctor and I had set our sights on my reaching thirty-six to thirty-eight weeks in the pregnancy before the boys were born, which is considered full term for twins. I was closely monitored by my doctor, of course, and I was taking my own blood pressure at home every day, because it tended to be a little high, and I was reporting daily readings to her office. One evening in particular, when I was exactly thirty-four weeks along, the reading was higher than usual. James and I were certain there was something wrong with the machine we were using—it couldn’t be that the reading was correct, we ’d decided. We kept taking the reading over and over, and still the numbers were higher than they should have been. Finally we called the doctor, even though it was the middle of the night, and she reluctantly let us stay home to sleep, but made us promise to be in her office first thing in the morning. As I fell asleep that night, I could only hope that the plan I’d had, to give birth to two healthy, full-term twins, was going to unfold just the way I’d imagined it. That’s not what happened. The children were fine, I’m so happy to say, but I was not. The next morning, my blood pressure was still up, and rising, and I was admitted to the hospital. I was on the verge of preeclampsia, although I didn’t know that at the time. Its cause is unknown, but women who have a history of high blood pressure have a tendency to develop it in the second half of pregnancy. If her condition is left untreated, the mother who has preeclampsia can suffer organ failure, seizures, even death. Fortunately, the cure for

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preeclampsia is the birth of the babies. Right after I was admitted to the hospital, on the day I was thirty-four weeks pregnant, that’s the decision that was made, in whispered conversations between James and my doctor in the corridor outside my room. The joy of having the boys was never removed from me. They talked quietly and calmly to me, and told me the boys were ready to be born right away. I never felt I should be panicked. I was feeling very tired, but I have to say that I was resting comfortably. I didn’t know my liver function was decreasing as my blood pressure was rising, a dire sign of approaching preeclampsia. It’s a testament to James’s and my doctor’s love and concern for me, and their understanding of just what a pregnant woman needs, and does not need, that I never knew the seriousness of the problem until after the babies were born that day by cesarean, and safely in my arms. Later, when my doctor and James explained how close I had come to developing full-blown preeclampsia and the organ failure that goes with it, I was shocked—and so grateful that all had turned out so well. It wasn’t the birth I had planned on, but the end result was a great gift, and I couldn’t help but reflect on how it isn’t until you have serious medical issues that you realize how valuable life is and how much we take for granted. I’m eternally grateful that James and I got so lucky under the circumstances. Each of these episodes has brought me as close as I could be to letting go of life itself. Even though I haven’t had to fully experience that ultimate letting go, being so close has taught me many lessons. Quite a few of those lessons, of course, have to do with death, and as a result I’ve let go of many preconceptions I used to hold about the subject. Very simply, I have learned not to fear death. I clearly understand that bodies are bodies and souls are in them for a while and then go somewhere else. Each time there has been a crisis, I have known that while I was not afraid of death, it just wasn’t what 90

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I wanted right then. I learned that before you die there is no more pain or panic; there ’s no emotion. You have a sense of serenity, and I also learned that you clearly hear and see every single thing that is happening when people think that you’re completely unconscious. So I’ve told all my friends and anyone who cares to hear that if they’re ever in a room with someone who is deemed to be in a coma or unconscious or has just died, be aware that the person sees and hears you clearly. I’ve heard that from a number of friends, including my husband, James, and Christopher Reeve, both of whom have had the experience of leaving their body and seeing and hearing everything that everyone was doing. I realize now that it’s all true— it’s a fact. Other lessons that came from these crises have taught me more about life. One clear thing that hit me after my experience in Madrid was that I absolutely wanted to be with my children. The only thing in life that mattered to me was that I, and no one else, would raise my children. I was married to David at the time, but strangely, I didn’t think about him. In retrospect, I think that reaction was a curious thing that could have been a clue to the fact that we didn’t really have a good relationship, but I didn’t see it then. I felt I wanted to let go of anything and everything that didn’t really matter to me. I so clearly knew you take nothing with you. Things are just things and we are custodians of objects until the time we are forced to pass them on. With my near-death experiences came the realization that the only things you own are your own feelings. I also realized that life was tenuous at best and that real friends and family were more important than fulfilling social obligations. And, I promised myself that I would give back to the world, because each time I was so enormously grateful to have been given my life back. In all, it finally seemed to me that many of us may actually need the blessing of coming near death, or of very nearly having to let go 91

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of everything, before we can really appreciate the true value of life. These experiences have certainly colored the choices I’ve made in my career. I’ve turned down many projects because they wouldn’t allow me to be with my children, or because they would require that I be away from home too long. I have perhaps overloaded myself at times with humanitarian commitments, but my desire to give back is so strong that I seem unable to say no to them.

Choosing to Let Go in Order to Let Change In Rejection is a particular type of change I’ve had to deal with over and over as an actor. It’s a huge issue for actors in particular, but in truth we all experience it. Everyone is rejected sometime by friends, by coworkers, by a lover. Rather than dwelling on the rejection itself, I’ve had to learn to let go of the rejection, and to put the emphasis on having a healthy attitude about what might be waiting around the corner. So many times I’ve seen that today’s rejection can allow space in your life for something brand-new you never imagined—another life experience, another job, another talent that may emerge. When you feel stuck, and you can’t accept a change that must come, it’s so important to remember that the real issue at hand is that you must clean your emotional house in order to open it up to change. Once you do, you can move through the signposts of change we ’ve been talking about: seeing honestly who you are, finding comfort in the midst of your turmoil, and then sorting out the good things you’d like to keep about yourself or your life, and identifying the negative things you’d like to acknowledge and let go of. Then you can be free to move on to other signposts you’ll need to visit as you live through your transitions. Sorting out and letting go of the past often isn’t easy. At times I’ve approached the process simply by gritting my teeth and keeping in mind something June Cash, Johnny Cash’s wife, once told me “Sometimes you just got to hunker down and press on!” Other 92

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times I’ve found that humor is one of the greatest assets—finding a way to have a laugh at the predicament you find yourself in. It may require the passage of time, as it has for me, but I’ve certainly laughed at myself and at any reluctance I might have to getting through a particular transition. I’ve even managed to find a bit of humor in the blinkered life I led before my split from David. Perhaps my heritage as the child of a prison-camp survivor has helped me more than anything else in being able to let go of the past when I need to. Like my friend Steve, I’ve managed to accept when things are changing and then move on fairly quickly because the bottom line for people like us is that there is so much life to be lived. While Steve and I learned this from an early age because of our particular backgrounds, I believe anyone can learn how to let go, to avoid living in the past. There are lots of ways to do that, and perhaps some that I’ve used will be helpful to you, too. When I’m in the midst of a huge transition, I seem to go through a process in order to let go of it. First I do a lot of thinking, and I acknowledge and credit what has happened. I feel and express all the feelings I have about the past. But then I make a conscious decision to let it go and get on with my life. It may not be pleasant, but I generally don’t try to fill the void that naturally comes with letting go of what cannot be. I’ve found that if you lose something and immediately try to fill it with something else, whether it’s a relationship, or a pet, or a thing, it simply doesn’t work. I think if you give it time and patience and leave yourself open to whatever your next experience will be, you’ll surprise yourself. I recall something Marjorie, a close friend of one of my friends, said about retiring from her company and creating a new life for herself: I give a lot of credit to a particular book written more than ten years ago called Managing Life’s Transitions: Making the Most of Change, by William Bridges.

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Jane Se ymour I’ve been a junkie for self-help books of this type, and when a friend passed it on to me, I found it became my road map. One of the things Bridges said that stuck with me was that in any transition, there was the end of something, then a space in the middle, and then the beginning of something new. Life isn’t always that tidy—the space between an old and a new life may be only a few days, or it may be nonexistent, or it may last for a year or more. But the key idea is that the space between the old life and the new is uncomfortable and the tendency is to want to leap into something to get out of that space. But if you leap too soon, what you go to ends up being just like what you left. The situation or job may have a different name but it will be just like what you left. Even though I’d read the book, I found myself doing exactly what Bridges described—twice! The first time was just before I retired. A colleague who’d left the company before me was starting his own consulting firm and wanted me to come aboard as executive vice president. I thought about it for two or three months, and then I agreed. Two weeks later, I read Bridges’s book and realized that if I took that position, I’d have a job that looked different but was really the same thing I’d been doing. Fortunately, my colleague understood when I withdrew. The second time was after I began taking some courses at a nearby university within the first six months after I retired. Professors learned of my experience and soon I was an executive in residence at their school of business, acting as a consultant to the school and to graduate students, in addition to doing some communications work for the school. It was an honorary post, and I committed for a year. After a few months it dawned on me that I’d done it again—I was recycling the same kind of big-business issues I’d lived with for twenty-eight years. After that, I made a point to reread the book every couple of

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Sometimes when I find myself on the brink of being pulled by the past, having not let go of it, I have a particular way of thinking about it. I like to remind myself that in the same way I wouldn’t want to hear a CD with a scratch on it playing over and over, I don’t want to hear my past or a critical inner voice telling me the same negative thing over and over. So I either turn down the volume in my head or am able to shut off the negative thoughts completely. I believe that we have only so much room in our brains and in our hearts. Why waste that limited space filling it with concerns about things that you can’t control? At the top of that list is the past. Following close on its heels is people ’s actions and reactions to you. Once I quite literally found a way to stop that terrible scratchy CD from playing and replaying. After my divorce from David, I had a brief relationship with a famous rock star who had a fabulous voice. When we broke up I was so devastated I would walk for hours listening to his CDs, feeling terrible, reliving our short romance, recasting our conversations. I was trying to figure out what had gone wrong, and just mourning the relationship, which is fine, for a time. After a while, and many talks with my girlfriends about it, I realized there was no more figuring out to be done and I had to truly let go of everything that had to do with him in order to move on. Playing his music over and over wasn’t comfort, as it might have been in another case. In this case, it was hurting me, like

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rubbing a sore spot. Even though the relationship was over, I had to make a conscious decision to let go of my feelings about it, and about the breakup. When I did this, memories of the positive parts came back to me, and this musician and I are now friends. And now, when I listen to his music, it evokes lovely memories of our short but intense time together. I also believe in verbalizing whatever it is you need to let go of as part of this signpost. Just as John James recommends in his Grief Recovery Institute workshops, you can talk to a therapist or to a good friend, but you need to tell someone what you’re struggling to let go of, to hear yourself speak it. Without that verbalization, you’re likely to have trouble getting it out of your system. What helps me the most in this regard is having honest friendships—with people like Steve and Sara. I hope you have cultivated friends like these. Of course it’s such a help in life in general, but it’s especially helpful during times of transition. Real friends are those who will listen to you and who are not afraid to tell you when you’re far off track. And you aren’t afraid to say the same to them. There ’s a shared level of trust that means none of us feels attacked by honesty, and none of us will attack the others, and we speak openly on issues that you can’t touch on with more casual friends. That doesn’t mean any of us is always right, but I can trust that they hear me when they listen, and they think when they speak. We learn from one another’s experiences, and after talking, we no longer bear our burdens alone. When we get together, it’s like a mini–group therapy, although sometimes our feathers do get ruffled! So letting go is not about giving up, it’s about choosing to move forward, to embrace change and reinvent oneself. James always reminds me of a quote from Stanislavski, who was a great acting coach and acting teacher. He said, “In your choice lies your talent.” I think it’s how you choose to deal with things that makes a differ-

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ence. And we can choose to go on and embrace changes as they come. While we can all do that, one person in particular springs to mind as a brilliant example of someone who has publicly reinvented herself over and over—Madonna. Like me, she is not afraid of change. She doesn’t stay in her past, she moves on and adapts. She ’s always fresh and surprising and different, and she does it with great merit because she ’s a professional and whatever she changes has been worked on to the best of her ability. Sometimes people seem to want me to live in the past, reminiscing endlessly about old projects—James Bond films, the movie Somewhere in Time, even the Dr. Quinn series—all of which I dearly loved doing and am proud of. I’m happy and grateful to audiences who love those roles, too, but I have to balance that. They were successful and meaningful parts of my life, and of movie and television history. I do realize new audiences are just discovering them and they are fresh for some people, which means I should not be too flip about saying I’ve moved on. But I don’t intend to get stuck in the past—I have already let go of it.

A Positive Attitude Helps Us Use the Hard Times Well So many times I’ve seen in my life and in the lives of those around me that it’s adversity that drives us, that forces us to be creative in our lives. A story comes to mind of a gentleman—I’ll call him George—an executive in a large corporation. He is an extremely well-respected man, and had worked for this particular corporation for more than twenty years. When the president of the company was getting close to retirement he announced that he would hire a new chief operating officer to replace himself. Everyone knew that George was the man most likely to succeed the president, and every-

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one, including George, wanted and expected him to get the job. At a dinner meeting, just at the moment George thought he was going to be offered the job, the president told him the company was merging with another company and that someone else would be the new president. I was stunned. I said, “That’s the end of my career.” He said no—I would still be in charge of the largest business unit. But I recognized it was the end in terms of upward mobility. It was the first time there was a ceiling, a limit to where I could go. My colleagues all had reactions similar to mine—tremendous disappointment, feelings of having been betrayed, anger, the whole gamut of emotions. More than anything I would have liked the opportunity to present myself to the board; then if they selected someone else, I could have accepted it. I would have been disappointed if they hadn’t chosen me, but I wouldn’t have been devastated because I’d had the opportunity. But I didn’t get that chance. Still, my colleagues and I had all been with the company for more than twenty years; we were loyal, career employees. Independently we vowed we ’d try to adapt—these things do happen in the business world—and every one of us made a commitment to try to make it work with the new president. However, he came in with a negative bias toward us that was very apparent. He was against everything we did. There were no senior management meetings—no give-and-take discussions. If you had new ideas, you were accused of being subversive, of derailing the company. We quickly saw a dual standard concerning what he told us about how we should treat others and how he treated us. For me, that was especially difficult. I treat people a certain way and had earned respect and goodwill in the organization. That fundamental issue was hard to reconcile—I can’t deal with hypocrisy. It was clear we also

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Remarkable Changes had a fundamental difference in our management styles. I like a participatory model, and he wanted no input. After a couple of months I knew that this wouldn’t work for me. Although I was only in my early fifties, I made my decision to retire. I told myself that I could be bitter, jaded, and cynical over this unfair circumstance, or I could tell myself I was simply going into a new life phase because I refuse to be bitter, jaded, and cynical. I decided that this was an opportunity for me to pursue what I’m interested in. There was a conscious decision on my part not to look back and second-guess what had happened. I know I can’t change the past; I can only control what happens in the future.

George is a wonderful example of how we can let go in order to let change have a positive effect on us—we must make a conscious decision to do so. The change that George allowed to happen in his life surprised everyone. As soon as I made the decision to retire, people told me they could see a change in my face and body language. They said they could see that I had made a key decision, and everyone assumed it was that I would go into consulting. After all, I was relatively young and I had a strong background. When I said, “No, I’m not going into consulting, I’m going to cook,” they were sort of in disbelief. But they were extraordinarily happy for me.

At last count, George has taken a couple of dozen cooking classes, including forays with his wife to classes in Italy and France. He ’s going to golf school, learning about digital music and photography, playing his guitar (which previously had stayed in its lovely case for thirty-five years). He ’s also learning to speak Italian, French, and Spanish, and he and his wife can now volunteer for

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Habitat for Humanity, as they’d often discussed doing. After decades of committing most of his waking hours to his company, his positive reaction to a terribly unfair situation—and his previous financial planning— have allowed George to let go of that life and do all the things he hadn’t had time for in years and create a rich life. One of my most painful lessons in letting go Haven’t we all known came when I was released from my role as Costanza in the Broadway production of a situation like that—a Amadeus. boss (or a spouse or a colleague) who is just so unfair or so hostile that we can’t bear it? It seems that such predicaments come to us all sooner or later. The truth is we can’t stop them from happening, but we can control how we react to them. I lived through this kind of predicament to when I got pregnant with Katie. I was with David then, and my biological clock was ticking loud and clear, awakening all these maternal instincts I didn’t know I had. At one point it was as if a loud bell rang and I knew it was time to try to get pregnant. I was thirty years old and David and I had set a wedding date for July of that year, because I was in a play on Broadway and wouldn’t be free until then. I was doing Amadeus, playing the part of Constanza, Mozart’s wife. The play is all about jealousy and genius. Mozart adored Constanza and had a very 100

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bizarre relationship with her. Eventually he brought them both down to abject poverty, misery, and hell. So it was a wonderful role! Looking ahead to our marriage, and so eager to have a baby, I was still somehow sure that I wouldn’t be able to get pregnant right off. So we decided I would stop taking birth-control pills in the spring, several months before our July wedding Of course, despite all my worries about being able to conceive, I got lucky straight off the bat. I was instantly pregnant—and overjoyed. I remember going to the theater and announcing it to my friends in the cast and crew. They were all thrilled, hugging me and telling me how wonderful, how great, how exciting. The next day I went in to work, and I thought everyone would still be excited for me. But no one spoke to me, not one person. I thought this was very odd. I got to my dressing room, and my understudy was sitting in my chair, putting on my clothes, putting on my makeup, clearly having just taken over my life. Nobody had called me in to talk to me, to tell me I’d been fired—nobody. There was a letter on the tray on my dressing table, and it just said that my services were no longer needed because I was pregnant. That was my moment to be stunned. About the same time I was supposed to do a commercial, an ad for a famous soap, I believe it was. The contract had been signed, but as soon as they found out that I was pregnant, the deal was canceled. I really can’t explain it. I thought it was unfair and unnecessary then, and I do now. With advances in our attitudes toward women, I don’t think either of these things would happen today. In fact, I know they wouldn’t. On Dr. Quinn, the producers simply had my pregnancy with Kris and John written into the script. We shot all the scenes we could that featured my character, Michaela, early in the season before I looked terribly pregnant. As my belly grew, my costume changed, and I often wore a duster, a loose overcoat that was 101

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typical of the time period, over my dress. I also stood behind tables or horses a lot! Interestingly, I wasn’t the only one who was pregnant during that season of the show. For a while there it seemed we had a real baby boom, and about a dozen cast and crew members either were pregnant themselves or had a spouse who was. My makeup artist, Lesa, and her husband had been wanting to start a family, and Sometimes things do work out! I had a as soon as I got pregmuch happier response to my pregnancy nant with the twins, when I was shooting Dr. Quinn. they were able to time her pregnancy to coincide with mine, so we ’d have the same maternity leave. Lesa’s son Luke was born a few months after Kris and John. We set up a separate baby trailer for my boys and Luke and their nannies so the babies would all have a clean, quiet place when they weren’t in strollers on the set. Kris and John became instant friends with Luke, and remain so to this day. They’re like the little Three Musketeers. In all, I was away from the Dr. Quinn set for about a month before the boys were born, and for another six weeks after they were born. Much of that time occurred during the holiday break we

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always took. The boys were born November 30, so when filming resumed in mid-January, I showed up right on time, babies and nanny in tow. Because my pregnancy had been written into the show, when I returned to shooting after the boys were born, I was playing Michaela Quinn about seven or eight months pregnant. In real life, I’d worked very hard to regain my prepregnancy shape quickly for an appearance I made because I was nominated for and won a Golden Globe award, and I admit I was pretty proud that I’d lost my baby weight already. But there I was on the set, wearing this huge pregnancy pad, to my dismay. During a break between scenes I once calculated that if I added being pregnant and playing pregnant together, I’d had a pregnancy that lasted nearly two years! But all those years earlier, life was different. The loss of my role on Broadway and the television commercial were particularly difficult to fathom because I had just had some great successes. Here I was in the biggest hit play on Broadway at the time, in which I had gotten great reviews for a part that wasn’t really that large. I had just had a huge success in East of Eden on television and won a Golden Globe for my performance. And the film Somewhere in Time had just come out as well. I was so excited about it, and although it did not receive good reviews, it got enormous public response. With the loss of my role in the play and the cancellation of the ad, I had quite suddenly gone from being the toast of movies, television, and theater to being very out in the cold. It felt as if the whole house of cards had fallen, and I admit I was devastated. David and I went back to California, got married, and rented a little tiny house, and I had every day free for walks on the beach. In all, I chose to look upon the next part of my journey as a brand-new odyssey, which is why, I believe, I got past the whole episode really quite quickly. I had a new experience at hand—

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pregnancy. For the first time in my life I did nothing, just literally contemplated my growing navel, and I gestated. I felt loving and I felt loved, and quite at peace with the world, calm and serene. It turned out to be an absolutely wonderful, wonderful time in my life—and I wouldn’t have had it if I hadn’t been fired. Even while I was in the midst of that time, I could see that the calm and serenity I felt were helping me to prepare for whatever was going to happen next. This gave me a sense of comfort in the midst of the turmoil and loss. Indeed, that unfair situation taught me some valuable lessons. While I’d desperately wanted to become pregnant, I’d also always feared that having a baby would so radically change my life that I’d no longer have any freedom. I was afraid that I’d lose my figure, and that I might lose my work—and indeed I had already lost some work as a result of the pregnancy. But along with my calm, positive attitude and time to think and reflect, there came the knowledge that deep down I was willing to embrace whatever changes came with the baby. As it turned out, having babies did not stop my career, and after Katie was born I found that I felt even greater freedom because I had dared to experience something huge. The most important, exciting, and emotionally rewarding aspect of my life has been giving birth to and raising all my children. Ironically, when I was in the hospital after giving birth to Katie, it so happened that I met a couple who later went through just such an enormous letting go of an old life to enter a new one. The woman in the bed next to me gave birth to her child twenty minutes after Katie was born. We met her husband because the next day, when both families were visiting and taking pictures, he needed some film and we gave them some, and began chatting. We all kept in touch, and years later this woman, now my friend, told me that her husband, who was a very successful defense attorney, was no longer happy in his work. He was very good at it, very clever, but he wasn’t satisfied 104

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with what he was doing. However, like George, he did love to cook. To make a long story short, she told me that he finally asked himself, “What do I really love to do, and what do I have to let go of in order to do it?” His answer was that he truly loved to cook and he had to let go of a lucrative law practice in order to start a restaurant called the California Pizza Kitchen. As the saying goes, the rest is history. Today, I’d wager he is among the happiest of people, and having a fabulous life—but not the one he ’d planned, and not one he would ever have predicted!

Trust in Yourself—and Know When to Let Go No one’s story is more dramatic than that of Emily, who, when she was in her middle forties, really was tested almost to the limit—and had no choice about learning to let go in order to move on in her life. During the span of a few years in the early 1990s, Emily’s elderly parents both died, her business went bankrupt, her house burned down, and her marriage ended. Her story reminds me that there’s almost a reverse way of thinking one has to cultivate in order to accept change and be the better for it. When Emily says, “The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my husband was having an affair,” it sounds crazy at first, but I understand what she’s talking about. While I was married to David, I never would have asked that we split up the way we did. But once it happened, I could begin to see that the relationship had not been a healthy one, and that it was ultimately for the best that we let go of it—even though it was tremendously difficult and painful. Sometimes in life, there is so much momentum to keep things going the way they are that for a time you just can’t change; you feel stuck. The energy to continue is so strong that even if the situation isn’t good for you, it’s hard to let go and stop that energy from carrying you on. That’s the way it was for me, for a long time.

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Jane Se ymour That’s why one of the luckiest things that happened was my husband having an affair, because it was not a happy marriage. He was my second husband, my third major relationship. When I met him I was totally in love with him, and he with me. I thought this is it—no matter what, I’m not ending this one. I was committed to stop moving from relationship to relationship looking for my happiness, for a sense of myself. I think that’s what I was looking for my whole life—a man to make me happy. But after a time in this marriage, there I was having the same problems I’d always had in marriage, and for a long time I thought, “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to leave.” When I am really truthful I think I created the situation that caused my husband to go have an affair. Still, I wanted to do anything to make the marriage work. We went to counseling, but he wouldn’t stop seeing this other woman—actually more than one woman. He wanted to be able to be with them and have me stay. I could have stayed—I tried, but it pushed me right over the edge; it was so painful I couldn’t do it. It took that degree of severity for me to leave. However, I was terrified. I was so scared when I got my own place—I was scared to be alone. I admit I was miserable at first, but once I’d made the decision to leave I also thought, “No matter what happens here I’m going to make this step—I’m going to learn how to live alone and trust myself.” I was very aware of being alone—going into restaurants alone, going to movies alone—feeling so obviously single. I remember thinking, “A woman on her own without a man—what does that mean, and what does it say about me?” What a crock! That’s how I felt then, but now I see I’m fine and happy alone, in or out of a relationship.

Isn’t that so true? After my divorce, learning to be alone, letting go of the idea of being part of a duo, was yet another change I had to 106

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work through, and it was a revelation to me. I realized I had never given myself the opportunity to discover that I could enjoy my own company. From the time I had my first crush at age ten, I’d assumed I’d always have a romantic interest in my life. The symbiotic relationship I saw between Mummy and Daddy was all I knew while I was growing up, and I aspired to it. I felt comfortable as part of a team rather than alone. After my divorce I realized I had to learn to be alone, too. That was one of the hardest things for me. It was a struggle for me at first, but like Emily, I persisted. My truth today is the opposite of what it was ten years ago, at the end of that marriage. Whereas then I led a blinkered life, emotionally dependent on someone else for my entire happiness and choices, now I am capable of being happy when I am alone. I love being a participating partner in life, but I have to be my own person now, to have my own space. Because of the changes I’ve been through and the things change has taught me, I can no longer live a life in which I am totally defined by another.

Willingness Is Part of Letting Go Part of the divorce meant losing my home in Montecito, and not knowing if I could afford another roof over my head because I was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was frightening to feel without a home. At the same time I realized I was willing to let go of the house, not to fight for it, because deep down I felt the house was poisoned for me. I truly didn’t want to be in the house of that marriage. It no longer represented security, but rather betrayal and trauma. When Emily’s house burned, she was, of course, not at all ready to leave it. But her ultimate willingness to let go holds lessons for all of us. The loss of having your house burn down with everything in it is almost too enormous to conceive of. Mine burned in the 1990s. My

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Jane Se ymour husband and I were out of the country when it happened. We ’d heard on the news that there was a wildfire raging in the countryside and it sounded like it was near our house, so I called to see if I could get the house sitter, but there was no answer. Then I called the general manager for my business, who lived five or six blocks away—no answer there either. Finally I called my ex–business partner. He picked up the phone, and when he realized it was me, he said, “Emily? Emily?” And then he began to cry. Not a good sign. Friends met us at the airport and took us to another friend’s home. It felt unreal—maybe because we were away when it had happened and we hadn’t actually seen our home burn. The police drove us to our old neighborhood and there was nothing to see—everything had burned to the ground. There were such conflicting emotions. Initially I felt this sense of adventure—we were staying in a hotel nearby where we ’d always wanted to stay, and that was actually kind of fun. At the same time there was this feeling of being utterly lost, that you couldn’t go home in any sense of the word. Of course we couldn’t go home to the house itself, but I also felt lost in terms of stuff: artwork, pictures, books, papers, things from when I was a kid. All of it was just gone. There was at the same time a sense of opportunity, of lightness of being, like nothing holding you. I felt as if I could float away. Those two things together created this unusual experience in my life. Going back and forth between feeling lost and feeling light—a very odd experience. Immediately my response to the loss of the house was, well, “I’m going to rebuild; there ’s no question.” But then all these other things started happening—my parents died and my marriage ended—and I just didn’t have the emotional strength to rebuild. I started looking for another house and I went with a real estate agent every Sunday for a year, but I couldn’t find anything. I think that was because I was trying to replace the same sense of beauty and peace I’d had in

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Remarkable Changes the spot where my house burned down. The insurance company gave me four years to buy a house or rebuild, and when the four years were up I still hadn’t found anything. But at that point I did have enough strength to rebuild the house. It’s a totally different house, a fabulous house. It’s in the same spot as the previous house, and I’m so happy to be here. Today, people hear I lost my house in a fire and say they’re sorry. I say, hey, don’t feel sorry for me! I live in a fabulous house that I totally love. I ended up with an amazing opportunity to build a house I love that came out of this painful experience. Others who also lost their homes in the same fire are crying years afterward and in misery for having lost their house and their stuff. I don’t want to pass judgment on them, but I want to say to those who have struggled with letting go of the house that burned, “Turn around and look at the rest of your life. The house is gone, but what’s taken its place?” For me, I was lucky enough to experience a spiritual awakening that I might never have had if I’d not lost nearly everything that mattered to me. The question to ask ourselves is always, “What’s new in my life? What’s come into my life in the space left by the house?” Some people are so focused on not letting go they can’t let anything else into their life. I just find that the saddest thing, when life is such a miracle. Maybe I am different from some people in that regard, but that’s how losing my house turned out for me—I came to see it as an opening in my life. I didn’t feel that way the very first minute, but if you stop and look, that’s what it is, and it’s a sign to me that life works. It does—life works. The secret is being willing to let go.

Acceptance Helps Us to Let Go and Move On Acceptance is generally important in life, but even more so during life ’s heartrending transitions. When you look at Emily’s story, you see that acceptance was paramount—she had to somehow accept 109

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what was happening to her before she could see her loss as an opening in her life for new experiences. I also think of acceptance as a huge part of being a parent, and being a parent has everything to do with using change well. When you become a parent and that infant is put into your arms, you really do not know who that creature is or what is going to happen to him or her. Parents don’t really receive handbooks on their children— and in any case, no one handbook could tell you exactly how your child will experience life. As a parent now of six children, including two stepchildren, I know that each is a miracle and each has his or her issues. Some, however, are almost genetically predisposed toward addiction. I’ve watched a young friend of one of my children struggle with both. I wrestled with the demon of drugs for almost fours years, from the time I was fifteen until I was nineteen, both in and out of rehab. I’ve had friends die, and I’ve had friends kill themselves because of drugs. When I was just short of nineteen, I bottomed out when a friend I’d known from rehab overdosed and died. It was an intense time for me, but when I emerged from it, I had decided that I wanted to live. I haven’t touched drugs or alcohol in nearly seven years now, and I have no desire to. Instead of doing drugs, I’m fulfilling my dreams. I wrote a film script about my experience at rehab and attended film school. I’ve written two more scripts, produced several short films, and I’ve been acting in films and working in development and production.

It’s a desperate journey to watch, and if you aren’t one who makes that journey, you cannot conceive of that mind-set. It would be impossible for me to understand doing anything to take me out of my consciousness—especially after my experience of going into

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shock in Madrid. I feel it’s so important to take care of the body— that vehicle in which your soul resides. I’ve watched young friends and the children of friends make the heartbreaking journey through drugs and alcohol, and through this I have learned quite a bit about acceptance, change, and letting go. As someone who always wants to jump in and help, I, like Sara, have been an enabler. When I was first accused of this, I was appalled. But then I looked more closely and I saw that sometimes, rather than helping too much, you have to let people work things out for themselves. You cannot make others think and feel the way you do. In short, you must accept that each of us has our own journey to make in our own ways. I’ll admit that it took a while for both me and Sara to understand this. But we got a clear lesson in what happened when Sara, who is a very good-hearted person, could not let go of the idea that she needed to help everyone, and accept that she could not control what someone else did. During her friend Erin’s long struggle with her addictions, she was working hard to learn how to deal with her in the best way, and she regularly attended support meetings for families of substance abusers. At one particular meeting, a woman stood up to speak and announced that her life was over and she was going to leave the meeting and kill herself. The rule during these meetings is that no one interrupts or comments on what the speaker is saying, but afterward you can talk to that person, exchange phone numbers, share stories, and get to know them. After the meeting, Sara did more than that. She swept this woman up and said, “I’m taking you home and I’ll cook you a fabulous dinner, you’ll have a lovely hot bath, and the snuggliest bed to sleep in. Then tomorrow I’m going to cook you a lovely hot breakfast, and then we ’ll go shopping and have lunch.” They talked and laughed and cooked, all evening. The next

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morning, they were on their way to go shopping, driving on the freeway, when without warning the woman opened the car door and threw herself out into the traffic! Sara, who was driving, grabbed for her with one hand and came up with an empty sweater. Meanwhile, the woman was rolling uncontrollably down the highway, cars dodging her. Eventually the woman miraculously landed in the median—bruised but otherwise okay. Fortunately, Sara wasn’t in a major car accident, and no one else was harmed. It was a horrifying experience, but the woman survived, and I hope she went on to get the help she needed. I know that Sara certainly realized she couldn’t fix this woman, and she understood that she had indeed put herself in harm’s way in her desire to fix someone else. While she could share, talk, and empathize, Sara—and I— had to finally accept that we cannot fix others. It was a hard lesson Sara had to learn about Erin as well. I remember her struggle when she first had to accept that Erin’s journey would be very different from her own, and that only she could make it. I made the legal arrangements and left her in rehab, stopped by a girlfriend’s house, put on a black-tie outfit, and went to a charity event with Jane and James. The contrast between what I was doing and what she was doing that night was such an out-of-body experience. I remember thinking I should be there with her. James looked at me and he said, “No, you have to let go of that idea and accept that she ’s where she belongs and you’re where you belong. She needs to get clean and sober, and you have an event to attend. You’re going to the event, and you’re supporting your friend Jane, and this is what you do. She ’s going to learn that there are consequences for her behavior, and that you have to go on living your life.”

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Remarkable Changes I knew that intellectually, but emotionally it was just against Mother Nature. This girl was like a daughter to me. Why wouldn’t I stay at the hospital with her since she was there for something as horrible as drugs? I just wanted to sit there and hold her hand and tell her it’s going to get better. And I know now that in one way that is the worst thing you can do, because that kind of sympathy is enabling.

Sara and her family are like an extension of my own family, and James, the children, and I have all changed as a result of being with her and Erin through her struggles. I think we’ve all become a bit more accepting in the end. James and I were discussing this recently, and he said, “You know, as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned how to accept things and just go with it. I still kick a little bit, but not as much as I did when I was young.” He explained how, many times when he didn’t get a movie he ’d wanted to do, for example, he ended up with something else that opened doors he hadn’t known about. Finally he could see that accepting what was offered, even if it wasn’t what he’d asked for, could be a blessing in disguise. It’s that kind of flexibility that allows us to let go of things when we need to. James’s comment brings to mind Marjorie, who planned an early retirement from a large corporation and struggled with redefining her life and herself. She realized that her flexibility really helped her adjust to the changes in her life. I describe myself as an infinitely flexible person because I see so many possibilities. So many people get so focused on doing “this” or “that.” Then anything that deviates from their idea, they cannot do. If you can be flexible, it’s kind of amazing: you’re wide open. Life can take any form, and there ’s a real freedom in that. I’ve found that there are lots of things that can work out if you want them to work out.

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Jane Se ymour I think there ’s a definite process of letting go; you can’t be fully formed in a new life unless you let go of the old life. It took me two years to let go, but I really have said good-bye to that corporate person—I’m a different person now. I also see now that it’s been about really looking at this change as a new chapter in my life, and focusing on life as a blank slate that I can make into anything I want.

When you can see life that way, every minute is exciting. A positive attitude, an open mind, new thoughts—all of these can put you on a path toward something. Who knows what it will be? In my life, I just keep putting ideas out there. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised that they work out; sometimes they don’t. And sometimes I find I’m interested in doing something different from what I thought in the first place. But accepting what comes and staying flexible enough to use it always leads to something. There are times when I try something new and it doesn’t always work out, but I’ve come to believe that it really doesn’t matter. When I first had the idea to paint, for example, I didn’t know if others would like my work. I didn’t really even think about that. I loved the process! The point was—and is—not whether or not it was going to work out for me. The point is if you don’t try to do the thing that draws you, then you’ve failed before you’ve started. You can’t know if you’ll be a success at something unless you try. Say you love chocolate brownies and want to bake them yourself, but you’ve never baked before. If you try, and they don’t turn out, then take a look at why they turned out lousy, and see if you can change it. If you can’t change it, then it’s time to accept it. I say to myself, “Well, that’s just not my thing,” and move on. I met a woman recently who has lived in an iron lung for a little more than fifty years. Her name is Dianne, and she is the most giving, warm, bright, and outgoing person you can imagine. She has written a delightful children’s book, and she talks about how her 114

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spirit soars even though she cannot move. The lesson I learn from this woman and from my friend Chris Reeve is this: One can be ablebodied but paralyzed by the mind. Chris and Dianne, on the other hand, are people whose bodies can no longer carry them, but who have nevertheless found a way to allow their minds and spirits to soar free, and they can become our guides and inspiration. I believe that truly remarkable changes happen in our lives when our spirits soar, when we allow our imagination and our creativity to grow and express themselves. And we all have that creative ability. Whether you write a few words to a friend or the Great American Novel, it doesn’t matter. Whether you draw a little doodle on a personal greeting card or conquer the international art world with your paintings, it really doesn’t matter. It’s not the result that matters: it’s the doing of it that makes the difference in your life. So many people I meet through the art world are those who love images, and buy them for their own collections. They always tell me they can’t draw or paint. I always tell them, “Yes, you can.” If they finally do take that pen they use to write the grocery list, and doodle and sketch patterns or images, and take themselves a little seriously, they invariably come back to tell me how much it changed them. They begin to see that we each have a creative side, and that no matter how hidden it may be, it is still there. The moral of this book is that you cannot effect remarkable changes in your life if you allow your spirit to be paralyzed. It seems to me that right now, with all the horrible things at work in the world, we have two choices. We can choose to go down in a kind of tunnel and live there, fearful of impending doom. Or we can make the most of life today. We can have an effect on the future with our creative energies by opening our souls to the endless possibilities surrounding us. That’s a form of acceptance, as well as a positive way of moving on. 115

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My friend Corinna, whom I’ve known since we were teenagers in England, was diagnosed a few years ago with breast cancer. I’m happy to say she ’s fine and healthy now, but watching her transformation as she was treated for the cancer was an inspiration. She managed to be at once accepting of her illness and at the same time she fought it with all her might. Her attitude toward her illness and all it brought said a lot to me about acceptance as well as letting go. I lost all my hair during treatment. While I hadn’t particularly wanted to lose my hair, it was surprisingly liberating. I had waistlong hair all my life—so vanity took a back seat—a change I welcomed! As it grew back in I had this new gamine look—very interesting. One of the things I learned is that change is good. I want now to keep challenging myself by trying to shed things I feel too comfortable with, not to settle into a single look or a persona that’s me. I think it’s good to shake ourselves up and redefine what we are and what we care about, and to grow!

Forgiveness–the Final Release When all is said and done, I absolutely believe that we must forgive in order to let go—either forgive ourselves for choices we have made, or forgive those who have wronged us. I had an inspiring experience concerning forgiveness not long ago when I visited a healer someone had told me about. I wasn’t sure I was ready for a guru—but my back was killing me. I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t walk without incredible pain. I’d had the surgery, done all the rehab, taken the pills, done the exercises religiously—I’d done all the things you’re supposed to do, but still I was in constant pain. So I went that night and thought, “Well, I’m

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not doing anything else this evening, so I’ll go there, I’ll just see what it’s about.” I went with an open mind. As I walked in, a little bit late, I was looking at all these people sitting in chairs and smiling beatifically. There’s this guy in robes who’s talking, and I’m not sure about this at all. After a few moments he turns to me and tells me, “Now we ’re all going to help you— what’s your problem?” I told him my back hurt. He never touched me—he simply went through a series of prayers that were all about forgiving—forgiving myself, my husband, my children, my father, my mother, and the generation before that, the generation before that, the generation before that all the way back to the beginning of time. That was the whole thing. He prayed about forgiveness on my behalf, and others in the room joined in to some extent. Everyone was focusing on me while he was doing this and I was saying the prayer as well, reading it from a piece of paper he’d given me. I kept thinking that this seemed kind of strange, just repeating these words. But then I found that when you say the words of forgiveness out loud, you actually do begin to forgive yourself and others and you let go of something you may have been holding on to, and then you feel yourself letting go of something else and something else. Just by saying these things, all of a sudden I started weeping, for no apparent reason. Nothing they said was very specific to me or to my needs. It was a feeling of great relief—a wonderful sense of freedom, of lightness. After the prayer was finished, he told me to lie down on the floor and I thought, “Oh no, if I lie down on the floor I’ll never get up again.” But I went ahead and lay down on the floor, and I was able to do it easily. He said to put my chin to my chest, to roll from side to side, and then get up. When I did so, literally all the pain was gone— I had no pain at all. I even moved freely.

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I don’t know—was this guy a miracle worker or not? Yes, I still get aches and pains from time to time—but definitely whatever the energy was that had to do with forgiveness, it had a profound emotional and physical effect on me. I haven’t said the prayer every day as the healer suggested. But every now and then, when I find myself not forgiving myself or somebody else when I need to, or I find myself talking about the hurt that somebody or something has caused me, there’s a little trigger in the back of my mind. It reminds me that I don’t want to spend my energy on this—that I should just acknowledge that such and such experience wasn’t good, or that it hurt—and move on. I know that forgiveness also changed the relationship between James and his brother when their parents were ill not long ago. James and his brother are very close, but still, with both of their parents being ill off and on, James had wondered whether his brother was really doing his part in caring for them or if he was avoiding it because it was difficult. Then their father, Stacy Keach Sr., took a turn for the worse and was terribly ill, and both brothers rallied to his side. It was my brother’s actions that showed me his character—being there at the hospital, making sure he went there every day. If he was out of town I was there; if I was out of town he was there. It really gave me a much deeper respect for my brother—not that I didn’t have that already, but I just saw a side to him that until this kind of illness presented itself I’d never seen before. I suppose we hope that as we get older our view of ourselves becomes more forgiving. Therefore it probably allows us to forgive others more.

James told me he felt he had to forgive himself for having thought ill of his brother earlier, and that this release changed him and deepened their relationship.

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Of course in other circumstances, when people seriously hurt you or do really heinous things to you and get away with it, I’m the first to admit that it’s very hard to forgive them. But I also know that it’s worth trying. Leslie, the woman I spoke of earlier who shares my feeling of calm around water, has also had extraordinary experience with forgiveness. It has changed how she has reacted to crises her entire life. When our daughter Catherine was two years old she was run over by a truck in front of our house and seriously injured. We lived on a little dead-end street and had come home from a walk. She was outside with our older daughter and a whole bunch of neighbor kids. I had run into the house with my son. In the meantime, a service van had come up the street and the driver left the engine running when he got out to ask directions because he was lost. While he was gone, somehow the van rolled down the street backward. It hit Catherine and dragged her to the end of the street, where the van hit a brick wall. When I came out of the house with my son I thought I was in a Laurel and Hardy movie because the driver was running down the street yelling at his van to stop. Someone else was screaming, “Call an ambulance!” I ran back into the house and called—not knowing who the ambulance was for. When I came out I saw that it was for Catherine, and I was freaking out, yelling, “My baby, you killed my baby.” She was just lying there in the street with blood pouring out of her ears and her nose. All she had on was a little diaper because it was August and a zillion degrees. I remember looking at her as she was turning gray and truly thinking she was dead. I felt such intense anger at whoever had done this. Then I looked up and I saw the driver’s face. It was filled with such total sorrow . . . and in that split second I knew I had

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Jane Se ymour a choice. I could spend my life really angry with this guy or I could put all that energy into being positive so my child could get better. It really was a click, and it changed everything. I just remember that man’s face—it was a freeing experience to make the choice to forgive him in that moment and release my anger. I look back now at my life prior to the accident, and I think of little things that I used to do, like holding a grudge. I would do that over stupid stuff. But not after the accident. I knew I didn’t need that anger and blaming in my life. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my life and this click. Because of it, lots of things sort of fell into place. It’s hard to describe, but I had heard that wisdom expressed by other people, whom I had at the time thought were ridiculous, and now suddenly it made me think, “Aha! Now I know what they were talking about, and this is a shift I needed to make.” I really do try to spend my life forgiving and not judging, accepting people for who they are.

After a childhood filled with surgeries, physical therapy, and doctor’s visits, Catherine is setting off for college, and Leslie is challenged once again to find a way to let go, to release into the world the daughter whose life once hung by a thread. It’s another form of letting go that Leslie wrestles with now as she reminds herself that while Catherine ’s life has been filled with difficulties since the accident, it’s also been filled with successes and achievements as her daughter has worked to overcome them. We can learn a lot from Leslie ’s original click. It reminds me that to truly see what someone else ’s life is like is to be able to forgive them. And in the end, that’s what we ’re left with. We certainly don’t take anything with us, but I believe we carry with us the goodness from the things we ’ve done for others and the forgiveness we’ve offered to ourselves and to those around us.

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These are all part of creating openings for change: cultivating a positive attitude, willingness to let go, acceptance of ourselves and our situation, forgiveness. They all help us to let go when we need to, when change is knocking on the door, or even when it has already burst into our lives! It’s all part of moving on so that we can imagine ourselves as somehow new.

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Left to right: Sally, Mummy, me, and Annie. We’ve all had moments of transformation in our lives.

4

Imagine Who You Will Become Transform Yourself

A t t h e t i m e s i n my life when I was at my lowest ebb, I have always needed to imagine something I could be or do to lift myself up. To me this always includes being with my children, and of course painting. But it also involves doing anything artistic and creative, making the house nice on a budget, coming up with things that are a little bit special but don’t cost a lot of money because I use my ingenuity. Whether it is the food I put on our plates, the birthday cake I decorate, or the party I organize without much in the way of funds, I’ve always imagined and created that positive vision of myself and of my life. It’s the way my whole family operates. It’s not about calling the caterer and calling the florist, or in a larger sense, relying on someone else to make our lives right. It’s knowing that I can do this or I can do that myself. I end up having not only a life that works for me, but also the pleasure of accomplishing a task myself. This signpost is about just that—how extraordinarily powerful our imaginations can be, and how vital they are in times of crisis. Several years ago I had the pleasure of watching my sister Annie go through a 123

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very large reimagining of herself. It was an amazing process of first envisioning who she could be, and then transforming herself from a stay-at-home mother into a skilled homeopathic healer who works all over the world with experts in conventional and alternative medicine. She learned so much as she initiated her own life changes, and I did as well, by watching her as she became a new person. I’m so happy to be able to share her story with you. I have found that once you imagine yourself changing, in the process a load of other things fall into place. Other people change the way they view you. And as they start to view you differently, they treat you differently. And when they treat you differently, you behave differently. And you just change—you become more yourself. To me the bottom line is this: It all comes down to self-belief. Just have the courage and the faith to take the first step and you will get such a big reward, you’ll be encouraged to take the second step. That’s how my biggest life change came about. In the process of bringing up my kids, I discovered that the nurturing side of myself—the healing side, if you like—became more and more apparent. People would come to me for advice when they weren’t well. I was also discovering more and more about alternative medicines and the true nature of health and disease just through having my kids get ill and finding that the standard answers I got from conventional medicine were not the real healing answers. I began to feel an affinity with alternative medicine. Eventually I got so annoyed at having all this excess energy and curiosity, and nowhere to channel it, that I started looking into taking evening classes in homeopathy just about when I was thirty-eight or thirty-nine. My children were about seven, eight, and nine. I thought, “Well, since people come to me for advice, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if I really knew what I was talking about.” So I started to buy books and I took a course on homeopathic first aid. I loved it so much, and I loved being

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Remarkable Changes back in studying so much, that I did the next course. When that finished I asked the instructor when the next course was, and she said, “Well, there’s nowhere further I can take you. If you want to pursue this, you have to go to college and become a homeopath like I am.” Funnily enough, my motivation to change came from discussions with people I’d see only once a year that somehow mark the passage of time in a special way. I remember the day my girlfriend from Canada said, in response to my always saying I wanted a more fulfilling life, “You know, Annie, I’ve known you many, many years. Every year when I come over, you’re saying that you really want to study, you really want to do something with your life. You realize that if you actually started it now, next year when I come, you’d have been doing it for a whole year.” I thought, “Yes, actually, she’s absolutely right. Absolutely right.” Sometimes it takes someone from outside your life commenting on what you are doing to help you see the truth of it. I could see, when my friend spoke, the truth in the old saying about a journey of a thousand miles beginning with a single step, and that I need only take that one step to get started. Perhaps I was also just ready to hear what she was saying. Perhaps I had gotten to a point in my life when I could begin to imagine what a different life would be like. In addition to that, every year between Christmas and the New Year our family goes for walks in the country near Bath where Jane and James have a home. And every year there I’d be trudging along in the snow, complaining. One year Jane and James and I were having our usual heart-to-heart, and I was describing how I can’t do this, I can’t do that . . . and how frustrated I was. I think it was the process of hearing myself complaining and blaming somebody else—finally I just thought, “Hang on. This isn’t true. No one ’s stopping me from doing anything. If I really wanted to do it, I can jolly well do it.” For years I’d used as an excuse this huge fear that it would be breaking up my marriage if I went off and did something independently and

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Jane Se ymour became who I really am. I was afraid that if I gained some independence my relationship with my husband would be adversely affected. Soon after this day, when I made my first tentative steps, and I visited colleges to see which one I wanted to go to, I remember thinking I didn’t want to rock the boat in my marriage; I didn’t want this to be a reason for my marriage to fail. I didn’t know how I could be independent within a marriage and a family situation, so I was very afraid. As it has turned out, studying homeopathy was an incredible process. It took four years of college classes plus more than fifteen hours of homework a week. It meant that I’d have to say to my kids, “Look, here’s your dinner. Eat it up, clear it away—I’m working. I’ve got papers to write, so that’s the deal.” And they were very respectful of that! My children and my husband became very proud of me. They began to see me differently, to have a sense of respect for me and pride in what I was doing. And it subtly changed the balance of power between my husband and myself in a positive way because he respected what I was doing, and I developed a clearer picture of who I was. There’s a huge amount of emphasis placed on earning ability and having a career. In the early years of my marriage, I’d put up with people at parties saying, “Oh, and what do you do?” When I’d answer, “I’ve got three kids,” they’d say, “Oh, that’s nice, and anyway I’m just going to go get another drink . . .” and off they’d go. Before I understood all this, I kept expecting change to come from outside myself. I kept expecting that I’d wake up one day and know what I wanted to do, what I could do that would be fulfilling. It never happened. What I did realize was that whether I did anything or not, I was becoming myself, slowly and gradually. I wanted to be sure the self I was becoming was the one I intended. All of this helped me realize that I could still be talking about the same issues in twenty years’ time. Looking back, I can see that very often you have to get so uncomfortable in your stuck place that change is a godsend. Sometimes we have to be put into a position that is so

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Remarkable Changes uncomfortable, so awful, so unbearable, so untenable. Then we have to say, “All right, what do I need to change?” But I have to be sure that is the issue, not “Oh, but it’s not fair, the world isn’t treating me right.” When I make change in my life I have found that first I sort of get the idea, then I frootle around for a while thinking, “Oh no no no no, I can’t, I can’t.” Then the more I start to believe in it, the more strength it gains. It’s almost like you can visualize how you’re going to be. Then when it actually comes to it, it all just happens as if rehearsed. There are people you think are going to offer the most resistance, and you’re waiting for it, and they kind of go, “Oh, okay. Good luck!” That’s really the way it’s worked for me. For years I assumed my husband would object if I went off to study; I thought he was going to say no, never, I forbid you. But when I told him I’d enrolled in college to study homeopathy, he actually patted me on the back and said, “Good luck, I’ll look after the kids. Well done.” If you want something, opportunities arise. By wanting something and visualizing it, you have to be alert to little flashes, little signs from the outside that are encouraging you. They are there—there ’s a connection between one’s dreams and one’s becoming. You just have to look out for it, and not just think things that happen that nudge you in the direction of the change you want are stupid coincidences.

The next chapter in Annie’s story is a light one. I think it’s a testament to the idea that one change begets another. Sometimes you put one toe in the water, and who knows? You may find yourself swimming with ease before you know it! Annie found that with all her work and traveling, her clothing budget was stretched to the limit. She thought she just couldn’t afford nice clothes. I, on the other hand, had a closetful, and wanted to share, but we weren’t the same size. Once Annie was on a roll in her new life, she simply took the next step in order to get what she needed. She went to Weight Watchers where she lives in England, lost ten pounds, and now is somewhat smaller than 127

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I—but she fits into my clothing. She now has a beautiful wardrobe for her world travels, work that matters to her, and a happy family. She did a complete makeover of herself, from the inside out!

The Power of Imagination Annie ’s transformation has been inspirational to me. Her story is a great example of how, when we truly do want to change, and when we can see ourselves both as we are and as we might become, we are indeed able to initiate change. In fact, I would say that we must see who we truly are, and imagine who we can be, before we are able to initiate change. Annie, like all of us, came to know who she was in stages, and she looked to others to help her do this. In the next chapter, I’ll talk more about connecting with others in order to come to a remarkable change in your life, but as with all the signposts of change, there’s always some overlap. It’s difficult to draw a line separating the issues of how we connect with others, and how we can better imagine, or reimagine, ourselves, because the one has so much to do with the other. In Annie ’s case, she first saw that she had a special kind of empathy for people around her who were suffering or ill, or who were dealing with issues such as postnatal depression, or who had a family member who was dying. Once she realized that she was naturally quite empathetic, she noticed that not everyone possessed this quality and that it was essential to healing and the practice of homeopathy, which interested her greatly. Still, though she had begun to see herself and her natural abilities more clearly, she felt uncertain as to whether she really could be a homeopathic healer. She began asking all kinds of people what they thought she was meant to be doing in her life, how they saw her abilities being used. I believe she was really looking for a sign to guide her, which can be a great help. A sign can come from a trusted friend’s truthful comment that we take to heart, or it could be the result of a sincere prayer. Somehow you are filled with an overwhelming belief 128

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that yes, this thing you’ve been interested in, the thing you’ve been asking for guidance about, is, in fact, your calling. In my sister’s case, she actually spoke with a famous psychic, who was herself a healer. When Annie asked if she, too, might be a healer of some kind, the woman said, “Absolutely, yes.” That affirmation gave Annie the freedom to open the door, to try to achieve her dream. We all so often need permission to get on with what’s important in our lives. But I do believe that if we take the time to look, deep down inside ourselves, we already know what we can do and what we do well. The key may be in recognizing those abilities because they may not look spectacular at first glance. For some, it may be as simple as being naturally neat, and tidy, and organized. That’s a huge ability that some people have and others don’t, and it’s something you could put to use in your life in many ways, from simply organizing your days more efficiently to creating a way to help others do the same. Perhaps, like Annie, you have the ability to understand other people’s emotional and physical needs. Or perhaps, like a certain high-powered businessman I met recently, you have the ability to create a viable business. This man had been incredibly successful, and had consequently retired at the age of forty-five. However, he could not get used to the extended leisure time he now had. After trying really hard, for three years, not to do anything, he realized that just was not who he was. He finally understood that his joy was not in the amount of money he made, or in what he could do with the money. He just loved doing what he was capable of doing, which was making things happen. Now that he has, in a sense, reimagined who he is, this businessman is at work once again, helping people who have good ideas turn them into businesses for themselves. He’s using his ability and his knowledge in a new way, and finding it quite satisfying. In a similar way, Annie reimagined herself as a homeopathic healer. She allowed herself to use, in a new way, her natural abilities of being a sympathetic listener and an analytical person who truly hears and 129

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processes the information she receives from people. Those abilities, plus the knowledge she gained from her schooling, have allowed Annie to live the life she imagined. I think, though, that you have to want something enough in order to make a change. And if you do want it enough, you also have to go about making the change in a fairly organized way. You have to give yourself a goal, an image of where you’re going. It has to be a tangible image, whether it’s a ten-pound weight loss you want to achieve, or exercising more in order to bring your blood pressure down, or applying to college in order to get started on a new career. Imagine for yourself a small, positive goal at first, and as you achieve it, acknowledge yourself for having achieved it, hang on to it, and then imagine another small goal to achieve. Imagining these goals is so much better if you can do it with a group of people who are trying to do the same thing. You’ll have more reassurance and a sense of community, you won’t feel you’re alone, and you won’t get distracted and lose your way as you work toward your goal! You reap benefits from being part of a community, and the community reaps benefits from your participation as well. However small the goals you’ve imagined for yourself, as you achieve them, you can share that success with others who are struggling with similar issues. The knowledge that you managed to do one small thing can encourage someone else to feel that perhaps they, too, can achieve their goals. And you know, the biggest thing of all as we are reimagining ourselves, challenging ourselves with new goals, and facing unrelenting change in our lives is to have a sense of humor about the whole darned thing! There are times when it all feels so serious, I know, but at some point, if you cannot laugh at your own situation, then you are in deep trouble. Let’s say you’d like to change your habit of overspending with your credit cards. Make up your own internal signal to stop yourself, and be a little light about it. Imagine what you’ll do ahead of time. You know you’re going to have to catch your hand as it goes for 130

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the plastic. You’ll just have to say, “Oh! Oh no! There’s that crazy hand out again—don’t want to do this!” The point is, instead of being mad at yourself, or driving yourself crazy because you’re not perfect, try laughing at yourself. As you reach for the next doughnut, imagine yourself saying, “Now, which part of my anatomy do I actually want to stick this on? Maybe I should try it on first inside my underwear and see if it fits, and whether I like that bulge. Do I really want that doughnut here—or do I actually want two, so that I can enlarge the hips symmetrically?” There are so many ways to lighten up, and I think that if we do, we can actually imagine—and make real—significant change in our lives. We all have our foibles—habits like overeating, undereating, overspending—that we’d like to change. Sometimes, I think the only thing that keeps us from changing is that we amuse ourselves with our foibles. By that I mean that the very fact that we have a certain habit is a distraction, and our attention tends to focus on the distraction rather than on what we could be doing about it. For example, if overeating is the habit you’d like to change, instead of taking action, you waste energy telling yourself negative stories: “I’m so fat, I’m never going to get into those jeans, so I’m not going to buy those jeans. Poor me. I can’t have gorgeous clothes because I’m too fat.” After a while, when you’ve told yourself that story enough times that you know you really don’t want to hear it anymore, it’s time to change. Here ’s what I do: I imagine a different way, a different story. I tell myself, “I’ve heard that story, I’ve lived that story. It’s no longer amusing or distracting, and it’s not something I want to hear myself say again, ever.” As you find yourself about to go back into that old habit, fire up your imagination again, see the thing you wish to be, and remind yourself, “I’m not going back there.” When I was fighting my weight, years ago when I was in my twenties, I used another trick. I realized that the more I thought about the situation, the worse it got. The more I felt I had put myself on a diet, 131

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the more I obsessed about food, or rather, about not having food. However, I found that if I put knitting needles in my hands, or if I was embroidering, or even now, if I’m painting, my hands are busy, and it doesn’t occur to me to put something in my mouth. When my mind is focused on being creative, the time flies by, and suddenly I think, “Oh my goodness, I haven’t eaten anything for three hours.” There are, of course, more serious foibles, which can become addictions. The habit of over- or undereating can become an eating disorder; smoking and alcohol or drug use can cross the line into abuse and addiction. These are far more serious situations, which require more than your own reimagining of your life in order to change. Fortunately, there are many different ways of handling even these predicaments. Obviously, and very successfully, people have realized that twelve-step programs, such as those used by Alcoholics Anonymous, are very effective. You, of course, have to first acknowledge that you have a problem, and that’s a huge stumbling block for people who don’t want to make that admission. But once you do acknowledge that you have a problem, you are on your way toward change, particularly if you can work with a group of people like yourself. The truth is, we can each create a much more fulfilling life by seeing our opportunities, embracing those possibilities, and doing all we can with them. I believe we can choose to be open to receiving what is happening around us in our own lives—this is vital. Our opportunities come from looking around and having eyes and ears and hearts that are open to what is there. Like Annie, who saw that her love of healing could lead her to a new life, I believe that if you can see it, there is so much opportunity around each of us that it’s almost overwhelming. But we do have to be able to see it, and that’s where the power of our minds comes in. Remember Emily, whose husband was having an affair and wanted her to stay in the marriage anyway? She has two brilliant examples that describe how we invent our world in our own minds—and how, understanding that, we can begin to change the way we see things. 132

Remarkable Changes For three months after I found out my husband was having an affair, it was all I could think about. As a result, every single day of my life I was sick to my stomach. Then suddenly there was a day in month four when everything was okay and I stopped being sick. No circumstances had changed—my husband was still having an affair. But something had changed in my mind, as if there was a switch in my brain that had flipped, and I said to myself, “Whoa. I am out of this relationship.” As a result of that, my life changed. It’s so fascinating to me that both of my experiences, the day before I knew I was done with the relationship and the day after, were absolutely real to me, but absolutely different from each other. I experienced two completely different realities based only on how my mind saw them. I have also had experiences where I’ve created complete scenarios in my mind along with complete body experiences of something being true, which was in fact not true at all. For example, a child is lost and you imagine that she’s dead and you experience the total, complete emotional and physical (for you) reality of this being true—and of course it’s not.

Which mother among us has not imagined her child gone missing or seriously injured—and later found the child perfectly safe and sound at a neighbor’s—and felt that hole in the pit of the stomach, the dropping heart, and the mental and emotional anguish? That’s the power of the images our minds can create. If we understand that we have that kind of power to create our own reality, isn’t it all the more important to really try to focus on creating positive images about ourselves whenever we can? We all develop some kind of vision of ourselves, and I believe we can choose to make it a positive image rather than a negative one. How we do that is unique to each of us. I visualize myself doing things I want, but I don’t think I visualize having to be a success in anything I do. I just visualize myself accomplishing the task at hand in the best way I can, 133

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whether it is cooking spaghetti that night in ten minutes, or teaching the kids how to play table tennis between homework and dinner, or even seeing the way to handle my youngest sister Sally’s fiftieth birthday, which we celebrated recently. Instead of going out and spending money on huge floral arrangements, my sisters and I just ran out in the garden, saw what was blooming and gathered those flowers, then picked up a bunch of other flowers to complete the arrangements. We got a couple of other friends together who don’t really do flower arranging and said, “Hey, this is how we do it, let’s go!” There ’s a sport to seeing things this way—in seeing the good and positive aspects of all kinds of events—and it can be fun. It’s more appealing to me than pining over what I can’t be or don’t have, or contributing in any way to a negative image of myself. I think really, the key for me is not visualizing what I’ve lost, but rather visualizing what I’d like to do or be today. I cherish the simple joys of living in the present—and keeping my eyes and ears tuned for what can be wonderful now. Maybe you have a signature dish—like Sara, who makes a carrot cake that everyone goes nuts over. I have a salad dressing everyone loves. Whatever it is that you can do that’s special, or that’s different— be alert for it and at the very least find the pleasure in your own creations. Who knows? Maybe, like Annie, you’ll find something that you love to do, take it several steps further, and figure out how to make a living at it! But you won’t if you can’t see it in the first place.

Learning a Positive Attitude All of this is, at bottom, about having a positive attitude so that you can create this positive image of yourself. I think James must have acquired his own positive attitude from his father, Stacy Keach Sr., who was a director and later an actor. He’s eighty-eight years old and retired now, but many people remember him as the older gentleman from the Bird’s Eye television commercials.

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Remarkable Changes Being positive—I think it’s the only way you can be. If you don’t have a positive attitude, nothing’s going to come your way. That’s one of the important ingredients in my personal philosophy. I came by my attitude by compensating for a handicap: my father died when I was nine years old. My mother was suddenly a widow with a family to support and not a lot of money. When I was in high school we lived in Chicago, and I was in the school’s ROTC, as the commanding officer. When I was about to graduate, my superior officers said they’d get me an appointment to West Point. I loved the idea, but I’d performed in a lot of plays in high school and I wanted to work in the theater. So I was given the choice of either being a West Pointer and having everything paid for, or working my way through college and helping support my mother and being in the theater, where I’d have a better chance to starve. So I decided on the starvation trail—I went to Northwestern. But I had a positive attitude, so it worked out.

Grandpa Keach has taught James and me that it helps to visualize yourself as forward thinking and positive—and prepared for things to work out rather than worrying and looking over your shoulder, second-guessing the choices you have made. There is a wonderful book that’s been popular lately called Who Moved My Cheese? When I read it, what they had to say was so right, I just had to laugh. My “cheese”—the thing most important to me at the moment—moves, and even disappears, all the time! However, never in my life have I stuck around waiting for my cheese to come back just because it’s always been here, it’s supposed to be here, and anyway it’s mine and that’s the way it is. That’s just never, ever been a part of my consciousness. Accepting change as it comes, initiating it when I need to, having a positive attitude about it, and expecting things to work out have always been the way I live my life. It may come from my Jewish roots. There’s an idea in that culture

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that you should become a barber or a doctor—or some profession that will always be needed somewhere—because eventually you’re bound to be chased out of your environment. I’m not in fact a Jew, but that is part of my cultural heritage. Perhaps, on the other hand, it comes from my mother, who, as a prison-camp survivor, had to deal with so many changes that she just became more self-sufficient and more focused on the present. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her look back at her past and say, “Well, what I had isn’t anymore.” I don’t think I ever saw my father do that either. And I don’t do that myself. All of this brings to mind George, the executive who made a new life for himself when he did not get the promotion he and everyone else expected. He is one of the most positive of men, even though his early life would not lead you to think he would be. George is a fabulous example of how we can become what we can imagine about ourselves—and that imagining something good is a choice we make. When I was an infant, my mother relinquished me, thinking that when her situation improved, she would reclaim me. She and my father were very young when they met, and they shared a doomed romance. His parents, who had more social standing in their little town than my mother’s family, looked down on her, and wouldn’t approve a marriage. When she became pregnant, his parents forced him to join the army. It was during World War II, and my mother and her extended family all worked full-time to support themselves, so she had no resources to take care of an infant. As a result, I grew up in foster homes and lived with about ten different families during the course of my childhood. All my foster homes were on farms, where, in my experience, foster kids were treated like indentured servants. The families didn’t seem to want kids—they wanted workers. A lot of children I knew in my situation went from foster homes to prison. I really think my positive attitude was key to the fact that I eventually became the number two person in

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Remarkable Changes a three-billion-dollar company. It’s all about attitude—we can control our attitude and how we react. That’s what I learned as a child. Ideally, children have people around them who provide positive role models, but I had just the opposite. The adults around me were negative role models. As a foster child, I wasn’t allowed to have opinions and to speak. There was always verbal and emotional abuse, and I decided I didn’t want to be a person who would abuse others. Eventually, I found my own positive role model, in the form of a book. My fundamental philosophy of life came from reading about the Knights of the Round Table—it was a huge influence on me. I liked the idea of doing good rather than hurting people. Since I wasn’t allowed to speak, I spent a lot of time observing—I watched individuals and group dynamics. I watched people make excuses and conscious decisions to blame others, and I didn’t want to do that. I saw there were things I could and could not control. The lesson I took was that I had to recognize those things I could control and learn to live with those I couldn’t. I also learned early on to accept responsibility—if I wanted anything I worked for it. And I learned not to make excuses, and not to blame anyone for anything. My mother eventually married. She thought her new husband would adopt me, and that she would take me to live with them, but he refused, so she was stuck. Even in the face of this, I learned that it’s all about attitude—making conscious choices to be who we are, to be happy or unhappy, and taking responsibility for what we can control.

What a terrible, unfair situation George grew up in. But how inspiring that even so, he was able to imagine himself as a good person, like the knights he read about, and that is who he became. What a testament he is to the strength of the human mind and spirit. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but when I see stories like his and so many others, it seems to me that adversity really can push us to see the 137

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best in ourselves. From that, we can change ourselves to meet the challenge at hand. But most important of all, his story reminds me that we do have a choice about the changes we make and the kind of people we become. Sara always says that everybody has something they must deal with, something that produces the pain that moves them toward change. It could be cancer, it could be Alzheimer’s, it could be a car accident. Her something was Erin’s substance abuse. She, like George, wanted most of all to make good come out of what had been so painful for her—which is why she chose to have a career working with people in recovery.

Adversity Can Produce Great Change They remind me of two other friends: Deborah, who lost her vision to complications of diabetes, and Corinna, who survived breast cancer. Both found that the difficult things that happened to them made them reassess their lives in ways that eventually brought a kind of fulfillment they wouldn’t have predicted. You might recall that Deborah at first couldn’t imagine herself as a blind person and spent a year living with her parents and mourning the loss of her vision. She finally began to accept who she was—a blind person—and imagine a new life for herself—as an accomplished blind person—when it looked like her condition had gotten even worse. After my second eye surgery, I was left blind but with a tiny bit of lousy vision in one eye. It was as if I could see through a pinhole at the center of my eye, and if I looked out of the margin at the bottom of my eye, I could also see a little, but it was blurry. During that whole first year I didn’t really know how to use that tiny bit of vision, but I was told that the longer you keep the small amount of vision you may be left with after surgery, the better your chances of keeping it forever. Even though I wasn’t using it, I did check frequently to see if I could

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Remarkable Changes still see in the margins—it fluctuated, so I was constantly checking. I was afraid I’d go to sleep at night and wake up with nothing. Then one day I noticed a change in my vision—the pinhole in the center was gone. It was March 13—exactly one year since I had woken up blind. I had a regular appointment coming up with the eye doctor. Suddenly I just knew I would walk in to that appointment and walk out again, and I would still be me. I had lost more vision, but nothing had really changed, and I knew that no matter what the doctor told me, I would be okay. Sure enough, he told me I had lost more vision—and I was okay, I wasn’t upset. That was the trigger that let me imagine myself as a blind person, and my life started again.

I think that when you reach the bottom, anything is possible. Somehow it’s an amazing clearing deck, and as painful as it can be to reach the bottom, in a certain way it’s the most useful part of a crisis. A lot of people are stuck in ruts they can’t get out of, and until things get bad enough they can’t seem to clear the deck and say, “Okay, now who am I really and what do I really want?” That, in a sense, is what happened to my friend Corinna. When she was forty and on holiday with her husband, she found a lump in her breast while putting on suntan lotion. After she got home she saw a doctor and was diagnosed with breast cancer. I watched her assess her life as she made that difficult journey through her illness and back to health. What she seemed to do first was to take a look at her past, her present, and what the endless possibilities might be for her future, should she choose them. Especially when it’s about your life and death, and you are that vulnerable, you really must take a clearer look at who you are. That’s the lesson I learned from Corinna, which is really the prevailing message here: so often it’s not until the chips are down that we actually start to look at the very foundation of our lives, to really see who we are, and in that process we can reassess and reimagine our lives. 139

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Patience to Wait for Your Vision of the Future Everything we’ve been talking about takes time to develop and patience to allow it to do so. Whether you’re initiating change you’ve longed for, or reacting to something that’s been thrust upon you, it always takes patience to handle the ensuing turmoil. No one gets to know the end of their own story ahead of time—and in the meanwhile, we each have no choice but to be patient while we figure out the next step in our own stories. Losing my patience with people is a constant struggle for me, and it offers loads of opportunity for learning. But while I’m not a particularly patient person, I do take lessons where I can find them. One terrific place is from friends like Deborah. Patience has been paramount to her, both in her own process of imagining a new life for herself and in the smaller day-to-day skills her life requires. Being patient with yourself is so important. I’ve sat on the floor and figured out how to work electronic equipment. I put together a computer desk by myself. I couldn’t read the instructions but I spread all the parts out on the floor and felt them to figure it out. I knew my husband wouldn’t have any luck with it—he’s not mechanically inclined! I once replaced a toilet seat alone—and he caught me in the act. I just knew I could figure it out—patience was what it took.

That’s one kind of patience, and a very important one that I think has colored Deborah’s life. Marjorie showed another kind of patience as she made the transition from business executive to whatever she would be in her new life. Her predicament was familiar to me in that she had to try hard not to fill the void too fast—what I’ve seen to be true in relationships is also true in the world at large! If she wanted to truly make a change in her life, she had to consciously practice 140

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patience in not jumping at the first job or volunteer position that came along. Soon enough she found that whenever she did jump, it was into a position just like the one she had just left. At the same time she was trying to imagine what a new life would look like. And while she never second-guessed her decision to leave the corporation, she found it hard to really see what her days should look like, exactly. After years of getting up in the morning and putting on a business suit and going to the office, suddenly there was this freedom that was wonderful, but really, what do you do each day? We ’d each answer this question differently, of course, but as Marjorie struggled to answer it for herself and imagine not only what her life but each day should look like, she started a process of questioning to help her find a focus. Asking myself the questions about what I did and did not want really helped me narrow down my options. I tried to imagine myself living in that house, in that town five years, ten years from now, and I could see that although I didn’t hate it, that wasn’t where I wanted to be. So I started thinking about where I might want to live, and I made a list of places that appealed to me. Finally, I came up with a plan. I thought, “Yes, I’ll move, and these are the conditions under which I’ll move.” One of the conditions was that unless I could figure out a way to move to a particular town I’d picked out, I wouldn’t move at all. I got to a place where I knew that if I couldn’t go there, I was willing to stay here. Being that specific was a kind of acceptance as well as a letting go. I was no longer wrestling with an endless number of options. That’s when my whole image of my life changed. Choosing a place I’d like to move to, and working on how to get there, was like running toward something. Before, when I’d thought about moving, it felt like I was running away from something. As it turned out, eventually I moved to the town I’d chosen, and it has been wonderful. But without

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Your vision of your particular future may not occur instantly, and you may, like the rest of us, need to sort through some things. As with Marjorie, there’s often a load of thinking and considering that goes into the waiting. It all will take time, but change will come. I recall what John James said once about how long it sometimes takes to realize real change. After his infant son died, a change happened in him about six months before he actually became aware of it. “I’d find myself reacting a certain way to something and then realize that six months before, I’d have done that differently,” he said. Many changes that come in the form of a crisis can seem to happen quickly, and some of us adapt to them more quickly than others. But in so many cases lasting change and a deep shift in attitude just takes time. Emily has remarked that she sometimes thinks change has taken an inordinate amount of time for her, even though the change-causing events all happened in a few years’ time. Sara always reminds me that in her work, in recovery counseling, she sees people move in such baby steps, but even so, they all do get somewhere eventually.

Removing the Fear to See the Way Our imaginations are so powerful, and can do so much good in our lives. However, there are times when our imaginations work overtime, and fear can be one of the unfortunate by-products. Fear is the great stop sign that can halt change—or make it far more painful than it needs to be. A woman who has written brilliantly about life, Rachel Remen, said that “Fear is the friction in all transitions.” Change so often takes courage, and fear so often provides the sticking point that overpowers courage. My belief is that we don’t have to give fear that much power. As James says, fear can be just another trick of the mind. 142

Remarkable Changes I know how it can go. Sometimes fear takes over and you’re afraid you’re never going to work again as an actor or a director. Someone told me once that we shouldn’t honor fear so much, that fear is just False Evidence Appearing Real: F-E-A-R. Now I look back and see that a lot of things I was afraid of I didn’t need to be afraid of. I like to think that as we get older we can—and often do—stop being so fearful of things like change. I think those who become more fearful are those who are not willing to change. They’re not willing to go for it. I want to go for it, whether it’s with my garden or my career. Whatever it is in life, I just want that experience. Sometimes it’s painful, but it’s what makes you grow. I guess what makes me able to carry on in spite of whatever fear I may have is the satisfaction and joy that I get when I succeed in finishing something after a long hard struggle. It’s sometimes so hard, but then you look back at it and go, “Wow, I did that.” Whether it’s planting a row of vegetables and seeing it grow or raising a kid to graduate from college and have him or her become a fine, loving person. Maybe it’s having the simple courage to go to the hospital day after day when your parents are sick, and putting your head down at night and knowing you rose above whatever fear might have stopped you.

There are real things to fear, yes. But everything in life is a choice. When I am afraid, for example, I tend to put the thing that frightens me down on an imaginary table, and stand back from it and kind of look at it pragmatically, and maybe do something silly sounding, like making a list about it. I ask myself, “What’s good about this, what do I fear about this, what good could come out of it to make it worth taking the risk?” I can see then whether or not it’s a big risk and whether or not the downside is something I can live with or maybe learn from. And then I can make a choice. But when fear is at its worst, it can truly numb us and paralyze us. Maybe the fear is about a career move that you know you should 143

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make, but you’re frightened of failing. Perhaps there’s a relationship at stake. If I take to heart Sara’s comments about patience for change that sometimes comes in baby steps, it seems to me that those tiny steps can help us overcome fear of change as well. Once you’ve inched your way toward a change, once you’ve made some small adjustment in your life and found it’s worked out fine, then you have a history of success, however short! And that history can breed courage to overcome the paralysis of fear. It’s true that sometimes we only break the logjam of fear when someone else pulls us through it—and that’s the value of friends and connections. Still, on your own, the kind of attitude you choose to have, your patience, and your willingness to imagine a new situation for yourself can get you moving away from a place of fear. This reminds me of my own resolutions about fear and acting in spite of it. Fear is a big part of many actors’ lives. We all have to work at getting over the jitters before a performance, and having enough nerve to do the performance. It’s been a major issue for me in my life—how to get past that abject fear. To this day, if I go out to make a speech, I’ll do the talk, and then when it’s over, and everyone’s applauding, I’ll realize that I have no idea what I’ve just said. I know I spoke from my heart, but I can never repeat whatever it was I’d said. My way of coping with the fear is to be in the moment, to speak from my heart. Obviously, I prepare ahead of time, researching the subject and knowing how I feel about it. Then the information gestates, and when I speak, it’s not something that’s been learned, something that’s been written and performed, it’s simply what’s in my heart. I confess I’m in a state of total panic when I go up to the podium, but then I get going, and I forget about the fear. I’m the same way with every movie I do. I am terrified on the first day. Terrified! But by the end of the first take, when the director says, “Print,” and “Next shot,” it’s like I’ve been doing it forever, and the fear is gone. It’s rather amazing, after all these years. How does one get past that 144

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fear? I believe it happens in the same way that it does the first time you ride a bike, even though you’re scared, or the first time you dive off the high board, and manage to swim. One day you try, and you survive it. So then you’re willing to try it again. I have a lifelong phobia of snakes. I am more terrified of them than I could possibly ever describe. Wouldn’t you know that at their second birthday party, Kris and John wanted nothing more than to have reptiles present, especially snakes. We had a handler bring a selection of snakes to the house, and at one point Johnny had this huge albino boa constrictor all around his neck; he was happily holding this enormous snake that was three times his size. It terrified me, but to be honest, I felt a little foolish being his mother and not touching the snake, when he was wearing the snake. The situation reminded me of how my own parents tried not to induce fear into my sisters and me. They introduced us to new situations all the time, so we’d not be afraid of unfamiliar things, and because of that, I was determined never to pass my own fears on to my children. That was it, I thought. “Okay, I’m going to touch this snake.” I made a humorous comment about touching the snake, then, with the help of the handler, I put the snake around my neck. I wasn’t thrilled with the experience, I’ll admit. Its tail moved, and I jumped, but I realized I wasn’t in danger, and my fear really diminished. Holding the snake wasn’t as frightening as I’d imagined it would be, which was a great relief, and exciting actually, because I’d processed a bit of my fear of snakes. That doesn’t mean I’m going to run out and buy snakes as pets, but that phobia was no longer so huge for me. And it’s nice to feel that you can notch one off, and say, “I can do that.” I do feel an enormous sense of satisfaction in knowing I’ve overcome some of my fears, just by facing them square on. There are certain things I draw the line at—because I know the odds are not in favor of my doing them at this time in my life. Jumping out of an airplane with a parachute is just never going to happen, 145

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but that one ’s okay with me! Not doing it won’t alter my sense of myself, or my ability to function, or to enjoy life, or affect other people ’s lives, so I’ve crossed that one off my to-do list. But many people feel the true sense of having lived only if they manage to achieve such things. I know a woman in her mid eighties who jumped out of a plane with a parachute just to prove that she could. All of this is to say that in my opinion, the antidote to fear is action. This begets bravery, and the more I sit back and contemplate, anticipate that which I am afraid of, the more paralyzed I can be about it. Paralysis from fear is not something I relish, and I’ve done a lot to keep it from happening. Allowing myself to be stilled by fear is certainly not the way I was brought up, and as I said earlier, I’m very conscious of what I will pass on to my children. If I’m particularly afraid of something, I make sure I’m not the person to introduce my children to it. For example, with horseback riding, I made sure that someone who really knew what he was doing with horses taught the kids to be responsible and to be safe, to be sure that they did not absorb my sense of fear. It doesn’t look as if I’m fearful of horses when I’m riding now; I’m actually quite a good rider. But I do have a very healthy respect for a horse, and I probably would not be able to do half the things my children are able to do on horses because I come from a place of fear. Another, tamer example of dealing with fear in my own life has to do with my back, which has given me trouble off and on for a long time. After years of being afraid of hurting my back, I woke up the other day and I thought, “You know, I’m not going to be afraid anymore that my back will stop me from doing the things I want to do. I’m going to develop a new picture of myself. I’m going to look instead at how many things I can do because of my back—and I can think of tons of things I can do.” True to my word, out with friends, I swallowed hard and chose to try waterskiing the other day. To my surprise, I found I could do it! It 146

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gave me the courage to play tennis lightly, without going completely nuts, which I am apt to do. I stay in touch with my body, and if it starts feeling bad, I stop. I even played golf, which I would have thought I could never play again. I discovered that I can do nine holes easily, maybe up to fifteen, and then I have to stop. So I’ve made a bit of an adjustment in my own thinking, my own picture of myself, and it’s no longer a question of what I can’t do anymore. It’s a fact that I can do quite a lot in spite of my back, and that I get excited when I find myself able to do something. Indeed, when I do my back exercises regularly, I get into awesome shape! It’s a grand example of adjusting the picture we carry of ourselves in our heads, and choosing the positive over the negative. My eighty-eight-year-old mother admits, “Well, yes, I’m older. Things are breaking down. But that’s not what I’m going to be thinking about every minute of my day.” She chooses to think about spending time with family, friends, grandchildren. She truly believes she’ll see my father after she dies. It seems that because of her positive approach to life and the images she carries in her mind, she has no fear at this time of her life. I have to admit that in some ways my sisters and I are more afraid of the end of her life than she is! My sisters and I clearly realize how important it is to give our mother the love and the space to be herself right to the end. It’s remarkable to care for someone who once had to take care of you—to see the great circle of life played out before you. It all comes down to this: Everybody has choices. Choose to make your imagination your ally. You do have a say about what pictures live in your head—and you can choose the most positive images to shape your life.

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James and I are committed to remaining connected with one another. That’s the secret to our marriage.

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Connect with Someone Along the Way Commitment Can Be Your Lifeline E v e ry c h o i c e w e m a k e in life affects other people. It’s so important that when we instigate change, we do it in a way that can be handled by everyone concerned. Those famous words from John Donne, “No man is an island entire of itself,” are so true. Looking back on my life, I see that it’s all been a series of choices, some better than others, but every one a learning experience. I’ve come to see that connection, the heart of this signpost of change, is what helps enormously in making choices we can truly live by. We need a connection to the people around us, to be sure change doesn’t needlessly tear us away from those we love or from situations we care about. Few things are more devastating than feeling isolated in your turmoil. I believe that when we do connect with someone, it’s not only comfort and company we seek. We can also know that we are not the first ones to be going through whatever it is that’s on our plate. The person you confide in may well have been where you are today. Maybe they’ve lost a job, had enormous health problems, been hurt by an unfair situation, or encountered the upheavals of divorce or death 149

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in their lives. As John James says, when you tell your deepest hurts to someone else, part of the burden is lifted from your shoulders— because someone shares it. We can do this for others, and there comes a day for each of us when we will need someone to do this for us. It comes down to this: We need to be needed. It’s what engages us with life. That’s not always easy in today’s world. Life can seem very impersonal; television blasts at us, music blasts at us, our kids sometimes blast at us. It’s not so easy to actually connect, to get involved with things. However, once you dare to get involved with something, once you dare make a commitment to something, your life changes.

Commitment and Connection In my experience, commitment goes hand in hand with connection. I think it’s interesting, what happens when people begin to attend AA meetings, for example. So often they’re in terrible shape, and they’re trying somehow to find some sense in their life—all they’re looking for is to be alive for the next minute, and not drinking. Those people then are required to make a commitment for the meeting. It might be putting the chairs out, selling the books, or fixing the coffee—some little deed that they have to commit to for a certain number of weeks. It seems to give them a framework; their duty connects them to the others at the meetings. The person putting out the chairs might have been the CEO of a huge company, but nevertheless he or she is required, just like everyone else, to make this commitment. The necessity of fulfilling the commitment, of doing what needs to be done for the others in the group, of ultimately connecting even in this small way, somehow helps people get back on track. That’s commitment leading to connection—and John Donne’s words in action. The first step, as it always seems to be, is to know one’s self well. Then it is possible to understand how connected we all are. My sister Annie has a great way of explaining how she sees connection working in the world. 150

Remarkable Changes One of the things I got out of my training to be a homeopath is the wonderful realization that everything is connected. We are all connected to one another, to our environment, and most important, to ourselves. We just have to learn to listen to that, and trust it. And then, really, it does unfold in front of you. I see my job as a homeopath as trying to help people to make connections to themselves. By doing that, very often we can unleash a lot of energy and move on. It’s empowering when people can ask that question—“What do I need to change?”—and when they realize they really can. People make the changes they need when they become selfaware. The moment they realize that they can make change in their lives, it’s very empowering—scary, but empowering. That’s what happens when people take responsibility for making choices for themselves and their lives. You have to be able not only to see that connection, but to feel it, and to have the vision to trust that if you can see what you need to change in your imagination, then you’re that much closer to making it happen.

I was talking to a young woman recently who had gone through terrible postnatal depression. She now speaks and leads groups all over the country to help others with the same problem. She was telling me that the only way she got through the depression was to find others who were dealing with the same issues. Now she facilitates those groups, and sees that within a group, people are encouraged to find a way to open up and talk about problems and successes they’re each having. It’s the sharing that produces the magic, the healing that can happen in a group. We ’re freer to change if we’re not alone in our difficulties. Haven’t we all seen that those who are the very best at helping others deal with major issues and crises are usually those people who have had to deal with issues and crises themselves? Like my friend with the postnatal depression, these are the people who have been where we are—they have 151

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survived the very storm we may be currently struggling through. They have managed to enter the eye of that storm and come out the other side ready to bloom again. They’re not holding on to the old blooms in their lives; they have allowed them to be washed away in the storm. In a very freeing way, their difficulties have cleansed them. At the same time they have committed, either in their words or by the strength of their hearts, to connecting with those around them. I really learned about commitment and connection when I had children. To this day, my daily commitment is getting the kids up in the morning, getting them ready for the day, encouraging their unique creativity and keeping them safe. If you are a parent, you know what I’m talking about. If not, you may also have committed to something or someone—caring for a relative or a spouse, looking after your plants, your dog, or your neighbor’s garden in their absence. Even such small commitments tie us to one another in good ways. My introduction to real connection and commitment came when I was pregnant with my first child, Katie, who was born in 1982. I was thrilled to discover that I was suddenly part of this wonderful group of women I’d never really known existed—mothers and mothers-tobe. In their support of me, in their welcoming of me, I discovered for the first time the power of a group of women. When the baby was born, I felt I’d graduated, in a sense. I finally belonged to the most privileged club in the world—and what a joy it was to join in. I felt I had been received wholeheartedly into that community as an equal member. Not being singled out—being just like all the other mothers—was a profound and wonderful change for me. I’d spent most of my childhood feeling singled out in a negative way because I was different, and much of my adulthood feeling singled out in a more positive way because of my career. Feeling so welcomed into this new community in which I truly shared something with other mothers was a pleasure and a relief from the isolation and loneliness I so often felt. As connections do, that particular connection made it easier for me to 152

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make other changes that came with a new baby—and there were plenty of those. Becoming a mother itself is a powerful change for most women, and I know that for many reasons many women at first find it as much of a struggle as a joy. Annie definitely felt that way when she had her children, and in her struggle she learned a great deal. She found such joy in her three children, but still she worried that her entire identity had changed as she gave up her independence. A big part of me was completely affronted, even outraged, that I had taken someone else’s name when I married, and had given up my right to be a happy-go-lucky, flirtatious single woman. My life situation had changed in a way that I consciously wanted: I wanted to be married and I wanted to be a mother, I wanted to have children. But on a deeper level, I wasn’t ready to give up being who I had been until then. It’s difficult when your unconscious processes haven’t caught up with your conscious processes. I look back at my early years as a mother, and think what a waste it was that I was so uncomfortable and took so long to adjust to that identity. Why couldn’t I have enjoyed it more? I spent a lot of time wanting to be different, not appreciating who I was at that time, telling myself I wasn’t worthy of respect. Now I look back and I think, “Gosh, how fantastic for me and for my family that I stayed home and reared our children!” The most valuable thing I’ll ever do in my life is bringing up my children. And the women I met when I was a young mother were so amazing—we did a lot of very profound thinking around the kitchen table as our children played in the other room. That time really made me discover other women, made me realize how much women do for one another and their children. What a great strength of solidarity there is in that female relationship. I’d never appreciated it before. Finding meaning even in repetitive domestic tasks, finding encour-

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Just as Annie found, my women friends have been my foundation through so many transitions and difficult times, and that connection has provided the comfort and understanding I’ve needed when changes in my life were beyond unpleasant. I recall one girlfriend in particular who was married to a flirty actor—he was always coming on to me, and to other women I knew. He was having affairs, and everyone knew it, but no one knew how to tell his wife. Finally he left her, just abandoned the whole family, for another woman. I couldn’t believe it when she told me she hadn’t known he was having affairs. How could she not have known? A few weeks later David left me, and I telephoned her first. We were in the same boat, and the two of us commiserated and comforted each other, which helped a lot. It brings to mind a favorite, and a much happier, girlfriend memory— my fortieth birthday party. I was in the middle of the horrible divorce from David, and I was as downhearted as I could be. My girlfriends threw a surprise party for me, and there was not one man there. They all decided that since I didn’t have a man, they wouldn’t bring their men. It was a girls-only birthday party for me—and it was absolutely fabulous. It was all I could do to stop crying because I was so moved by the love these women had shown. Many of them were the women I turned to when I so needed someone to listen to me. As my sister Annie says, simply listening is one of the most healing things that one human being can do for another. In the midst of the crisis, we all need to be heard. When Emily’s marriage was breaking up, she had a particular friend who listened to her pour out her heart. For weeks, Emily would go on and on, talking endlessly about her husband and her aching heart. Finally, her friend called a halt to Emily’s unlimited unloading. They developed an interesting agreement—her friend would listen to Emily talk about how bad she felt, but only for ten minutes. She’d 154

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even time Emily and let her know when the time was up, and then Emily couldn’t talk about her soon-to-be ex anymore in that visit. It let Emily vent all the feelings she was having, and be heard, but it kept her from being stuck in complaining. I like that idea! In making a new life after her retirement from a large corporation, Marjorie did much the same thing as she tried on new ways she might live. Listening to herself was as important to her as being heard by her friend. During that transition there were certain people I could talk to who would let me talk on even though it was probably boring. Just saying what I was thinking to someone was helpful. I needed to talk about it out loud—needed to hear myself saying it as if I was going to do it. I’ve done that all my life, and it makes whatever plan I have very real. As I hear myself saying it, I realize that it is—or it isn’t—actually what I want to do. It helps me try things on.

The key to all kinds of change is in turning talk into action. And in order to do that, you need to be heard. That’s why I think it really helps when we talk out our thoughts and our problems, to keep them from running uselessly around and around in our heads. If you communicate what you are thinking to others, by the time you’ve finished talking, particularly if you’ve been able to talk uninterrupted, you finally find the answer you’ve been seeking. You will be able to say it out loud. If other people hear it and if you feel it has been received, somehow you really hear it yourself. Isn’t that a part of the reason, after all, we visit a pyschic, a clergyman, talk to a therapist, or regale our best friend with our stories? It’s all part of the same process. When you pass what you’re thinking and feeling over to another person, you can clearly hear it for yourself, and you can begin to know what to do, rather than just what you think. Letting your thoughts out of your psyche allows you to put them into action. I’m a great believer in writing things down, and I’m always making 155

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lists or noting down thoughts. When I write down what I’m thinking, my thoughts become tangible, and my path seems clearer. In my most troubled times, when I was so devastated, unhappy, nervous, frightened, or angry, and I couldn’t sleep, I would get out of bed in the middle of the night and just write down all that I was feeling. I’d just let it all come out, with the knowledge that nobody, possibly not even myself, would ever read it. Then of course, if you do read what you’ve written in such times, you can often quite clearly see a pattern, and so often you end up realizing what you need to do. It’s amazing what happens when you let your thoughts out—all of them! Whatever from they come out in is fine, be it words, or a painting, or something else. It’s all okay, so long as you are not hurting someone else. Quite often I’ve found that what I start to express as pain is really passion. It’s an inner sense of who and what I am, and of what I feel. Finding that kind of connection, someone who will listen and truly understand, can happen instantly with a person, as it did for Deborah when she met Sara at a support group. Deborah was married at the time to an alcoholic who had become a crack addict. She once told me, “What’s worse than being blind is loving someone who’s so selfdestructive.” Through the meetings and her friendship with Sara, Deborah ended that marriage. Today she is married to a wonderful man, and she works with women whose lives are affected by alcohol and drug addiction. For Leslie, one of her strongest connections is with four women friends she’s known for years. They are the women she can call at any moment for inspiration or consolation. But the foundation, perhaps you’d call it the guiding connection, that has seen her through every variety of transition in her life, is the one Leslie shares with her husband. Every catastrophe we’ve had in our lives, my husband and I have gotten stronger. We rely heavily on each other. We ’ve come to understand that we have very different ideas about most issues, and have

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Remarkable Changes really had to work through that. When Catherine was so severely injured and we were faced with life-or-death issues, right from the beginning I said, “Let’s talk about all the possibilities.” Once we talked, we realized we ultimately wanted exactly the same end result in every case. However, how we believed we should get there was different, and so we learned to navigate.

Surprise Connections It’s almost miraculous how help and connection can also come from those we don’t even know, if we’re open to it. Deborah, for example, believes that “when you need help, people will appear.” Years ago, a blind woman Deborah met told her this as they discussed how to travel solo. Deborah hadn’t done any traveling since she’d become blind, and was trying to get up the courage to attempt it. That simple faith that the connection you need will appear when you need it pushed Deborah to try. It worked—she’s now traveled on her own all over the United States and even to Mexico, where, like many tourists, she wasn’t able to speak Spanish! It’s not hit-or-miss for her, though—she thinks carefully before she plunges ahead. I try to think things through before I do them, and imagine what’s the worst that can happen. Usually whatever I come up with is not too bad. The worst might be that I’d feel uncomfortable, or walk into something, or be a little late—nothing really too awful. And usually that comforts me enough to move on. In fact, nothing bad has happened to me when I’ve traveled alone, and that’s helped me learn to take risks. Overall, the thing that has made me want to be so independent was a feeling inside that I can do this. I also get inspiration from others. What I’ve found out about myself is that there ’s no jealousy in me at all. I’m not perfect—but I do take inspiration from others, except during that first year when I didn’t want to be a happy blind person. Learning how

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It is amazing to me how sometimes, just when you need it the most, the connection you are looking for may, indeed, appear. That happened for me and for my parents in the most extraordinary way during and after the filming of the miniseries War and Remembrance in 1988. It was shot all over Europe, and I invited my family to come from England to watch the filming. I thought they’d choose to come to one of the romantic and glamorous locations, like Florence, Paris, Rome, or Vienna. Instead, they chose to come to Auschwitz. My father and mother stayed up all night watching us shoot the selection scene at the railroad tracks outside of the camp, during which some were selected for the cremation ovens and others were sent to work camps. They were stunned, overwhelmed, and moved by what they were watching. Even though it was a movie, we were in the place these events had happened, and it felt so real. I, too, felt the power of those images, and of that place. To this day, I’m haunted by the nights we spent out there. One night, in the middle of the shoot, my mother turned to me and said, “I’m ready to go back now.” I thought she meant that she was cold, or tired, and wanted to go back to the hotel. But she said, “No. I’m ready to go back to Indonesia.” I was shocked to hear her say that, as was my father, because my mother had never really spoken to any of us very much about Indonesia. We knew she’d been in camps there, and she would say that terrible things had happened, but in telling the story, she would describe only the beginning and the end. She never told us what happened in the middle. That night, I promised my mother that if I had the means I would take her back to Indonesia with my father and my sisters, and that we would try to find the camps. As fate, or luck, would have it, soon after War and Remembrance, I was offered a feature film being shot in Malaysia, called The Keys to 158

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Revisiting the prison camps, where she had spent three years during World War II, helped my mother and father reconnect to a painful past.

Freedom, an action romance set against the plight of the boat people in Hong Kong. The Malaysian airlines provided part of the funding for the project, and so I was able to get airline tickets for my parents. One of my sisters, Annie, was also able to go, and I arranged for them to be in Malaysia while I was filming. It was our stepping-stone to Indonesia, and we were all excited. The fact that we didn’t know exactly where we ’d be going once we got to Indonesia didn’t dampen our enthusiasm. My mother had told us that during the war, after being driven in trucks through the jungle from the first camp to the second and third camps, she was so disoriented she had no idea where either of them had been. She did have clues, though, such as that one had been near a city called Bogor, that she could hear a river nearby, and that she could see an extinct volcano over the top of the compound fence. Somehow, we had faith that those clues would be enough. When we arrived at the Jakarta airport, a young woman came up to me and exclaimed, “Oh, you’re Jane Seymour! I’m a big fan of yours! 159

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Can I take a picture of you?” My mother offered to take a picture of both of us together. The young woman was so grateful that she asked us if she could help us. I told her we were on our way to have a brief holiday in Bali, but that our main goal was to see where my mother had been held in the prison camps during the war. The young woman, whose name was Maria, immediately responded, “I will help you find them.” She insisted on it—she wouldn’t take no for an answer, and she wouldn’t accept any money, even though she took days off work to help us. By the time we returned from Bali to Jakarta she had found a driver and a minibus for us, and we all climbed in and took off on an amazing trip to find my mother’s past. We drove to Djasinga, a rubber plantation near where the tea plantation had been. When we reached that old colonial estate, and my mother got her first glimpse of it, she had to struggle mightily to keep her composure. It was so familiar to her; before the war, on weekends, she and her husband had traveled to this estate for social functions, and while it was quite dilapidated now, she said it brought memories flooding back. While we were there, a large crew of Indonesians were renovating the buildings. My mother went up to the man who looked most like the foreman and asked him if he could give us directions to the Pasir Mading estate, the tea plantation where she had lived with her first husband. When they finished talking, the foreman motioned to one of his oldest workmen and told him to direct us to where my mother’s house had been, although he thought it might have been torn down. Despite our best endeavors, the road to the house was too potholed and rough to allow us to make much progress in our minibus. Night had fallen, and the jungle sounds were loud around us, and it just didn’t seem we could make it. Within what the old man estimated to be was just three miles of the estate, we reluctantly abandoned our search. The next day, we drove to Kota Paris where my mother had been interned. At first, nothing seemed familiar to her. Then she noticed a volcano in the distance, and then a river nearby, and taking her bear160

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ings from these, she suddenly recognized the street she’d lived on, and then the house that she had lived in. We were filming her, and my sister Annie and I took turns holding the camera, trying unsuccessfully to keep it from shaking, we were crying so hard. We just couldn’t believe she ’d found this place. My mother went right up to the door and knocked. She explained who she was to the man who owned the house, and he invited us in. He told us he’d taken over the house straight after the war and had never repainted it. My mother could see the nails that were still where she had put them in the wall to hold the line from which she had suspended a sheet to partition the room for her and her friend Juus. She walked us through these small rooms and the front garden, explaining and pointing things out as she went. It was an amazing afternoon. And how moving that so many complete strangers were willing to step up and help us. Out of nowhere, the connections we needed had appeared. And as a result of these surprise connections, for the first time my sister, my father, and I all had a clear understanding of what this part of my mother’s life had been like. It was an insight I don’t think we could have gotten any other way. I’d always known my mother was a strong person, who had weathered more than her share of life changes before she was grown. We’d heard the stories about how she ’d had a kidney removed when she was about eleven years old, and spent many months in bed recuperating, unable to go to school, isolated from the world. She no longer remembers why the kidney was removed, and mercifully the other kidney has been working fine all these years. In addition to that traumatic experience, my mother had to take the place of her mother in running the family home from the time she was eighteen. Her mother had developed a serious psychiatric problem when she reached menopause and was institutionalized, so Mummy had to take on all her mother’s responsibilities until she recovered. Mummy left home to get married when she was twenty-two years old. Now, understanding what she had faced in 161

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the prison camps, I was even more impressed with my mother’s ability not only to face change in her life, but to meet the challenges presented to her with grace and resilience. I was ready to try to find the third camp, the last one my mother had been in. But my mother informed us in no uncertain terms that she did not want to go to this other camp. “This is enough,” she said. “I saw this one; now let’s go visit a museum or a zoo.” She was adamant that she didn’t want to go, my father was adamant that she shouldn’t be forced to, and my sister and I insisted that she should go because we ’d come halfway around the world, and we should complete this quest. What my sister and I hadn’t thought about was that the third camp would bring back my mother’s most painful memories. It was there that my mother had, as a result of all the stress and feelings of helplessness, temporarily lost her grip on reality. We had a big family argument about it, a lot of emotional upheaval, and ultimately we decided we ’d just go to the airport. Despite all the changes in street names and buildings, Maria, very cleverly, had figured out where this last camp probably was. Without telling us, she just drove to it and stopped the van right in front of it. My mother, who had been dozing, opened her eyes and said, “Oh my God. This is it.” Now that we were there, she was willing to walk through it, in spite of her fears. The last hospital camp, St. Vincentius, had been a convent before the war, but it was now an orphanage run by the nuns. The Mother Superior invited us in and gave us tea and biscuits before letting us look around. As my mother walked around the building, she told us that where we saw empty schoolrooms, she saw, once again, the wards full of sick and dying people. She relived the experience of tending to these poor souls, and her feelings of sadness at not being able to help them. Unable to keep her composure, my mother turned away from us and walked out into the small courtyard garden and wept. The nun

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was quite wonderful, and very loving and supportive, but it was an extremely difficult day for my mother. Ultimately, I think my mother was glad that she’d seen this final place, and that experience, too, helped all of us have a much better understanding of my mother’s life. While I could see that it was terribly difficult for her to be there, she was able to confront and process her greatest nightmares and fears, which were the memories of this terrible place, where sickness, horrible brutality, and death had ruled. It was where she had felt so helpless in the face of a waking nightmare, just watching people die of starvation and disease, with no resources with which to help them. Our visit gave her a chance to have an emotional release, to acknowledge and face her demons and the horrors that were deep in her memory, and to begin to let go of them. As we discussed in the last chapter, letting go was one of the things that helped my mother to maintain her sanity. Her strength of character certainly helped, but it was her ability to face her demons and let them go that opened the door to a new life. She must have done that to some degree when she left Indonesia after the war, and she certainly did it again when she went back there with us. I know from her stories that a number of her friends from the prison camp were never able to do this. Some committed suicide while still in the camp, others after they were released. My mother was one of the few who managed to process her past and get on with her life. The point of her story is one of the most serious of this book: you can’t expect a remarkable change in your life unless you’re able to face whatever pain you may have, and process it in some way. It’s up to you to decide when the time is right; no one can force you to do it. However, once you are able to cry, and to talk about, and express those feelings, you have a chance, an opportunity to live with those memories rather than have them eat you alive. That trip was so much about my mother’s release from her memories. But looking back, I see it was also about extraordinary acts of

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kindness. We ’ve all seen that bumper sticker about committing random acts of kindness. I love the idea of giving and receiving kindness. A kind act received just sort of wakes us up in a lovely way. It works in another sense, too—a kindness given can be as much of a gift to yourself as to the one to whom you give it. You can walk around for the rest of the day with a little smile on your face, knowing someone else is smiling, too. When you have a need for something or you realize someone else has a need for something, what a treat it is to use your own ingenuity to figure out a way to solve the problem or to create something that will help others. My friend Sherry Jason is a tremendous example of a person seeing a need and, in trying to meet it, creating a fabulous chain of connection that literally saves lives. Sherry has been a dancer since she was three years old. By the time she was eleven she was giving ballet classes to neighborhood children in the garage of her home. She would make her father move his car out every Saturday morning, and she would scrub the oil stains from the floor before class could begin. Although she grew up to be an attorney for the Los Angeles Public Defender’s Office, she never gave up her love of dance and her belief in the arts as a positive force. Many times now, she’s told the story of the moment her life changed because of her belief in the arts. In 1977, as a young public defender, she was taken on a tour of Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles. On the tour, I happened to hear music. While my associates, the other new lawyers, watched the boys play basketball and lift weights, I followed the sound of the piano, almost as if I was in a dream—the ballerina in me always responding to music. It’s not like me to leave the group, but I was so curious to see where this music came from in this unlikeliest of places. I found the source of the music—a young boy who was having his first piano lesson. He was a true prodigy—hearing the music of Mozart and then playing it by ear, the music clearly touching his soul. I later

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Remarkable Changes found out that he was only thirteen years old, had committed a murder, and was awaiting placement in the California Youth Authority, the prison for kids. I walked away wondering what would have happened if this young man had met the piano before he met guns and gangs. This was truly the seminal moment when my frustration, sadness, and helplessness met to create the determination that children should be inspired to make positive choices rather than choosing delinquency. While I worked as a public defender, my clients were all children, some as young as nine, whose lives were already in shambles, with little hope. I felt I had to do something for them, and for their victims, who didn’t deserve the circumstances they had been placed in. I wanted to find a way to inspire children to see their potential as creative members of society. I believed that by feeling a sense of belonging, by expressing themselves, and by finding a creative home in a dance studio instead of on the streets, they would know how to make the right choices. From all of this was born the idea for City Hearts— Kids Say “Yes” to the Arts.

Right away, Sherry began providing free dance classes for innercity kids. Using their life’s savings, she and her husband, Bob, renovated an old warehouse to use as a studio. In the eighteen years since, her nonprofit program has grown and shown fabulous results. Sherry, her husband, and their instructors now work with children from five to eighteen years old, giving classes in writing, acting, stage arts, jazz, ballet, Shakespeare, and photographic and visual arts. She’s also developed a program called Sentenced to the Stage for juvenile offenders on probation that allows them to satisfy their community service requirements in classes on acting and stage arts. One young man in that program said, “Out there [on the streets] I’m always ready to fight; that’s my way. But onstage, the pressure goes away. I can really be me.” As Sherry says, “The arts are a way to heal these kids. It’s the one thing in our society that bridges or transcends rivalries and 165

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racial antagonisms. It brings kids together in a unique way.” There’s that idea of connection once again. I was privileged to witness the dramatic birth of that kind of connection during an acting improvisation class in Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles. The young men and women in the class had been convicted of a variety of serious crimes and were serving time in jail. At first I wondered what we could possibly do with these kids. I, like so many others, assumed they were broken beyond repair. I’d not been in a man’s prison before, which surely is worse than Juvenile Hall, but still, I can’t image anything more horrible than the feeling I had that day, in this prison. These were really frightening kids, all of them. The plan was for me to assist the man who had been teaching the inmates, and follow his lead. The first exercise was to pass an imaginary butterfly to one another. I’d opened my hands to look at the imaginary butterfly and talk to it, and I imagined it going onto my other hand, and as it tried to fly away, I gently reached up to stop it and bring it back to me. Finally, I passed this imaginary butterfly to one of the kids. This young man looked at me with his hard eyes, and he let the imaginary butterfly fall to the floor; he just closed his hands. His eyes held mine for a moment. Then he looked at the rest of the class, and silently, he bent down to where the imaginary butterfly would have fallen, and picked it up. He looked at his hands, just as I had been doing, played with the butterfly, and passed it to the next person. There was an audible gasp from the prison guards who were watching. No one could believe the gentleness and involvement they were seeing from this person. I was told later that this young man was one of the worst offenders, a gang leader. But he somehow decided to participate, and because he did, the others did as well. As a result of his moment of willingness to connect with an imaginary butterfly, with me, and with the others in the class, all of the young men and women there took a first step toward learning how to share with and respect one another. It was the birth of an amazing transforma166

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tion, a way of relating to another human being that had never been a part of their lives. I doubt that they realized at that moment what was happening to them; they were just doing this acting exercise. But those of us who had seen what the arts can do to help people connect to one another understood the farther reaches of what had begun in that room. One could almost physically feel the step the whole group had taken away from rejecting everything in life to a slightly more open view of the world, and a sense of daring to trust something new to them. The younger children in Sherry’s regular program are just like little sponges. They cannot wait to learn more. The kids in the arts and literacy classes, for example, who are often kids for whom English is a second language, will read from a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem, and they’ll discuss what it means to them. Then they’ll go off in small groups and come up with an improvisation that is based on what they think a particular line means. The improvisations they invent are really very much about their own lives and culture, and about things that happen in their world. As they’re acting out their pieces, they are processing their thoughts and choices for their own futures, looking at the future by enacting it with other people. The beauty of Sherry’s program is that even if a child gets to come to class only once in their lives, they get a bit of the purpose of the whole program. It empowers each one of those kids to know that they are unique, and that they’re capable of being an important member of the group. They learn that they matter. I couldn’t begin to count the lives that City Hearts has touched in a positive way. All of this from Sherry Jason’s experience of seeing a need, and as we discussed in Chapter 4, imagining that life could be different. She was so right. Offering children a connection to a positive community through the arts has been the path toward change Sherry Jason paved for thousands of inner-city children. The rest of us don’t necessarily need to start a successful nonprofit organization to be facilitators of connection and change for those 167

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around us. I believe we only have to have eyes and hearts that recognize need, however small, and that can visualize a different way, in order to be inspired enough to create something positive. For example, during a recent stay at St. Catherine’s, I tried an art form I’d never done before—I tried sculpting. Instead of telling myself that it is too late in my life to start something new, I thought, “Well, why not—it’s just a piece of wire and some clay. I’ll fiddle about and have some fun and see what happens, see where it goes.” Of course now I’m addicted to sculpting, and can’t wait to do it again. When I started out that afternoon only one other person out of all the extended family staying with us wanted to try it with me. By the end of the afternoon, there must have been about ten people, aged four to about sixty, working with me, making clay figures, having a wonderful time. Now my twins cannot wait to sculpt after school and on weekends. They prefer it to video games! It’s very therapeutic—you can really bring people together through the arts. We spend so much of our lives so passively, watching television, watching films, or playing video games. We’re being entertained rather than creating our own entertainment. You could, instead, be doodling with a pencil, or coming up with a piece of poetry with a friend, or making up a story, or doing a piece of sculpture, or making a pot, or painting a card. If you’re working as a group, there’s this amazing energy that happens. The time flies and a lot of people really open up, and talk in a way they wouldn’t if they were just sitting with a cup of tea or coffee. It’s interesting to me that with the stresses, and the frightening predicaments, in the world right now, people are doing crafts more than ever. In Hollywood, knitting clubs have sprung up! Famous people are getting together in the evening and knitting. They’re not out on the Strip; some of the party hounds are home with their knitting needles, going clickety-clack, clickety-clack. People are connecting, coming back to the comfort of the quilting circle, just as we did in Dr. Quinn. We can find our personal inspiration there, by the hearth with our 168

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Visiting the Masai on our trip to Africa with the Red Cross for their Measles Initiative was a life-changing experience for me, and a memorable one for our boys, Kris (left) and John.

knitting needles, or we can be inspired by just about anything, if we have eyes to see. I often look to nature and other cultures for inspiration. I was in Africa not long ago, and before I went there, when I thought of tribal people like the Masai, I automatically assumed them to be too different from myself in their ways and traditions for me to feel any connection with them. But when you actually go and see how and why certain people live the way they do, what their traditions are and what the cycle of their life is, it all starts to make sense. I found it fascinating to see how they run their families. The Masai bypass all the romance and simply buy their wives—more than one. 169

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Perhaps odd to us; makes sense to them. When a man has more than one wife, each lives in her own house, which are built right next to one another, and they help one another with chores. So when the husband takes on a second or third wife they’re happy, because now they have someone to help them gather firewood, fetch water, watch the kids, prepare the food, do whatever it is a Masai wife needs to do. There’s apparently no jealousy among them—it’s simply part of their culture that says this is how it works and it’s what we do. Until you see it in practice and you see people living in what you would think are impossible circumstances, you can’t understand how they can be so happy and how they can make it work. Talking to those Masai families made me think of families I see in which people are divorced, and the biggest fights and traumas they have concern how the children are shared. It brought to mind friends of mine who are going through a terrible child-custody battle. The battle is killing both parents, it’s desperately bad for the child, and it’s costing more money than either of them possesses. Watching their struggle, after what I saw of Masai family life, reminded me of how I approached child-custody issues with David and his ex-wife when we were married, and then later, with James. We all have tried to simply put what is best for our children ahead of everything else. When I married David, he had a daughter, Jenni, from another marriage. David and his ex-wife, Linda, had separated long before Jenni was born, but still, we all found ourselves suddenly embroiled in a complex, difficult set of circumstances because David was to have Jenni, who was just an infant, most weekends. At first, Linda was understandably upset that a woman she’d never met—me—would be caring for her newborn baby on the weekends, but I so much wanted her to be comfortable with my participation, and I wanted the baby to be comfortable with David and me, too. So I decided to really make friends with Linda, and asked her about her feelings about leaving Jenni with us on the weekends. She told me she didn’t like it, and she believed that if I had a newborn I’d never allow another woman to look 170

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after him. Never having had a baby, I don’t believe I really understood the bond between mother and child, but I promised Linda then, that when I did have one, I’d send the baby to visit her as soon as I was done breast-feeding it so that I would truly understand what she was feeling. As it happened, I bonded immediately with Jenni. That’s how I knew I wanted children. When I held Jenni, these maternal instincts I never knew I had just arose. Less than two years later, David and I welcomed our first child, Katie. When Katie was about three months old, and finished with breast-feeding, I packed her up with bottles and diapers and sent her over to “Mama Linda” for an afternoon visit. Linda couldn’t believe I’d followed through on my promise, but I suspect she was delighted to hold a baby again. Linda and Katie bonded quickly, just as Jenni and I had. In a sense, I suppose it was a calculated gamble, sending my baby out to visit someone I didn’t know that well, but it turned out to be possibly one of the smartest things I’ve ever done, for all concerned. Jenni bonded with her baby sister in her own home for a few hours that first day, and she saw her mother behave in a loving manner toward her new sister, which also helped Jenni to accept Katie. But it went further than that, which is something about making a connection with another person we can’t always predict. This one act inspired us all in our extended family, with all our children, to make our exes, as well as our new husbands and wives, truly connected, so that none of the children would have separate lives. Consequently, all of the children are close with one another. Linda and I became good friends, and eventually, she became an extra mom for all my children. Her family is truly part of our extended family. Sean spent several months living with Mama Linda and her family when James and I were filming a movie in Europe, and Sean was in school in the United States. Linda’s daughters from her new marriage have come to England to spend the holidays with us, and even my seven-year-old twins know and love her well enough to call her Mama Linda. 171

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So that gamble, and the promise I made to Linda, have fostered a wonderful tradition—this marvelous experience of the very extended family we have today. I believe it really opened all our eyes to how connections can survive even when families are dissolving and reforming, blending in new ways. I know it did for David and me. After all our difficulties, David and I are friends today. Even during the divorce, when things were terrible, somehow, when we were around the children, we always extricated ourselves from the adult issues that were so devastating to us, and behaved like good parents. He lives nearby now, and goes to Sean’s games. We see him there, or when he ’s at the house, picking up or dropping Sean off. We’ve always had an open arrangement, in which he sees the children when he wants to, so he and the children make their own plans. In that way, too, we decided from the start that we’d do whatever was best for the children. When James and I were about to be married, there were even more children involved; my two with David, Jenni from David’s first marriage, and Kalen, James’s son from his first marriage. We—all the women, that is—discussed at great length in dozens of telephone conversations, how to handle this increasingly complicated scenario. We simply decided that we’d do everything we could to find a level of communication among all of us that was based on the needs of our children. We would also share responsibilities for the well-being and happiness of each of them. Many people just can’t believe the connection that exists in our huge blended family. We all get together socially, and we all help one another in need, and nobody is territorial about the children. Nobody feels they own the children—and the children don’t feel that they’re not allowed to communicate at any time with any one of their parents, including stepparents and exstepparents. After returning from Africa, I looked at this arrangement and thought it’s kind of like the Masai wives, isn’t it? They are smart women, these 172

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Masai wives, and they get together and say, “Okay, how can we figure this out together?” It seems they’re looking at the big picture, which is something I see happening in my life as well. When I sense a problem in the air, whether it’s physical or emotional or practical, I try to stand back and look at it from above, and I try to see what is the most important element, regardless of my immediate feelings. I ask myself, “What needs to happen here? Do we need to save a life, or save the psychological life and sense of security of a child? What is the actual need?” Trying to look at an issue from the outside, trying to see the whole picture, is the key. It is coming toward change from a big-picture place of love and of truly seeking solutions. Underlying all of this is a sense of connection with the children as individuals and our family as a whole. Consequently, as a result of my divorces, I have developed some fabulous relationships with ex-husbands and with my husbands’ exwives. We have children who feel loved and able to talk to a number of different parents when they’re in a time of crisis. None of us parents in the group does anything major without sharing with the other parents; we work as a team. Sometimes in a crisis with a child, we play good cop/bad cop. Sometimes we are able to just say to one of the other parents in the group, “Hey, you know what—my daughter right now has typical teenage mother-daughter issues. If you, the stepmother or stepfather, are able to help in some way, please do!” You just have to let go sometimes and realize that the most important thing is to find a solution, to have a child that’s happy and healthy, and to resolve the problem. We don’t have to do it all alone. We don’t have to take credit for it alone. We can allow ourselves to be helped because we have these wonderful connections. Whether it’s in our families, with our dear friends and spouses, or it’s in chance encounters like Sherry Jason’s meeting with the boy playing the piano, when we see a need, or we have a need, if we connect with that person we each can become links in a great chain of transition. Each one can help the next to reach the place they need to be. 173

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Christopher Reeve and I felt an instant connection on the set of Somewhere in Time, which has continued throughout our lives.

Connecting in Everyday Life Everyday life, for me, has for many years been about making movies. Sometimes I find extraordinary connections that propel me, and the entire crew, to deeper friendships and higher levels of professionalism. Twice, it has happened for me in a profound way on a set. Once, of course, was on the set of Dr. Quinn. The other time, the first time, was on the set of the movie Somewhere in Time. There, I met not one, but two of my soul mates: Christopher Reeve and Steve Bickel. I met Christopher Reeve for the first time when I auditioned for the part of Elise, and I was his first choice. Later I learned that Steve, too, had strongly recommended me for the part. All I remember is my unbelievable joy when I learned I had won the part. It was a lovely, romantic role, and I couldn’t wait to get to work. 174

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When I arrived to begin the movie on Mackinac Island, off the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I was instantly swept away to a world that looked just like the time period of the film, which was 1910. There were no cars on the island. Instead, there were horses and buggies, and we were each issued our own bicycle. The friendship between Chris and me really started because I arrived on the island sick, with a bad case of flu—high fever, coughing, the whole array of symptoms. I’d be in bed, sniffling, and he’d just pop in to see if I was okay. He brought me books to read, and always had a cheery word. He was very thoughtful that way, and that got to me. I had told myself that I didn’t need to like this man, I was just working with him. But I found him to be quite exceptional, very bright, and lots of fun. That summer, when we weren’t working, he taught me how to fly an airplane and sail a boat. I remember he told me he was just getting used to being Superman. He had recently finished the first Superman movie, and he referred to himself as “Star for a Week.” I assured him he was a star for life. We really had an incredible relationship, a great love that continues to this day, and one that has withstood the countless changes in our lives. Very quickly Steve, who was a producer, and Susan, the publicist, became buddies with Chris and me, and the four of us used to hang out together. We were like a bunch of carefree teenagers that summer, with sharing a wonderful time together our only goal. I have so many fond memories of that glorious summer on this beautiful island, with few cares in the world. Often on movies you become close to those you work with, and you think you’ll see one another again once the movie is complete, but it almost never happens. In the case of Somewhere in Time and with many friends I made on Dr. Quinn, that connection did happen. We forged friendships that will continue to enrich us for the rest of our lives. I think it happened on Somewhere in Time because we worked in such an isolated, beautiful place, and we were making a movie we all believed in. The subject of the movie, which was the triumph of passionate, 175

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We reunited in 2000 for the twentieth anniversary of the release of Somewhere in Time.

undying love, was inspirational to everyone. If you were the type of person the movie touched emotionally, you were probably going to like other people who felt the same way. It was a beautiful and very emotional experience, really idyllic. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a happy time, or such an emotional time, on a movie, and I think the emotion we all felt shows on the screen. I remember that the goingaway party, the wrap party, was truly devastating. There were lots of tears, far more than usual! Years later, I found out about Chris’s accident while I was on the set of Dr. Quinn, and because I was crying uncontrollably, we couldn’t continue filming that day. Like everyone else, I tried to find out what happened, and along with everyone else, I waited weeks before I finally had contact with his family, and really knew. I found it too bizarre for words that a man who was so independent, 176

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physical, daring, and free-spirited would be given this circumstance to deal with. But I believed that if he could physically survive, he would be a fighter. This was a man who always challenged himself, both physically and intellectually. And as it has turned out, this is exactly what he ’s done with his life since the accident. Every day, he challenges his body physically, and he uses his intellect, compassion, and wisdom to literally change the course of medicine! Ironically, what he ’s doing now is huge, compared to what he might have done if his accident had ever happened.

Connecting As a Result of Crisis In the intervening years, Steve and I have also remained friends. As he and I grew closer, and he came to know my family better, we began to understand the special kind of connection we share. We have had so many conversations about important issues and things that have happened in our lives, good and bad, and we have been a source of understanding and inspiration, each for the other. That kind of connection is worth more than anything. We know that no matter what the crisis, we will have each other. Through all her hard years with Erin, who struggled so with drugs, Sara found comfort in that kind of connection. It began with knowing that even on the difficult path she walked with this young girl, she was following in the footsteps of many who had walked it before her. Company means a lot when you’re suffering. But what Sara ended up with is so much more than just someone to hold her hand. The connections I’ve made through support groups and through the counseling work I’ve done mean that I’ve ended up with hope. I have more people in my life than I ever had before I knew about the world of recovery. I have more people I get to love and who love me. I’m very close to a lot of the young people in Erin’s recovery home—they don’t have relationships with their parents anymore either. So many

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Jane Se ymour say, I wish that my mom cared as much, or that my mom took the time, or that my family wanted to visit me. I tell them I was not always so willing to be of help. But the whole painful experience of dealing with an addicted child and the people I met through it have taught me so much. The connections with all these people sustained me through some very dark days.

One Step Attracts Another Connecting with others, especially in a time of crisis, can be so difficult at times. When uninvited change comes or our world is turned upside down unexpectedly, for many of us, our first reaction may be to simply crawl off somewhere—quite literally at times—and nurse our wounds, or perhaps just pity ourselves for a while. Perhaps that’s necessary for a time in some people’s lives, but I have to say that if you can marshal your resources to take a single step toward someone else during your time of turmoil, you may be totally surprised at what happens. Of course no one would wish for a situation like Sara’s, or like Corinna’s, when she had breast cancer. But Corinna will tell you that her bout with breast cancer opened up her life in so many ways. She managed to face it all straight on, right from the beginning. She also reached out to people around her. One thing led to another, and one day Corinna received an amazing telephone call. A woman who worked at the Esalen Institute called me and said that she’d heard I was embracing my illness, difficult as it was. It was extraordinary. She said she wanted to come and teach me meditation and share what she knew with me. Because of my illness I was looking into all sorts of healing at the time, and this was a wonderful way to begin the journey of holistic healing. A fifth-generation tai chi and qigong master moved in three houses down—and he also offered his help. There was an outpouring of love and support during this entire

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Remarkable Changes time, obviously from close friends but also from people I’d never met. It was a tremendous bonding experience.

Corinna found it a blessing to have these connections in her life, but she also found that she reached new levels of understanding about who she would and would not truly look to for connection. We meet so many people in our lives, we can’t be best friends with everybody. My illness taught me to be more discerning about the qualities that I value in the people I love. I would rather spend time oneon-one deepening and strengthening those ties than spend time on a relationship that means little to me. So I began to make a more blatant distinction between friends and acquaintances. And I’m unapologetic about it, because I think it’s an important distinction. I’m not nearly as social as I once was in that way—and my friends know not to expect that from me.

Steve and I have spoken of that very idea. When we search out opinions from others, if one of us is wrestling with a major decision for example, we are discerning about who we consult. I think that’s true for any of us. The trick is to find the people who understand you, whose opinions are perhaps not exactly the same as yours, but are on track with yours. Steve and I always say that we are similar in our basic approach to living, and that makes the others’ counsel particularly useful. One of the things we absolutely share is our love of family. Both of us have families that were always there to support us, perhaps because they especially appreciated how unpredictable life could be. I love hearing what Steve has to say about his father, who was, indeed, an inspiring man. When I was growing up, especially as a teenager, my father never put restrictions on me or gave me ultimatums. Considering this was during

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Jane Se ymour the radical sixties days of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, his attitude was amazing. Later in life I asked him about this. He said that he simply hoped he and my mother had raised me with the right values, that he had intrinsic faith in my judgment, and that he didn’t want me ever to hold back on things I wanted to do. For example, I had a successful career in advertising right out of college, working as a copywriter for a rather large agency. I had doubled my salary in my first year and was on the fast track. Having always had a yearning to pursue a career in motion pictures, I told my father that I wanted to attend the graduate film program at the University of Southern California. While my mother did voice some doubt, my father, in his thick German accent, enthusiastically said, “Go! Have a good time, learn and enjoy!” He knew that the career path I would be embarking on was eminently more insecure than the one I was currently pursuing. Yet instead of reminding me that I had a good job, he said, “If that’s what you want—go do it.” Throughout his life, my father had been in situations where he didn’t have options, so his advice was always that one should do what one wants to do. He felt options were a blessing and that personal freedom and expression were gifts. My first years in the movie business were a struggle, it’s true. There were times when I thought that I’d made a mistake. But never once did my father tell me I should come back to Minnesota and work in advertising. He was inspiring because he realized that it’s a privilege to collect as many life experiences as one can. In Auschwitz, he was surrounded by death each day. Life had to be lived to it’s fullest, and he reached ninety years by doing just that. I think Jane has picked up the same philosophy from her mother. She’ll get immensely wrapped up in what she’s doing at the moment— be it her acting, her art, her clothing line, or another of the many creative endeavors that she enjoys. She lives every moment of life to the

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Remarkable Changes fullest and derives great satisfaction from her achievements. But at the end of the day, she always understands her priorities—her family and close friends. It’s quite a balancing act.

The family I grew up in is indeed the foundation and the centerpiece of my sense of connection. I think I’ve always known this, but it became particularly apparent when my father was dying. He died slowly of cancer, and my mother, my sisters, and I all participated at first in trying to help him recover and then later in being there as he let go. The whole experience became a deep and meaningful cleansing— and we all developed a profound appreciation and understanding of the whole family and of our dynamic. My sisters and I now understand more clearly what our strengths are, what our connections are, and how we can work as a team. It’s generally an unspoken connection—we just do it. With my mother so far away from me, I appreciate my sister Annie being involved—sometimes aggressively—with her health interests. I appreciate my sister Sally spending almost all her free time with my mother. I appreciate Annie bringing her children to my mother consistently so that she has the joy of being a grandmother. When I am able to help them financially—they’ve never asked for or expected it—it’s a joy, and it’s the contribution I am able to offer from this distance. It all just works—it’s our unique connection as a family and we each do what we can. Isn’t that the reality about connection? You seek it out and then you do what you can, when you can do it. I hope these stories have shown how a sense of connection can help you immeasurably as you transition through the phases of your life. The next signpost, which is about seeking spiritual guidance, can offer an even deeper sense of direction just when you most fear that the changes you face can make you lose your way.

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The Dr. Quinn series was an answer to a prayer—and, sometimes I think, a gift from my father.

6

Find Guidance in the Spiritual Believe in Something Greater than Yourself

If events of the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that truly there ’s not a person on this planet who can guarantee that any one of us will be here tomorrow. I certainly believe that to be true, but I also think it’s a fearful way to live one’s life. We all vividly recall the fear that gripped everyone after the terrorist acts of September 11, which kept many people from traveling by air. I, too, was frightened, and I called my mother in England for a bit of advice. “I have all these commitments to take care of, but I’m not comfortable getting on a plane,” I said. “What do I do?” Her answer was like balm to a wound. She said, “Darling, you never know when your time is going to come, whether it’s an event like this or some random thing that can happen as you cross the street. All I know is if you are living in fear and not fully living your life, you’re not having a life—you might as well be dead.” So within days I got on an airplane. In the course of my regular business dealings, I flew ten or twelve times in the weeks following the tragedy, walking through empty airports and sitting in empty 183

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planes, with most of my friends thinking I was nuts. But I felt my mother’s advice was sound, and truly, it helped me to overcome my fear of the unknown. Her words started me on a kind of personal journey as well, thinking about what it takes to live through enormous change, or even just today’s unexpected events, without fear. Those thoughts are what brought me to this signpost. Fear of the unknown can easily color and limit each of our lives, but I believe the antidote to that fear is to look for spiritual guidance in the form that is most meaningful to you. In the pages of this book I have shared stories from many lives that have been shaken up, or turned completely upside down. Every one of these people has turned to their unique sense of the spiritual in order to understand, or sometimes just to stand, the changes they were involved in. Certainly to see even devastating change as a gift in disguise requires a great sense of the spiritual. As you live your life, perhaps you’ve seen that some of the things that happened to people in these pages, or things similar to these, have happened to you. But if not, rest assured that your own remarkable change does not necessarily have to come from an individual crisis or turn of events. It could come simply from seeing the global insecurity we all live with daily, and out of that can come your positive, creative response, which is so necessarily fueled by a sense of the spiritual. I asked my friend Deborah, who went blind because of diabetes, how she deals on a daily basis with what happened to her. How horribly unfair that she should awaken one day to a sightless world, a kind of life she certainly never asked for, and did her best to avoid. In addition to losing her vision, Deborah also had a kidney transplant several years ago, when her kidneys failed—another effect of diabetes. She ’d faithfully seen her diabetes doctor every two months, and he always told her that her kidneys had been stable for so long that she shouldn’t worry about them failing. Then, during one visit, a 184

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blood test showed, sure enough, they were failing. Her brother donated one of his kidneys, and this transplant saved her life. The reality is, having diabetes this long (she was diagnosed in the 1960s) simply takes its toll, and so Deborah lives every day with the possibility that further complications will make her life even more difficult. Her life sounds so full of crisis when I describe it to others, yet Deborah is a woman with a perpetual smile on her face and a tremendous sense of humor. How do I deal with what I’ve been given? Let me tell you—I am so glad I’m here. Every day is a gift to me. And everything is doable. If it’s not a medical problem, any problem can be solved. Losing other things, material things, can be heartbreaking—but other than medical problems or death, it doesn’t matter. My life has become calm. What I’ve been through puts everything into perspective. People ask me how I use what I have, how I live the active life I do. I tell them this: My strong will and the grace of God—that’s how I use it all.

Developing a Spiritual Connection It seems that if you don’t have a particular spiritual connection before you face great change in your life, you’re primed to develop one when you do. Facing something as frightening as breast cancer did that for my friend Corinna. She told me that it awakened the spiritual side of her nature. It also simply allowed her the luxury of time and the opportunity to read, not only about the conventional and alternative medical issues she wanted to understand, but also about the spiritual guidance she knew she needed. Having breast cancer made me realize that there is an entire world out there devoted to the growth and development of the soul. Having

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Jane Se ymour been raised Catholic and sent off to a convent boarding school at the age of seven, I had a relationship with organized religion that was shaky at best. My disease gave me an opportunity to reexamine my spirituality, and it gave me a deep sense of a connection with a higher power and an ability to trust in that higher power. It was the beginning of a new spiritual journey that led me to study the Kabbalah, read about Buddhism, and let go of Fear with a capital F.

You never know what it is exactly that will spark your spirituality. A cousin of mine, Adam Frankenberg, is a brilliant example of great spirituality springing up where you might least expect it. When I was quite young I began having problems in school, and my parents set about finding out why. In the end I was diagnosed with a neurological condition called neurofibromatosis. In my case it made me rather clumsy and gave me learning disabilities, so I was transferred to what in England is called a special school—I think I was six, just short of my seventh birthday, when I was transferred. I stayed in that school for about two years. Then, when I was nearly nine years old, we moved to the United States for about six months because my father was to be teaching for a semester at an American university. Both my sister and I went to school while we were in the States; she in kindergarten and I in elementary school. Because of a misunderstanding I was placed in a special education class that turned out not to be with people like me, who had dyslexia or similar problems. I was put with students who had very serious troubles, so it was quite rough. Toward the end of the time I was there, Jane ’s film War and Remembrance was shown on television. As part of the publicity for it, Jane gave an interview in which she said that her father was Jewish and her nonstage name was Joyce Frankenberg. The next day in school one of my teachers asked me if I was

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Remarkable Changes related to Jane because my name was Frankenberg, which is a bit unusual. I said that Jane was my cousin. Then the teacher asked if that made me Jewish. I’d never really thought about it—no one in my family practiced Judaism, and we’d hardly ever discussed it. After a few moments I said, “Yes, I suppose it does.” On the bus on the way home from school that day, my fellow students decided they were going to attack me because I was Jewish, reenacting scenes from the Second World War, and so they came at me with stones and other missiles. I was in the back of the bus, and fortunately the bus driver saw what was happening, and stopped the bus, and came and rescued me. He took me to the bus depot, where I was put on another bus and taken back home. My family made an official complaint, but we were about to return to England in any case, so my parents immediately took me out of school, and that was the end of it. But it set me thinking—I’d never thought of myself as Jewish before. I wanted to know what was this thing, Judaism, that would provoke such a reaction from my schoolmates. Some of my interest was curiosity at first, but it was also just plain obstinacy as well. It was quite clear I was going to get negative reaction whether I was involved in the religion or not, so I thought I might as well be involved. I immediately started a campaign to be taken to synagogue with my mom and dad. They did get a friend to take us, and I enjoyed it very much, but we didn’t go there again for quite some time—almost a year. Still, I kept nagging at my parents as only a child can. When we went again, we’d completely forgotten where this synagogue was. So we had to phone up directory inquiry asking where to find it. At first they gave us the address of the Little Sisters of Mercy; on a second try they gave us a Sikh temple. We told them that neither was what we were looking for and they said, “You’re complaining? We’ve already given you two places of worship.”

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Jane Se ymour We held on to our sense of humor, and in the end we got the address and started to go quite regularly. Our whole family really got into it. We eat kosher now, which has really affected my poor mother. I wander around the kitchen making sure we are kosher. We ’re members of what’s called in England a reform synagogue; that equates to a conservative synagogue in the United States. Now, years later, I’m doing a masters in Jewish studies and hope to be a rabbi in due course. I knew I wanted to become a rabbi very soon after we started attending services—within a couple of years, in fact. I became very interested in studying the texts—and to eventually work at studying and teaching seemed perfect. Isn’t it amazing how, in the spiritual realm, one thing leads to another so easily sometimes?

I suppose you could say my father was born Jewish—he certainly came from a Jewish family, although as with Adam’s family, no one practiced that religion. But as Adam saw in his own life, they certainly paid the price for being Jewish anyway. During World War II my father lost three of his family members at Bergen-Belsen. He was part of the Royal Air Force that came to release prisoners, and he told me he ’d hoped he might find his cousins, who he’d known had been imprisoned there. He never found them—they had all been murdered. Although my father didn’t believe in the religion of Judaism, he believed in the tradition and the culture, and that’s what he passed on to us. He was not what you would call a spiritual man at all. He adamantly did not believe in God or any afterlife, and so we were raised. But he did believe that people of all races and religions should have the right to live according to their beliefs. He very much wanted all his children to understand and learn about all religions and to realize that they all came from a similar perspective—the idea of something higher and more spiritual than yourself. 188

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I remember him reading Gulliver’s Travels to us, and pointing out that, like the strange characters in the stories, people around the world might have different ways of professing their faith and living their lives, but they were still to be respected. There was a particular story I remember I liked very much—about the Big Endians and the Little Endians. The story went that the big Endians always broke their boiled eggs at the wider end of the egg, and the little Endians broke theirs at the narrow end of the egg. In their land, if you ate your eggs the wrong way, you were despised. Each type of Endian was raised to despise those who were different from themselves, to hurt them, and eventually to kill them, just because they were different. Of course when you’re talking about fantasy characters, this sounds ludicrous. But when you think about what’s happening with various religions around the world today, and see that it’s very much the same thing, it’s not ludicrous at all. My great desire is to teach our children to understand that differences are to be respected. I’d love to see the teaching of comparative religion became a compulsory part of education. Children are capable of realizing that yes, I’m being raised in accordance with a certain religion, but that there are all these others and they’re all ancient and they all came from an original sort of spirituality and respect for something larger than ourselves. That’s what my father taught me. In that way he gave my sisters and me an introduction to all kinds of religions. Although my father did not believe in God, before he died we had a long conversation about that. It was fascinating to speak openly with someone like my father, someone who knows he is going to die soon and who knows he has come to his final state. What a gift my father gave me in having that conversation with me. I asked him if he ’d haunt me if a Supreme Being—God—turned out to exist and if my father indeed ended up in heaven with Him. We were being kind of funny and joking about it, but at the same time it was an honest 189

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plea on my part. I longed to say to him, “When you pass to the other side, if there is another side, you know, give me a sign.” I believe that what happened next was just that. At that time, of course, he did not know that my life was going to be falling apart, that my marriage was ending, or any of those things. I barely knew any of it myself, although I sometimes wonder if I wasn’t growing toward being Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman was a great able to withstand all that gift, allowing me to work outdoors in a was to come. When the beautiful park not far from my home. worst did happen, and I so badly needed work, out of nowhere suddenly this Dr. Quinn series just fell into my lap. It has often seemed to me extraordinary that in my time of greatest need, in my darkest moment, I would be given a show in which I could play a nurturing character, one who would allow me to process a lot of the feelings I was dealing with, and one that so closely mirrored my childhood with my father. It’s rather an amazing story, how Dr. Quinn came about. As my agent and I were looking for work that would ease my dark financial situation, he told me about two opportunities, one to do a sitcom and another for a movie, a pilot for a series that would be called Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Both sounded like just what I needed; how190

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ever, I had to choose just one. The catch was that if you do a pilot, you have to sign a five-year contract, just in case the pilot is picked up by the network and becomes a series. So you have to really like that movie, and be willing to make a full commitment before you do it. I had to make a decision quickly about the pilot, because the meeting for the sitcom was the next morning, and that’s when I would make my choice. So I took the script home that night, curled up in my big bed, and read it. I was profoundly moved by it. It made me weep, and I read it again and again, weeping each time. The script had touched me so deeply I couldn’t imagine living life and not playing that role. I was so drawn to the idea of a woman who had been raised a certain way, in a certain environment, and who could not be accepted for what she was, which for Dr. Quinn was, of course, being a female doctor. At the same time I felt a deep connection with a woman like Michaela Quinn, who wasn’t about to give up her training and allow herself to be destroyed by the system. Even after she went west, she wasn’t wanted by the town at first, because she was supposed to be a man and they’d got the name wrong. Still, in the face of all that, Michaela forged a life for herself in a very hostile environment. In so many ways, I felt a bond with Michaela. I related to her being a woman on her own. I related to having children other than my biological children to take care of, because I had Jenni. And I related to moving to a foreign environment, because I had come from England and gone west myself. Last, and perhaps most important of all, my father had been a doctor. Just like Michaela, I was the doctor’s daughter, and my own father’s great passion had always been the history of medicine. If I made this movie, there I would be, right in the middle of all that my father and I had loved! What a decision I had to make. I wanted to do the sitcom, because I needed the stability, but I dearly loved the Dr. Quinn movie. In the morning, I went to the meeting with the producers of the sitcom. I 191

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actually asked them what I should do, how I could choose. They said, “Oh, no problem, no problem. You can do both.” They went on to explain that they were certain the Dr. Quinn movie would never become a series, so after I completed it, I’d be free to do their sitcom. After all, they reasoned, Dr. Quinn had so many strikes against it: it had a woman doctor in the lead, which hadn’t been done before, and everyone “knew” a series with a female lead wouldn’t do well. Besides, they told me, it takes place in the Wild West, and not only was there no interest in Westerns anymore, there also was no interest in medical shows. Finally, they added, the movie was not edgy; it was kind of soft, and family-oriented, and that sort of show wasn’t going to do well either. “Okay,” I said. “Oh, good, that’s perfect. I’ll sign the contract, I’ll do the movie, and then I’ll be ready to do your sitcom.” I accepted the Dr. Quinn part that day, and I was literally in the saddle the next morning, beyond delighted. Here was a job that absolutely fit into what my father had raised me to believe, including the practice of medicine he had encouraged me to learn about. Here indeed was my salvation: a show that was shot in a nearby park, where I would work outdoors with children and horses; a place to which I could easily bring my children while I worked. On a slightly uncanny note, here also was a world in which I’ve always felt strangely comfortable. I do think there are many things on the spiritual level that we can’t understand. One that I’ve always questioned is why I feel so completely at ease in period costumes from this era. When I put on a corset and crinoline, I truly feel the way I imagine most women feel when they’re wearing blue jeans— I’m perfectly at home. Spending my days dressed like that, working on a set that portrays life in the 1870s, is, for me, like going home again. As it turned out, there was also a strong feeling of family on that show—unlike anything I have experienced before or since on a movie 192

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set or television show. There was an amazing bond that happened while we worked. To this day, every night before I go to bed, I turn on the television and after checking out the latest disaster in the universe, I find myself flipping around to see Dr. Quinn. I find I appreciate more today what a wonderful show it was and what a good message it sent. It gives me comfort still, and it makes me grateful to know I was able to be a part of something as fundamentally worthwhile. Indeed, it was a dream come true. In fact, you might say it was heaven-sent. One has to wonder, sometimes, just where these blessings come from. Whether or not my father had some kind of heavenly hand in my getting Dr. Quinn, I do believe he has been haunting me—not in a scary way, but in a profoundly loving, nurturing, and ever-present way. My seven-year-old twins, who obviously never met him, talk of him almost daily—as someone they knew, someone they love, and someone whose heritage means an enormous amount to them. While I wasn’t raised to be religious, I’ve always been comfortable with some kind of spiritual connection. For one thing, I find that I pray, but perhaps in a different way than many people do. My prayers are to a Universal Being rather than to or through a specific religion. I believe that a Universal Being exists, that we have souls with a light side and a dark side, which comes back to my great belief that life is truly all about choices. We all have choices to make between the light and dark parts of ourselves. When we make dark choices such as giving in to anger, seeking revenge, expressing hatred, I believe we give up part of our soul. On the other hand, when we choose to live in the light, we find in ourselves such qualities as sharing, patience, empathy, the ability to forgive, and the ability to be open to new ideas, new thoughts, and new creations. It seems to me that most organized religions include this in their belief systems; it’s just cloaked in different cloth. Earlier, I shared the story of Emily, the woman who lost everything. 193

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She learned about choice as well—in the spiritual quest that accompanied her losses. “Whether we admit it or not,” she found, “we’re choosing constantly. There are people who believe they’re victims, but they’re not. It’s actually not true. What’s true is that we choose.”

Many Paths Like my father, I have tried to raise my children to respect and have knowledge of all religions and to choose their own spiritual path. I just cannot raise them to believe that one group is right and another is wrong. Throughout history, that theory has caused so many wars. This belief is one of the reasons James and I made the documentary for the Red Cross about the measles immunization program in Africa. We took with us eight young teenagers, an ethnically diverse group from low-income parts of Los Angeles, so they could see that these Muslim children and adults were essentially the same as themselves, not an anonymous enemy. We hoped these American children could then see that the same situation exists at their schools back home— kids with different backgrounds, different clothing, or different religions are not the enemy just because they are different. We have a choice as to how we react to those differences. Rather than reciting the kind of prayer in which you ask God to take over, I was taught as a child to count my blessings and simply be grateful for what had been given. I still do this today. It is about being thankful for what is rather than asking for what you don’t have. I’m not one to go on my knees and say, “I give up, God, You fix it.” I also have a problem with helplessly watching sad things happen, or with being apathetic and looking to God to make it right for me. I feel that there has to be something that we can do for others, that we have to make the effort for ourselves as well. I joke with the twins, Johnny and Kris. I tell them, “Keaches are not quitters! We keep going and we keep trying!” The only failure I can see is in not having tried, in giving up before you start. There’s never any failure in having tried. 194

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This brings to mind the story of Claire Sylvia, a woman I was asked to play, and met through a television movie called Heart of a Stranger. The movie was an adaptation of her book, A Change of Heart, which tells the story of the heart-lungs transplant she underwent when she was in her midforties in 1988, the first such transplant performed at the Yale–New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. Claire is wonderful, such a beautiful, proud woman, and very inspiring. It’s interesting when you meet people like Claire, who are struggling with life-and-death issues, but who never come across as victims. Yet you can meet people who have very little wrong in their lives, and they come across as being victimized on a daily basis! It’s all in the attitude, and Claire has an attitude of power that is based in her spirituality. I’ve been a dancer all my life, although I was born with a heart murmur. It wasn’t until I was in my early forties that I began feeling tired and short of breath, and I was diagnosed with primary pulmonary hypertension. Various medications failed to work for me, and as my heart and lungs began to fail, it seemed my life was ending. Not only was I very ill with a life-threatening condition, but I also had a young child to care for at home. It was a nightmare. I desperately needed help in dealing with the nightmare. I didn’t think of what I was seeking as spiritual guidance in a traditional sense. But I felt strongly that if this was to be the end of my life, rather than the middle of my life, I wanted to find a way to face it with a sense of equanimity and dignity. I wanted to find something in this challenge I was facing to uplift me, and to help me do the best I could with what I had been given. I’ve come to understand what my friend Dr. Bernie Siegel, whom I met right after my transplant, called the definition of spirituality. While the word means different things to different people, he says spirituality is simply the ability to find peace and happiness in an imperfect world. That’s what I was looking for. On that path, I found a psychospiritual healer, a psychiatrist who

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Jane Se ymour taught me how to meditate, how to do positive visualizations, and who guided me in reading books by authors who deal in a positive way with the process of dying. I found authors like Stephen Levine and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose ideas helped me tremendously. I worked with the psychospiritual healer once a week. When I could no longer walk up the stairs to his office, he would come and have sessions with me at my home, sometimes including my daughter, or her father, my ex-husband. I was very honest with my daughter. After all, this was her journey, too. I told her what was going on with my heart and lungs, and we addressed the pragmatic issues head-on. For example, if I didn’t live until she finished high school, we talked about where she would want to live. We faced this largest of all changes with a sense of humor, and with honesty. What I learned is that I had to take charge of myself and of my own life, to find my own sense of power, and in my case, to not give my power over to the doctors. Bernie Siegel calls it being a “bad patient.” I continuously tried to find ways to make decisions that were the best for me, whether or not they coincided with what the doctors thought I should or should not do. By the time of the transplant, I had done a lot of work on understanding all my relationships, and on forgiveness. I came to understand that we are all motivated either by love or by fear, and I had chosen to give up the fear. I felt I had gone to a higher spiritual place because I had, in a sense, already lost my physical being. I spent my time in prayer, reading, meditating, and figuring things out. I had gained a sense of peace, and I no longer feared what was happening to me. I had an overwhelming feeling that everything was in God’s hands, and that whatever happened I would be able to live—or die— with. It wasn’t a giving up of power; it was an acceptance of peace.

Like Claire, at some point, after you have used your personal power and done all you can, I believe you have to let go of the out196

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come, which we usually can’t control anyway, and accept what will come. Often in my life, when things have been as bad as they can get, I have also done this. I do all I can, then I turn the situation over to God, or to Fate, or to whatever higher power there may be. I always try to put in my best efforts first. But once I have done that, then I just have to let it go, trust that what will be is the right thing, and welcome whatever results arrive. I learned about the most profound exercise in turning one’s hurts over to a larger presence through a woman I met while traveling recently, when we had to make an airline connection in Atlanta. A beautiful African-American woman, Carolyn Jones Ellis, had been assigned to meet our plane and take us to our connecting flight. She was quite striking, and I especially noticed her hair, which was wrapped high on her head like a natural turban. I asked her about it, and she told me she had started growing her waist-length dread locks after her head had been shaved for her second brain surgery in 1992. She ’d decided on dreadlocks because they symbolize the mane of a lion, and stand for strength. I was fascinated, and during the walk to our gate, she told me her inspiring story. Moved beyond words, I knew it was one worth sharing. I worked as an international flight attendant for seventeen years, flying from Cincinnati to Paris and living in Atlanta. I remember my last flight to Paris in 1991. When I was leaving the aircraft I ran back to get some Tylenol because I had a headache. It didn’t help, because, as I recall, I couldn’t leave my hotel room at all that weekend, I felt so bad. It was a strange type of headache, a pain between my eyes, where my face felt like it was just dropping. Coming home from Paris that weekend, I was working the first-class cabin. There was only one person there, and I would play my role, but once I was out of sight of the passenger, I was in the galley holding my forehead. I had to do that for eight hours.

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Jane Se ymour When I got home, I still felt bad, and saw several doctors, but no one came up with a diagnosis. Coincidentally, my parents were attending the funeral of a relative in the northern part of Georgia. I drove up to see them, and at the wake, the sister of the man who had died told me he had had an aneurysm, a weakening in the wall of an artery in the brain, which caused the artery to burst while he was driving a truck. The truck had crashed, which killed him, if the aneurysm hadn’t already done so. She added that her father had died of an aneurysm as well. There I was, with this pain in my head I’d had for a month, and I instantly knew what was causing it. I drove home that night, scared to breathe, and in the morning I went to see a neurologist. They admitted me that day to the hospital for the test that would show if I, too, had an aneurysm. A couple of hours after the procedure, the doctor came into my room, switched off the television I’d been watching, and looked at me with tears in his eyes. He said, “Miss Ellis, we have found multiple aneurysms on the left and right sides of your brain. We have to do surgery on both sides of your head.” He went on to explain that the aneurysms were spots where artery walls had weakened and were bulging, and that surgery to clip out those spots and then either replace them, or reattach the strong parts of the arteries, was the only way to avoid a hemorrhage in my brain. Even though I’d suspected I had an aneurysm, that was a blow. It took a while and a lot of prayer before I was ready to face the surgeries I needed. I had to go to my God, and I had to get to the place where, if He took me during surgery, I was ready; if He left me I was ready. After that I made the arrangements for two surgeries—one in December 1991 and the second forty days later, in February 1992. My dad—he was seventy-five then—came to stay with my son, who was ten at the time. My dad had worked as a barber all his life, and he cut

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Remarkable Changes my hair before I went in. I took a taxi to the hospital the morning of the surgery, and I remember lying on the backseat because it was hard to face what I was going in for. The taxi driver wanted to chat, but I said I couldn’t talk. When I got out he said, “God bless you.” I knew he meant it, and I appreciated that. It was five A.M. and dark as night. I sat on a bench out on the grass for a while, then I walked myself into the hospital. I saw a chapel, and went in and said what I had to say. I came through that surgery fine—but I don’t remember a thing from the forty days between that one and the second one. The recovery from the second was similar to the first: the whites of my eyes were burgundy from bleeding inside my skull, and my skin was black all around them, like a raccoon, also from bleeding inside. My brain was so swollen that when I tried to think, my head was full of cotton. I had to force thoughts through; I couldn’t recall on demand. And, I had two big incisions with fifty-five staples holding my skull together: one incision went from the top center of my head down to my right ear, with twenty-eight staples, and the other went from the center of my head to the left ear, with twenty-seven staples. All in all I came through unbelievably well. Afterward, I had a certain power—a certain glow, because I came through double brain surgery, and here I am! I walk a bit aboveground because of all this, because twice, I had to prepare to die. I had to make my will and talk to my young son about it. I admit, I’m being carried by Someone who was watching over me. I went to my God—and I was answered. I don’t talk religion. But if you ask me what happened, I’m going to tell you.

In raising my children I’ve wanted to avoid giving them a false sense of security. I want them to know that good things happen and bad things happen, and that you can come through. Like Carolyn, you can resurface. You just may have a different perspective when

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you do, about what’s important in life. And you just may have a new perspective about your spiritual connection.

Spiritual Sustenance Difficult times sort us out. Sometimes it can feel like being picked up and shaken upside down, and in the process all the unnecessary stuff in our lives falls away. When we look carefully, the really important things are what stick with us. I especially love that about Emily’s story. As she lost her parents, her business, her marriage, her home, she was painfully learning the ultimate lessons about letting go of everything. But in the process she also learned about what never went away, and when she understood that, her spiritual life sustained her. While I was going through that really difficult time, I used to take walks and listen to tapes and try to understand what was happening to me in my life, and why it was happening this way. One day I fell down on my knees in the middle of my walk and I just sobbed. I realized I’d given up everything and I didn’t have anything else to give up— except my own life. I thought in a flash that this all must be a teaching from God about letting go in life. I had had to let go of everything, and what was left but me? During this epiphany I thought, “Oh no, I’m going to die and God is preparing me.” In that moment I deeply believed I was going to go—and soon. It seemed that my entire life had been an experience of letting go of everything that came to me, even down to the moment, to this minute. I’d let go of parents and friends and family and children and work and the body and the whole thing. I was intensely trying to figure out how we learn what it takes to let go. What I was really searching for was spiritual guidance. About that time, through friends, I attended a talk by a woman named Gangaji, and what she had to say about the spiritual touched me to my soul. So

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Remarkable Changes there was an opening; I needed spiritual guidance and I just experienced an opening to her and to what she had to say. It changed the ground of my life. It took me years to understand and hear her message—it wasn’t my mind that needed the nourishment of what she was saying, it was my heart. What I came to was the idea that part of what allows us to live with letting go is being in touch with what you do not let go of. The one thing that’s forever is the spiritual basis of our lives—in my belief it’s called Consciousness. At least now, anytime I want, I can stop and get in touch with what is real in my life—with the spiritual reality. And I know that if we can gracefully let go of what we must, we’ve got it made—then it’s just about moving through life. But what we do not let go of is the spiritual reality.

I’m always being invited to meet spiritual leaders of various kinds. I believe it’s because I’ve made some movies that are open-minded about spirituality. Dr. Quinn was quite open-minded, I believe, and I openly acknowledged in that series, and elsewhere, that I believe that true healing is a matter of addressing mind, body, and spirit. And I’ve made movies such as Yesterday’s Children, in which I played a real life woman who has been reincarnated. After doing that movie, I was constantly asked if I believed in reincarnation. My answer now, as it was then, is that I don’t not believe in it. While I think there are a lot of charlatans who put themselves forth as spiritual healers and the like, I also believe there are many things we can’t understand that may very well be true, or, at least, entirely possible. Overall, I’m very interested in what people are doing that is giving them joy, peace, harmony, and a solution to their problems. So, although I don’t follow one spiritual path, I do get an enormous amount out of each of those occasions when I meet with a spiritual healer. I’ve experienced an extraordinary spiritual healing myself, during which the healer helped me with my back pain, so I feel I have proof that there is a 201

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spiritual part of life we may not fully understand—but we can know it’s there. When we ’re dealing with change in our lives, I believe we must also listen to our own hearts. I don’t suppose you could really call that spiritual guidance, but I think it has great value and a similar kind of mystery attached to it. Intuition, gut reaction—whatever you want to call it—I try to teach my children to listen to messages from their inner selves. One of the greatest tools to give to anyone is to teach them to listen to the butterfly in their tummy so to speak—to go with their gut, trust their instincts. If something simply doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. I had one experience as a teen with a boyfriend and several friends in which I learned the ultimate lesson in listening to my own butterflies. My boyfriend and I were on holiday in the south of France— and we were desperate to get away from his family and go have a great evening with some friends who were staying nearby. We discussed it and discussed it, and once our plans were made, it was almost as if I saw a movie in my mind of what would happen if my boyfriend and I went along—it was almost psychic. I told him, “You’re going to think I’m nuts, but I just had a vision of something quite terrible happening tonight with those kids in the car.” I must have been convincing because we stayed home, bored to tears. In fact, we fell asleep at his house. In the middle of the night we were awakened by his father, who told us there’d been a terrible accident. The car we would have been in had rolled three times and narrowly escaped going over a precipice. Our friends were alive but badly injured. He told us the police had said that if there had been anyone in the backseat of the car (that would have been us), it would have caused the car to topple over the precipice and there would likely have been no survivors. So I always listen to my gut. Emily says it so well:

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Remarkable Changes One thing I have learned—an ongoing lesson I continue to refine—is that I need to trust my instincts and natural intuition. They are almost always spot on. Not my mind’s intuition, but my gut. To learn all of this out of the crises of my life; talk about lucky. What a lucky life I’ve had.

It’s interesting that we all experience our lives so differently. For Emily, and for me, a connection with the spiritual and relying on gut instinct is the basis for many of our actions. For John James, the founder of the Grief Recovery Institute, the message was more direct. After his infant son died and he found some resolution for his own grief, others began to seek him out for help with their grief. I was designing and building passive solar housing at the time that my son died. About six months later a friend brought a couple to my office whose child had died. I talked with them and told them what I had learned after the death of my son. Over the next eight months to a year, I found that I spent about 80 percent of my day talking to bereaved people someone had brought to my office. Finally I got a phone call from the director of a funeral-home company who wanted me to spend a weekend teaching funeral directors about dealing with grief. I discovered that at the time, about 95 percent of the education they received was about the dead, not about the living people who were grieving. I found the same was true for much of the clergy; most had no clue what to do for the living to ease their pain. If it wasn’t so tremendously sad it would have been a joke to think that the very people most closely involved with those who have lost a loved one didn’t really know how to ease their pain. When I finished the weekend with the funeral directors, I thought to myself, “What do you get the greatest amount of satisfaction doing— building houses or talking to people who are like you used to be?”

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Jane Se ymour I’m convinced that sometimes our higher authority puts a ring in our nose and leads us where we need to be. I would describe myself as very spiritually focused, but looking back at the beginnings of the Grief Recovery Institute, I wonder how many years God had been tapping me on the forehead before I woke up and heard it. It’s almost as if I was led to it because of a personal tragedy.

John’s story has made me wonder if it wasn’t like that for me with the Dr. Quinn role. I simply needed a big tap on the shoulder to be sure my spiritual connection was there. It does seem that if you aren’t spiritually aware, you may actually miss the whole idea about these moments that can be so difficult, and fail to see that they are actually gifts in disguise. Once you have visited this signpost, and you can see the need for spiritual guidance in the midst of your turmoil, it’s wonderful to think of what can happen next. When Sara’s young friend was having so much trouble with her addictions, she told me she was just determined that something good would come out of all of it. She wanted not only to be able to help her, but to use what she had learned to help other families, and that is where she is now. In the process, she developed a spiritual connection. All of this heartache has made me stronger because it’s made me see the value in having a higher power, and in having the twelve-step program in my life, and in having others around me who have walked this experience ahead of me. I know I’ve got people walking behind me. We all share what we know—and that makes me feel good.

As James says, “Sometimes when you’re walking up that mountain by yourself, you say, ‘I can do it, I can do it.’ And if you realize you’re not really walking alone—if you believe in something greater than yourself—it gets better.” I think he’s right. 204

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Like all of us, James has had his moments when he’s turned to prayer. Again, crisis situations can teach us so much! I liked this story about how he found that prayer can be centering and calming. When I was about thirty-five or so, I took up martial arts. One particular day, I had to fight five guys at one time—this guy who I was studying with was a real serious Korean master and he expected a lot from his students. Before the fight, I was so afraid that I was going to look bad and that I wouldn’t be able to do it. I actually was on my knees before I was called up to spar, and I prayed—even though I hadn’t prayed before. I said, “Listen, if You’re around here, I don’t care if I win, please just take this fear away. Please take the fear away.” I got up and sparred, and one, two, three guys came up and I was enjoying it. I was really enjoying it. At the end I looked back and it was like somebody else had been sparring. I realized I’d had a true spiritual experience, in which I turned over my will to something greater than myself and I just allowed myself to be in the moment and not try to control it. It was a very powerful moment in my life. I suppose that’s what I try to do when I’m acting and directing and being creative. I just let it go. You have to do that in a lot of situations. If you practice a sport or rehearse a part, when you get in the game or you’re on the set, you let it go and it’s going to happen. What you’ve got to do is show up for the practice. You have to keep practicing, and tune in to the spirituality.

James and I certainly share this philosophy. It’s the only way I can do what I do, whether it’s acting or giving a speech. As I shared with you earlier, I prepare, I consider, and I practice, and then I turn it over and allow the happy accidents to happen. It’s funny to think that usually after I’ve spoken publicly I actually have no idea what I’ve 205

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said. I always prepare something ahead of time, and then I make notes while I listen to those who speak before me. Invariably my speech changes considerably because I like it to include a response to what I’ve heard and I try to build on something I’ve just learned. I really never do anything by rote. But if I didn’t do the research and really think about what I want to say beforehand, it wouldn’t work. If I speak what I prepared ahead of time, without regard for what’s been said by someone else at the same event, that wouldn’t work either. I believe it’s all part of living in the moment—being prepared, but at the same time being open to what will come. I think my friend Judy best personifies what a difference a strong spiritual side can make. She’s an American who has lived in England most of her life. She married a man much older than herself, and they had a son quite late in life. Judy developed breast cancer, and endured multiple bouts with it. She died not long ago, but when I talked with her several months before her death, she was so full of joy. I asked her if it wasn’t difficult to be ill again and to lose her hair the fourth time. She told me she wasn’t upset by it: “I’m so full of joy and love—I would never have had so much love shown to me if I hadn’t had to go through this.” Judy truly found a blessing in something she nevertheless fought fervently. She acted from a place of gratitude that can only be called spiritual. Judy is a great inspiration to me, as, of course, is Christopher Reeve, who told his story so eloquently in his own books. He really is my guide in some ways—whenever I think anything is tough, unfair, painful, or even insurmountable, I stop and within seconds I say to myself, “Chris Reeve handles this, and more.” We all know he doesn’t just handle it; he’s actively fighting to improve his lot and that of other people with disabilities. He is so full of life. In my travels I have been fortunate to have met many inspiring people. There ’s Joanna Wicke, a great fan, who also lives on a respi-

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rator. Her strength and courage to carry on and be a member of her community, to be helpful to others, are an inspiration to me. My friend Trent McGee, another fan, has the same injury as Chris Reeve, although his occurred when he was just a child of five or six, when his parents’ car was hit during a high-speed police chase. And there is Dianne Odell who, I believe, is the longest surviving person with an iron lung. She has published a beautiful children’s book helping kids believe in themselves. All of these individuals carry on, and their families are full of love and support for them. Whereas many people would give up if they were faced with similar circumstances of daily life, they do not give up. In fact, they go far beyond simply making do—they’ve each found a way to excel in their own lives. Of course there are thousands of people whom you and I don’t know who are this courageous, and what lessons there are for us all in these lives! Spiritual guidance comes in a variety of packages and is delivered to us under many guises. Looking to one another, to the presence of the spiritual in one another, and to the inspiration we can find in one another, is the way to truly begin seeing the gifts that even the darkest days can bring.

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Remarkable changes always involve creative expression.

7

See the Gifts That Change Delivers Summon the Courage to Receive Them A h . . . t h i s i s w h e r e we all want to be. The place where deep down, we know that all change—change we create or change that happens to us—is a gift to be well used. From the crisis that threatens to crush us, to the burst of creativity that lifts us up to new heights of joy and understanding—each of these and all that falls in between are equally vital parts of life. This ability to see the gift in every situation is a gift in itself, but it is one of our signposts as well. Mind you, I don’t think it’s one that most of us can see and appreciate until we have visited a few of the other signposts, particularly the one concerning spirituality. I see a great example of that in Emily’s reflections on her life, and in what she learned as she weathered those years when crises came to her, one after the other. She went looking for spiritual guidance, and when she found the spiritual teacher who made sense to her, she said the message she heard changed how she saw her life. That message had a lot to do with seeing the gift in everything that life presents us with. Emily’s spiritual teacher said that if you could be fully open to all of 209

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life, then it doesn’t matter what you’re experiencing in any one minute because all of it was good, all of it was life in all its richness. To be able to see her life that way was exactly what Emily needed. “I was spending so much of my life at that time just in emotional agony over all the losses I was dealing with. I wanted to be at a place where I would be okay with the agony, that I could feel that the agony was just another part of life, and that all of life was good. I wanted to really know that all life is good.” For Emily, and for most people, it seems to me, there has to be at least some spiritual work before it’s possible to see as gifts both crises and the wonderful surprises fate sometimes drops at our feet. That was certainly true of John James, the founder of Grief Recovery. He saw that not only spiritual guidance was needed, but the healing of his heart was needed as well. I’m convinced we are all underneath an umbrella of a living God. Under this umbrella I’ve been given gift after gift. In direct proportion to being complete in relationships, I get to see the gifts because I’m not distracted by arrows in my heart—which can be very old arrows that produced wounds long ago in my life.

John has found that the more he heals those old wounds, the clearer he can see the gifts of today. It’s no small task to get to this place of acceptance. In a funny way, you almost can’t get there by trying—it seems it’s more that you have to be open to it before it can happen. And sometimes crisis cracks us open, in a sense. So many of my friends have found the way to see all events as gifts just when they’ve hit the most difficult parts of their lives. When Corinna was in the middle of her battle with breast cancer, she told me about a Chinese proverb she’d heard that came to mean a great deal to her. It was one of those simple truths: Crisis becomes opportunity. When crisis hits or huge change threatens to overwhelm, I 210

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believe we have to examine why it came about, and through our honest search for that truth, answers inevitably appear. And inevitably, once we see the answers, we can move ahead to better things. I know Corinna feels she was being sent a message when she got breast cancer. She and her husband were living in a beautiful but isolated place at the time, and Corinna had always been quite a social person. I think the illness forced me to find my voice and explain to my husband that I needed more interaction with people and culture, a more stimulating life. And I needed to challenge myself. Fortunately he was extremely sympathetic and responsive and totally supported my decision to move. Ironically, he never looked back. For both of us, our move was a positive change.

Corinna told me she also believes that crises seem to happen sometimes in order to get our attention, to help us learn the lessons we need to learn in life. Her illness certainly got her attention, and that of her husband as well. And how beautifully they used this gift to move them toward a fulfilling change. For Carolyn, the flight attendant, the crisis of her two brain surgeries became an incredible, extraordinary opportunity. As she said, she couldn’t think well, or recall the simplest facts after the second surgery. Talking was especially difficult—she had to think each word through before she could say it. For a while this inability to speak fluently made her withdraw from all the people who wanted to help her. Finally, when she had healed physically, she began on her own to look for ways to exercise her brain that might help her regain her ability to think quickly and to remember. I was on disability leave from the airline, and I was scanning the newspaper every day for volunteer jobs that might help me learn to talk well again, when one item just jumped out at me. There was a call

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Jane Se ymour for volunteer tour guides at the art museum in Atlanta, to escort busloads of third- through sixth-grade children through the folk-art and photo galleries. It was perfect—I was in control, I didn’t have to field questions because I was talking the whole time. And I had to memorize what I was to say. Day after day I got better at it; my brain was working, and I loved it. It became like acting. When I was in front of those kids, I would look in their eyes and I was carried by the character I was portraying. One thing led to another and I took some acting classes. Because of my museum job, I knew I could memorize and deliver in front of an audience. After a few acting classes, I knew I could improvise, too. Through the classes I found out about auditions for extras for television shows being filmed in Atlanta. I began as an extra on In the Heat of the Night and I’ll Fly Away. At one point I auditioned with thirty other women for a part in which I had to cry on demand because the character’s son had been murdered. I won out. So I went into acting; they told me I had talent. Eventually I went back to work at the airlines, meeting dignitaries at their planes and getting them to their connections. At the same time my second career was beginning to take off, a modeling agency contacted me and I started runway modeling at the age of forty-two. I kept at it and now I have acted in theater, feature films, television, commercials, and industrial films. Everything is amazing to me, so amazing. Before my surgeries, it never crossed my mind to act. Now, if I never did another thing, everything has been sufficient. I’m good at what I do, and when I retire from the airline in another year or two, I want to work fully in the theater. Someday, I want to be in my eighties, still acting, with my memory intact.

It would have been so easy for Carolyn to think her life was over when merely thinking and speaking the simplest sentence were both so

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difficult. At first, it must have seemed she would never be able to return to her career at all. But Carolyn didn’t quit—she kept looking for ways to learn and change and adapt to the predicament that had been handed her, to learn whatever lessons were being offered. In the end, she turned her disability into a new ability. She is such an inspiration to me. And what a gift to have met her at all in that quick scramble from one plane to another! I’m convinced that this is true for all of us: if we keep our eyes and hearts open, we needn’t look far for inspirational stories and positive role models in our lives. In fact, every time I speak with friends and those I meet about these things they share another amazing story. I only wish I had room for them all! Often both are right in our own backyards. Quite coincidentally, my sister Sally had a predicament that was amazingly similar to Carolyn’s. I’d gone to the theater with my best friend Patricia. On the way we stopped for gas and something to eat. I bought a choc-ice—it’s ice cream with chocolate around the edge—which is unusual for me. I don’t often eat chocolate. Off we went to the theater for an evening of Spanish music and dance. We’d really been looking forward to it and had wonderful seats. Suddenly I had this terrible headache above my left eye in the front of my head. I’ve never had a headache in my life; it was excruciatingly painful. My first thought was that perhaps it was a migraine caused by the chocolate. I told my friend I felt faint and put my head to my knees, and then I just collapsed. The next thing I remember is being in an ambulance wondering what was going on. I remember wishing I’d worn the same color bra and briefs. Then I recall being on a gurney in the hospital with my sister Annie holding my hand, and she was saying, “Don’t worry, I won’t leave you.” I thought perhaps I was going to die, and I told her I wanted

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Jane Se ymour to be cremated and buried next to Daddy. Annie realized later that it was three years to the day since he had died. The next morning, my mother arrived and stayed with Annie at my bedside. She called Jane and James and they caught the first plane straightaway to come and be with me. Annie told me later that an MRI done the first night showed I had two aneurysms in my brain, which had burst. The doctors had to wait a few days for the blood to drain away from the site of the aneurysms so they’d be able to see when they did the surgery to clip them. I had to lie very still. They gave me injections for the appalling pain and checked me every half hour to see if I could still move my arms and legs, and to see if I could answer logical questions. I went through some very strange and frightening moments as the blood drained and affected different parts of my brain. One day I was suddenly paralyzed on my right side and hallucinated; another, I began talking nonsense. They finally did the surgery and I came out fine, with just a little weakness on one side of my body. By exercising daily I was able to walk again. It changed my life enormously. After the aneurysm, I received masses of flowers and 185 cards from friends all over the world, all telling me how much I meant to them. I was forty-one years old and it’s the most amazing thing to have your friends tell you how much you mean to them. I didn’t realize, truly, how much I mattered to so many people. What a gift that was. When I was in hospital the nurses stuck the cards up on the walls in my room so I could see them every day—and they did cheer me up enormously. But reading them afterward was even better. I have two scrapbooks that tell me how well loved I am. I’ve always been a very positive thinker and a positive person, and I think that helped me through. But the cards made me see how lucky I was. How amazing that so many people were so pleased that I lived. It changed my whole family as well. I always felt well loved in my

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Remarkable Changes family; we’re very close. But after my experience with the aneurysm, we all realized how we take one another for granted—and that we shouldn’t.

Sally’s story illuminates how vital it is to see our lives as the gifts they are. Now anytime anyone is ill or in the hospital, everyone in my family realizes how important it is to send these cards, to tell people what they mean to you. It’s a gift to the person who receives your thoughts, but it’s a gift as well to be called upon to share them. I’ve found that once you start talking about the gifts that come out of crises or change, you see an incredible abundance. As Voltaire said, it’s an embarrassment of riches, and once we can see that, how can we feel anything but gratitude? Corinna discovered that kind of gratitude for the gifts she’d been given even before she’d been diagnosed, when she first found the lump in her breast that she was sure meant she had breast cancer. As I shared in an earlier chapter, because she was on holiday when she found it, and had a lot of time to think and work things through quite logically, she was able to come to terms with the idea that she’d had a wonderful life. “One could find joy in knowing that if it was going to end, you had the time to tell those closest to you that you loved them,” she said. When she returned home and the diagnosis was made, she went right to work on a will. Contrary to what most of us would think, Corinna said, “It was a wonderful, extraordinary exercise. Like being Santa Claus!” I can believe that because I’ve watched my mother do the same thing, with great joy. At eighty-eight years of age, she lives every day to the fullest, taking advantage of every opportunity and invitation that comes her way, but at the same time she’s aware that she won’t be here forever. Consequently she’s been quite literally gathering up the gifts she has in her life and then slowly handing out treasures she’s collected and things she knows we’ll value. She ’s been doing this for the last few years—we’ve received things like my first ballet shoes or a dance outfit I wore as a girl, an 215

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exercise book from school, an award my father received. My mother is such a giving person, she derives great pleasure in sharing these gifts while she’s well, alive, and vibrant enough to take part in the excitement with us. I believe that part of the reason she is doing this is that she has a great passion for life itself, and it is natural for her to want to share it. By her example, she taught me that it’s incredibly important to find your own passion. After you’ve been through your inner processes of learning about who you are and what your personal gifts are, what could be more wonderful than finding your passion, whatever it may be. Perhaps you like to plant tomatoes, to paint pictures, to help others. When people have passion of any kind, they excel, and they are able to experience great joy. Look at George and what it meant to his life when he was not promoted to the presidency of his company. As a result of what seemed to be huge misfortune, his passion is being focused in a new direction. My whole approach to this next phase of life is totally focused on still making a contribution, but in a different way—I want to be involved and passionate. My priorities are to be a good husband and a good father. Now I’ll be in a position to take a hike with my daughter if we want to. My wife and I have talked for several years about becoming involved with Habitat for Humanity. Now I can physically do something and see results, rather than just donating money. I’ll get to see a cause-andeffect relationship between my efforts and the results. I’m a certified Dale Carnegie instructor, so I’ll teach there, too. I have little patience for people who make excuses, but if I’m around someone who wants to grow, I have almost endless patience. There’s nothing I feel I must do—I’ve been fiscally conservative, I’ve managed my money, so now I’m in the position where I never want to work for anyone for money, only for the sheer joy of doing it.

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Random Gifts There ’s this whole idea of the randomness of certain kinds of changes—I love the word random. That’s why people go to Las Vegas—they want a random surprise. And there are random ingenious ideas . . . ideas that occur when you have a need for something or you realize someone else has a need for something and you use your own ingenuity to figure out a way to solve the problem or to create something that would help people or help yourself. One of the greatest joys I have right now is feeling that I am in a position to actually make a difference to people who need help—that this is a gift I can offer, or at least try to offer. It seems you can help along this idea of the randomness of certain changes and the gifts that come from them by doing your homework, by knowing what it is you want, so that you can recognize random gifts from the universe when they arrive. Marjorie had one of those huge random surprises when she was trying to chart a course after her retirement from a large corporation. When I had been retired for two years, I went to visit friends for New Year’s Eve in a town I’d visited before as a possible place to move to. While I was there we went looking for houses once again, and again found that they were too expensive for my budget. At lunch with my friends that day, in the course of conversation I told them that for several months I’d played with the idea of doing volunteer work in the mental health field because there was mental illness in my family. But I hadn’t followed through on that idea because I didn’t want to commit to something serious in my current hometown because I was still unsure about staying there. So we went on talking about how hard it is to find a place to live when you don’t already live in the town where you’re looking. “The main problem,” my friends said, “is that you’re

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Jane Se ymour not here to strike while the iron is hot when an affordable house comes on the market. You have to be here.” One woman suggested that if I really wanted to move, I should sell my house and rent an apartment in their town, and stay there until I found something. I answered, “Yeah, but where am I going to find an apartment I can afford that’s nice?” One of the other women said the people across the street from her had a guest apartment in their house that she thought they were ready to rent. We looked at it right after lunch, and it was lovely and affordable, and they were willing to do a month-to-month arrangement. So I took it, just like that. As we were talking to the woman who owned the house, her husband came in and it turned out that he was the head of a mental-healthservices company in town and that he has a brother with schizophrenia, as I do. He said it would be great if I moved into their apartment because he could think of a number of people he could introduce me to so I could start doing some volunteer work in the mental health field. I was stunned—all I could do was stand there and weep. I knew this was it—this is what I was supposed to be doing. I went home and put my house on the market, sold it in ten days, put my stuff in storage, and moved.

I would say that because she had done her homework, Marjorie was able to recognize the situation that was right for her when it presented itself, and what a gift that situation was. Here’s how she explains what she did: “When they say the universe takes care of things, it’s true, but you have to be able to recognize when the universe is talking to you. You have to have done some work on your own—at least to know what you don’t want. You may not know exactly what you do want, but you must have at least a guess in the right direction. At least that’s true for me.” It seemed random that everything came together the way it did for Marjorie. What was not random, however, was that she was prepared 218

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to take a leap of faith in accepting a gift she knew she wanted when it was presented to her. She told this story about how she was inspired to take this—and other—leaps of faith. I was browsing in a gift shop and spotted a purple greeting card—my favorite color—so naturally I was drawn to it. On the cover of the card there was a single word: “Leap . . .” and inside it read, “. . . and your dreams will follow.” It reminded me that I was capable of planning this huge change for myself and resourceful enough to carry it off. That card is framed now, and sitting on my dresser, and I make a point to look at it often and think about that message. In the end, I did take that leap toward the gift that was offered, and it did work out. I’m never getting rid of that card!

Marjorie ’s story is refreshing to me because she was so willing to see the gift that was offered her. I believe that sometimes people allow themselves to get locked into who and what they believe they are supposed to be, rather than understanding who they really are. If they truly opened up and allowed their spirit to leave their body for a moment and imagined and thought seriously about what gives them moments of extraordinary happiness, they could find the seeds of a remarkable change within themselves. I know of nobody who is not thrilled when they find they are capable of something they did not know they could do. Perhaps it’s parachuting out of an airplane, or maybe it’s learning how to swim when they haven’t tried for forty years. In my case it was something as simple as holding a snake, which I’ve been terrified of all my life.

Change and Creative Expression Making changes in our lives that are truly remarkable always involves a form of creative expression. That creative expression can be anything, whether it’s to talk to a group of women about something you 219

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feel passionate about, or writing poetry or an essay, or just a piece in your journal about how you feel or what’s going on in your life. Perhaps it’s working on a painting or a drawing—or putting together a unique combination of clothing and jewelry that produces your signature look, or perhaps even designing your own things to wear and accessorizing your wardrobe. Everybody has within them the ability to be creative. Creative expression is the spark that ignites remarkable changes in your life; it’s the flame that illuminates the gifts that come with such change. Sometimes it seems that we can see the gift that’s being offered in the form of change, but we just can’t summon up the courage to receive it. Like Marjorie’s leap of faith, having the faith to welcome even unpleasant change into your life will in turn produce the courage to receive that change—like a huge cycle that strengthens itself. One bit of faith begets a particle of courage, which begets a little more faith, and on and on. Corinna’s attitude toward her cancer made that type of difference for her. Her initial ability—and willingness—to see it as a gift set her on the road to experiencing her illness on ever deeper and more profound levels. Right from the beginning, I was able to look at the entire experience as a gift and treat it as such. The initial impact was obvious, in forcing me to reprioritize my life. I found myself letting go of the superficial on all levels and zeroing in on the things that are truly important. In doing so, you learn a great deal about who you are. That was a wonderful lesson. My illness was also a gift of time, of time for introspection. It gave me permission to be selfish in the sense that no one had expectations of me. I was not supposed to go where people were because my white-blood-cell count was so low that I had no defenses, so I just closed my doors. I talked to people on the phone and kept my personal environment as healthy and germ-free as possible.

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Remarkable Changes In doing that, I was able to take this wonderful gift of time to explore not only all the healing therapies, both conventional and alternative, but to look at who I was and who I was going to become, what my strengths and weaknesses were. I had the time to harness all of my personal qualities to battle this evil. And I was determined to win.

Corinna did win her battle with breast cancer, and she went on to form a small company with a partner. One day her accountant called Corinna and advised her to dissolve the partnership because her partner had been involved in dealings that Corinna had not known about. Of course she was shocked and devastated at the betrayal, but she immediately realized that under the circumstances, this was absolutely the best thing that could have happened for her. She said that the partnership had never been based on a truly healthy relationship, and that she knew it was time she stood on her own two feet in the business world. It was my illness and my study of Kabbalah that had taught me to view this and any other process with an objective wisdom, and not to sink into the emotional reaction that would be typical in those circumstances. I was able to be proactive rather than reactive and to understand that even this was an opportunity. It’s happened over and over for me. The gift is to be able to view crisis without that human reaction—without wallowing in the emotional indignation, making judgments, and allowing yourself to be the victim. Instead, you are able to view the overall situation and allow the opportunity to reveal itself. You can have the confidence to trust the new direction and welcome it. This was my huge lesson in life: Rather than running full-tilt into emotional turmoil, you are actually able to stop yourself on the perimeter and examine the outcome.

I know from my own experience how difficult it is to regain trust once it is lost. Corinna handled that crisis admirably, and she did not 221

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lose her sense of trust in humanity. Betrayal is particularly hard for me, probably the hardest thing of all for me to get through. When it happens, it leaves me fretful and sleepless, struggling to process my feelings. It’s not just the betrayal, you know. I find myself wondering how I could have let that happen and why I didn’t know it was happening. You feel made a fool of. But life goes on. And when I look at stories like Corinna’s, it reminds me that we don’t know what gift each crisis may be hiding until we have the patience and faith to open our eyes and our hearts to what may come.

The Gift of Adversity I would be the first to admit that sometimes, when traumatic events such as betrayals or disappointments happen, it’s very difficult in the moment to be calmly philosophical about them, or to see the larger picture and move on. But we can learn to see the gift in the greatest difficulty by practice in dealing with our own changes and crises. As Corinna said, “We must seek to trust in the best outcome, and look for the power to understand this while we’re going through hard times, knowing in our hearts that the outcome will be of benefit to us . . . that’s what makes it a positive experience. If you can objectify your turmoil while you’re going through it, it changes the whole experience, the nature of it. It’s the biggest gift you could ever be given.” Leslie, whose daughter was injured when she was very young, also had an older son, who suffered for years as he struggled with substance abuse. As his mother, Leslie suffered with him, but both see their lives as the better for their struggles. I told my son the other day, “I have to credit you—as horrible a life as you’ve led and as difficult as the things are that you’ve gone through, I would not be the person I am today without having suffered it all with you. The struggle was truly a gift; each of these things has been a gift.

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Remarkable Changes I think we have a choice in all this. You can be the kind of person who looks at each adversity as a gift, or looks at each as a pain in the ass. We can each choose to be a positive person, and let that energy lift us up, or we can choose to be negative and let adversity weigh us down. Even if we don’t understand why life has been this way for you and for me, I do believe that someday the light will go on I was so honored to meet Claire Sylvia on the and we’ll both be able set of Heart of a Stranger, a movie based on her to say, ‘Now I know heart-lungs transplant. Claire’s willingness to face the extraordinary changes in her life why this was my plan, allowed her to see the gifts that came to her why this is my life.’ In through difficult times. the meantime, we can just enjoy the gift, the richness of the life we have.” While he and I agree that right now it’s easier for me to say this than it is for him, it remains the truth of his life.

Claire Sylvia also found that adversity brought many unexpected gifts to her life, and to the lives of people around the world. After her heart-lungs transplant, she was plagued by dreams and changes in her

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own personality that she was sure were connected to the young man who donated the organs that now were part of her. Her story is truly extraordinary. One of my first dreams was of a young man. In the dream, the young man and I kiss. As we do this, I feel myself inhaling him into me, in what feels like the deepest breath I’ve ever taken. I awoke from the dream exhilarated, and knowing the young man’s name. When I called the transplant coordinator to ask if this man might be anything like my donor, and described the dream as well as the man’s name, the coordinator was horrified. At that time donors and recipients were not encouraged to have any contact at all, and she told me to forget the dream and the name, that I simply could not know any of that. During the first weeks after the transplant, I found I had a sudden taste for beer, which I had never enjoyed before, and for certain types of junk food which I’d never even tasted, such as chicken nuggets. As the weeks went by, friends noticed that I was wearing brighter colors, and some said I walked with something almost like a swagger. At first I wondered if perhaps all of these changes were just expressions of the joy I felt at having my life restored because of the transplant. But I had to admit that it was more than that. I truly felt as if another being was coexisting with me in my body. And, as time went on, other, more frightening dreams appeared, ones in which I could feel myself flying through the air after the motorcycle I was driving crashed into oncoming traffic. I had been told only that my donor was an eighteen-year-old young man who had been killed in a motorcycle accident, but the other attributes I felt myself taking on made me want to know more. Eventually, working on my own, I found, and met, my donor’s family. The name I had dreamed was my donor’s name. When I spoke with his family, the dreams, the personality changes, all made an uncanny kind of sense. Among many other things, they told me he had loved

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Remarkable Changes beer, that the bright colors he gravitated toward were a reflection of his own joy in life, and that he was always stopping to pick up some chicken nuggets, his favorite snack, at a local fast-food restaurant. In fact, they told me, he’d had a box of the nuggets in his jacket the night he died.

As a result of Claire’s willingness to face and understand these dreams and her new life, the medical world now at least acknowledges that there are questions to be asked about exactly what a transplant patient receives when she or he receives an organ from a donor. In an interview recently, a reporter from New Zealand asked me, “How does it feel to be the person who changed the concept of medicine?” He asked because the medical community talks now about cellular memory. They at least address the question I was asking fifteen years ago, which is, “Can the cells carry the memories of what had happened to the donor?” I learned that traditional Chinese medicine has known this for centuries. They talk about the soul existing in every cell, that there ’s memory throughout the body. We, in the West, are finally open to this idea, but it’s been a long time coming. Before me, no one had spoken about this publicly. Now there is a voice for others who are asking this question. I’m so grateful to have been given this challenge. As a result, I’ve been able to get the word out, not only about the value of organ donation, but about what transplants have been like for so many recipients who have had experiences similar to mine. Organ recipients write to me, thanking me for giving voice to what’s happened to them. There is more than that to be grateful for. I’m grateful for the preparation I had to do before the transplant, which brought me a new depth of spiritual life. But I’m also grateful for what happened to my inner life after the transplant. I had to visit what I call the dark side of

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Jane Se ymour myself in order to learn these things. Being in the light, by which I mean living with all the love and forgiveness I could imagine, was a part of my survival before the transplant. Afterward, when the dreams about my donor started, I worked for years with a Jungian therapist to understand them, and my inner world. I went into the shadowy places within myself, and looked at the issues that I couldn’t face while I was actually dying. In order to gain a new balance in my life, I had to go through the nightmares, the dark dreams, and figure them out. I had to look at them all, and be observant of my life in its entirety, instead of running away, and seeing only the pleasant parts of myself. In the end, I believe I gained a great deal of clarity. After my transplant, I felt I was incorporating another being into my life. It was a tremendous amount of psychological, spiritual, and physical work. Once I assimilated what was happening to me, I was able to use the parts of the personality of the old Claire, along with the new parts that had come with the transplant, and become a third being, with fewer emotional obstacles, and more clarity.

Blessings to Count While I was talking with my sister Sally recently, she reminded me of a tradition our parents taught us. As little girls we were always encouraged to count our blessings. Of course what that implies is that no matter what happens, there are always blessings among the day’s events to be counted. In my mind, that’s what we do when we look for the gifts that change can bring. The last thing I do every night— and have done all my life—is think over what’s happened that day, and what I think is going to happen, and then to think of how grateful I am for the things that have happened. I’ve taught my own children to do the same, and it’s a lovely little ritual I often complete with my

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twins. And I love feeling that I can pass to my children the wonderful, enriching traditions my parents taught to me. Nice end to the day, actually. I also love what Claire has to say about the simplest thing that helped her to face great change. “You must laugh,” she says. “That’s what kept my daughter and me going when I was so ill. We must make jokes, and try not to take ourselves too seriously. We must learn to let go of the script, and be in the moment, to cherish each moment, because that’s really all we can be certain we have.” As I ponder what remarkable changes can mean for all of us, it occurs to me that when we allow ourselves to see all changes as remarkable, some extraordinary things can happen to us. When you receive those gifts, the hard ones as well as the easy ones, I believe you’ll feel inspired, excited, challenged, loved and loving, creative, exhilarated, unique, and open to every new day. You’ll find yourself to be vibrant, positive, patient, optimistic, calmed, and peaceful. Welcoming change, and making it remarkable, you’ll have no regrets, just new challenges and adventures, and a life that is rich with meaning.

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Acknowledgments Anyone who has been involved in producing a book owes a debt of gratitude to those who helped make it. I would like first to thank Judith Regan for her creativity and energy in bringing about the birth of an idea, Susan Ginsburg for being a perceptive and supportive agent, and Pam Novotny, without whom I could never have done this book. I’d especially like to thank all the people who so generously shared their stories in these pages— they have each been a true inspiration to me. I particularly want to acknowledge my friends Christopher Reeve, Joanna Wicke, Dianne Odell, and Trent McGee, whose spirits fly and inspire us all daily. A special acknowledgment must go to our friends at Saks Fifth Avenue and the Blair Corporation for giving me the opportunity to use my art in ways that have already produced many remarkable changes in my life. Nothing happens without the support of my family, and that has been true of this book. James and all of our children—Kalen, Jenni, Katie, Sean, Kris, and John—are a continuing source of love, support, and inspiration. And where would I be without my wonderful mother, Mieke, and extraordinary father, John (Papa P), and of course my sisters, Annie and Sally, from whom I have learned so much about using change well. It is with great sadness that I would most especially like to acknowledge James’s father, Stacy Keach Sr., who died as we were finishing this book. Through his passing, James and I saw our whole family draw closer together than ever before. During Stacy’s long illness, we were blessed to come to know James’s mother, Mary, even better, and we were both moved to express our love for James’s father in our own unique ways: James replanted his father’s garden, and I painted a portrait of Stacy that was given to the three hundred people who attended his glorious funeral. Although the days and nights we spent at the hospital with his father were often very difficult, James and I see that this time has produced an amazing sense of healing in all of us. Pieces of the puzzles of so many relationships have been brought together by his father’s passing. Now, it’s as if we can feel him smiling peacefully down on us, reminding us how important it is to love one another. At the same time, how amazing it is to see television reports of people all over the world protesting war. It’s as if there’s a synergy of peaceful intent happening globally—and we are feeling it in a most personal way. We can only hope that humankind can realize that we each have the responsibility to look for peace, and for the possibility of a remarkable change, in our lives and in our world.

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About the Authors JA N E S E Y M O U R is an acclaimed actress with more than fifty motion pictures and television programs to her credit. She is also an accomplished painter whose works in watercolor and oil are exhibited and sold around the country. She has her own clothing line in the Crossing Pointe catalog, featuring fabrics based on her paintings and a new home furnishings and children’s clothing line that is sold through Saks Inc. The mother of four and the stepmother of two, she lives with her husband, James Keach, and their children in Malibu, California. PA M E L A PAT R I C K N OVOT N Y is the coauthor with Jane of Two at a Time and the author of The Joy of Twins. The mother of five, she lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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Copyright REMARKABLE CHANGES. Copyright © 2003 by Jane Seymour. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader December 2008 ISBN 978-0-06-183482-0 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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