Remarkable Changes: Turning Life's Challenges into Opportunities

PREFACE

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

IN 1995, I MADE 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 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.

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

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

AROUND MY FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY 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 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 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.

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 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.

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

1

Take an Honest Look at Yourself

Examine Your Roots

WHEN EVERYTHING SEEMS UP 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. 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 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 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!

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.

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 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 cotton-wool 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 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