Carly Fiorina - Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey

T HE TWO POLICE OFFICERS STOOD AWKWARDLY IN our living room. They shifted uncomfortably, as if worried that the mud on their boots might soil the light carpet. What was really bothering them, though, was the news they had to deliver. Frank and I looked at them and knew they had something terrible to say. Hope is a curiously strong thing and so we hoped that what they had to tell us wasnt what we feared.

They asked us to sit down. Frank collapsed in a chair. I sat on the carpet next to him, my arms wrapped around his knees. The police officers said our daughter was dead, three thousand miles away. We hadnt heard from her in a couple of weeks. Frank had been in touch with the volunteer paramedics he had worked with in New Jersey, and they asked the police to check on her. She was thirty-four years old. At that moment, we lost both the woman she was and the woman she could have been. All our hope for her and her life died. Frank and I leaned into each other and sobbed, for Lori, for our family, for ourselves. A heart truly can feel as though it is breaking apart into a thousand shattered pieces.

The news wasnt completely unexpected. Lori had been battling addictions for years. She had been in and out of rehab three times. As anyone who has loved someone with an addiction knows, you can force someone into rehab, but you cant make her well. Only the addict can do that. Lori couldntor wouldnttake that first step of admitting she was powerless over her addiction. And ultimately her body just gave out.

I had known her since she was six years old. I fell in love with her and her big sister, Tracy, almost before I fell in love with their father, my husband, Frank. They were little angels, both to be with and to behold. Tracy was a brunette, and looked like her father. Lori had long blond hair and bright, sparkling eyes. We came into each others lives just when we needed each other the most. Lori was a bouncy, happy, and loving child. I was a manager at AT&T, eager for a family. In Frank and Tracy and Lori, I found my family.

All young people represent potential, but Lori had more than most. She was smart and hardworking. Whatever she did, whether it was tending bar or marketing pharmaceuticals, she was the best. And more important, Lori was a kind, compassionate soul. On Franks birthday one year, while Lori was in college, he was busy in court giving a deposition until late at night. When he got home after midnight, Lori was waiting for him. She and a girlfriend had decorated the house for his birthday. She had a tremendous amount to givebrains, talent, but most of all, love.

We worried that Lori drank too much in college, but we didnt think she had an addiction. Those were good yearsor so they seemed at the time. I had taken Lori around to visit different campuses, and she had settled on Fairleigh Dickinson, near our home in New Jersey. She lived with us while she went to school. She did well academically and thrived socially. After graduation she toyed with the idea of going on to graduate school but got an offer for a job in sales at a pharmaceutical company. It was a good job, but at first she didnt want to take itshe didnt think she would succeed. She ended up being great at it.

What we didnt know until much later was that behind the scenes in those seemingly happy, high-functioning years, Lori began abusing prescription drugs. Not long after graduation she got her own apartment, met a man, and eventually got married. Her marriage would take her to Richmond, Virginia, for a time. There her drug use got worse. Like so many high-achieving young women, Lori also struggled with bulimia for years. Despite her repeated stays in rehab, the combination of bulimia, alcoholism, and drug abuse took its toll. She was divorced and living in New Jersey when she died.

Virtually every minute of every day after those two police officers stood in our living room, Frank and I wondered what signs we had missed, what we could have done differently to help Lori overcome her demons. It is the torture of second-guessing that every parent who has lost a child to addiction goes through. What breaks my heart the most, though, is the look that grew in Loris eyes as her addictions overcame her. There is an old saying, The eyes are the windows to the soul. As Lori grew progressively sicker, the potential-filled girl I knew disappeared from behind her eyes. The light, the sparkle she once had, left her. What remained was a dull, flat void. It was the look of hopelessness. And that look is what haunts me most.

Only faith, family, and friends got me through those first terrible days after Loris death. Without my complete conviction that a loving God had been with Lori, and was with our family as we buried her, I am not sure how I would have coped. Each time, when grief, guilt, and regret threatened to overcome me, I would do as I have always done since my childhood. I whispered the Lords Prayer in my mind. Now, I added the Twenty-third Psalm to my daily prayers: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.

Frank seemed destroyed and so I was not surprised when, soon after Loris funeral, he came to me and told me he had lost his faith. I prayed nightly that he would be given a sign and his faith restored. It was months later, just days before Fathers Day 2010, when it happened. He had been in the garage changing the oil in his car. A pile of boxes, which had been stored for years in the corner, caught his eye. For no particular reason he decided to open one of them. Lying on top were four Fathers Day cards from Lori. In one of those cards was a long letter she had written to him many years ago, telling him what a fine father he was and how much she loved him. He read I love you in her childish handwriting. He approached me with tears and relief in his eyes and those cards in his hand. He knew, once again, that Jesus loved him and that Lori had found peace. But in those days of spiritual isolation, Frank, too, had that flat, hopeless look in his eyes. Ive come to know that when people dont have hope (and faith, among other things, gives us hope), the look is always the same.

Later, when I ran for the U.S. Senate in California, I saw this look in the eyes of more people than I should have. I found myself in a town named Mendota, in Californias Central Valley, once part of the most productive farmland in the world, now known as the Appalachia of the West. I met three men who used to work the fields in Mendota. Now they were out of work along with almost 40 percent of their fellow residents. It wasnt just that they had no jobs. As I looked around town I saw the fields of almond trees the men used to tend now had become desiccated wastelands. Trees lay uprooted in dead, shriveled heaps. And flowing through the middle of all this parched destruction was a rushing aqueduct. Men and women in suits, thousands of miles away, had decided that this water couldnt be used to give life to the fields. Men and women in suits had decided these men couldnt workthe farmworkers potential was less important than Washingtons ideological agenda. The men I met in Mendota also had that flat, lifeless look in their eyes. The look of hopelessness. The look of potential unfulfilled.