Schultz - Life happens: and other unavoidable truths

Life Happens

Connie Schultz

CONTENTS

PREFACE

T he title for this book came about long before I knew I was going to write it.

In 2000, I was disappointed to be turned down yet again for a columnist position at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, where I had worked for the last seven years. Where I saw failure, Ellen Stein Burbach, the papers Sunday Magazine editor, saw opportunity. She took me to lunch and, right after we ordered, pulled a sheet of paper from her purse.

I want you to write essays for our magazine, she said, sliding the paper across the table. Here are some deadlines I have in mind. I looked at the list to discover that she had mapped out quite a plan for me for the next few months.

Well start with that, she said.

It was one of those moments when I felt that someone bigger than both of us was telling me that sometimes life happens only when you give it a nudge, so I agreed. She told me to come up with a name for the page where my essays would regularly appear.

I went for a long walk that weekend, which prompted the memory of another walk I had taken in 1998, only days after forty-one-year-old Lisa Hearey had died from a rare form of cancer that attacked her appendix. I met Lisa right after doctors told her she had only days, maybe weeks, to live. She agreed to let me chronicle her life and death, and then follow her family for a year. She was smart and beautiful. She loved her husband and three young boys, her career and her neighbors, and a glass of chardonnay at the end of the day. Like most of us in the throes of daily living, she thought she had all the time in the world. Until it was clear that she didnt.

She died before daybreak on a beautiful autumn day in Octoberin Cleveland, where fallen leaves gather around tree trunks like petticoats and the wind whips cheeks until they glow. I awoke from a dead sleep and sat straight up in bed the moment Lisa died. Even before the phone rang minutes later, I knew that she was gone.

On the first anniversary of her death, I was walking through piles of crisp leaves when I spotted a parked cars bumper sticker that said SHIT HAPPENS.

I stopped in my tracks and stared at that bumper sticker. I thought about Lisa, how hard she fought to live, how unfair it seemed that her life was so short. Then I thought about the afternoon when she told me she was ready to go. Her distraught husband, Clem, had finally been able to tell her it was all right for her to die. Her final burden had been lifted.

Its time, she told me, smiling for the first time in days.

Now, there I was, a year later, staring at that bumper stickers bleak take on the events that form our lives.

No, I said out loud. Life happens.

And so Life Happens was born.

When I began sorting through my Plain Dealer columns for this book, I started thinking about how every life has a beginning and an end but we have no memory of either of those moments in our own lives. For the story of our birth, we are completely dependent on someone elses account. When its our turn to die, we are the only one in the room who wont have a story to tell when its over.

And so its the middle, that time between the beginning and the end, where our stories take shape, where life happens to the best of our recollection. Those are the stories I try to tell.

My mother always used to say I was a bright child, but you have to question her gift for assessment when you consider that I was sixteen before I realized an essential truth about my own beginning.

It was my moms turn to host the monthly Canasta Club, where a half dozen or so women brought various versions of chip dip and settled in for a few hours of cards and kvetching. They were deep into loud chatter when one of them asked my mom, Janey, when did you and Chuck get married?

February 1957, my mom answered.

She hadnt seen me standing on the stairs a few feet away, but a nod from one of her friends prompted her to look in my direction. I didnt notice her, either, because I was caught in a wait-a-minute freeze as I began counting splayed fingers toward the birth of her first childthat would be mein July of that very same year.

You keep those fingers to yourself! she snapped.

The women erupted in laughter, my mother rolled her eyes, and I ran out the screen door into a world that would never look quite the same.

My parents story is as old as love itself. Mom got pregnant, Dad got a union card and a marriage license, and the rest of their life was harder than theyd ever thought it could be. Twenty years later, Bruce Springsteen found a way to make their story rhyme, and their oldest child got to thinking maybe she could one day write, too, about how life happens.

I was the first in my family to go to college, the first to write for a living, too, if you dont count the little blurbs my paternal grandmother used to pen for the village newspaper so that other parents knew what was happening at the local school. My grandmother died before I was three, and I never knew she wrote until three years ago, when my father gave me an old red scrapbook of his mothers clippings. They look like box scores, these little yellowed squares of text, but they must have mattered a lot to her because she took the time out of mothering ten children to paste her tiny stories in neat rows across the black pages.

By Mrs. Harry L. Schultz, the byline reads.

Not long after my father gave me that scrapbook, I finally started writing a column for The Plain Dealers Arts and Life section.

It was the fall of 2002. We were on the brink of a war most women opposed. Soon after it began, the ensuing battle for who would be our next president turned into a debate over who was and who wasnt a war hero. This had nothing to do with what most women cared about, such as health care, education, and every workers right to a living wage, not to mention the human cost of the war.

It seemed to me that, since women cared about all these issues, and I was one of them, maybe I ought to write about them and all the other life that was happening around us. A Cleveland anchorwoman made headlines across the country after she stripped on the air to increase the shows ratings, a spokesman for the far right was quoted in more than a hundred newspapers denouncing women who were deliberately childless, and Ohios secretary of state was making registering to vote only slightly less difficult than childbirth.

I watched these and other events unfold, and decided there was no way I could be what others might define as the typical arts and life columnist. Instead, I would try to write about the art of living, and all that entails.

So, twice a week I started talking to readers about whatever was in the news or on my mind. I wrote about registering to vote, how to tip so the server actually gets the money, why women started grieving long before the war in Iraq had actually begun. I wrote about sex, too, and, let me tell you, thats an interesting endeavor when youre a middle-aged woman whose picture tops the page. But how could I not address our right to control our own reproductive health when we had a doctor on the FDAs Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs who opposed birth control for unmarried women and suggested we could just pray our cramps away?

Over time, I also wrote about my own life, in part because my editor, Stuart Warner, said readers would be more open to my opinions if they felt they knew a little about me. That theory has borne out, as an increasing number of readers who dont share my politics or religious beliefs nevertheless assure me that they love the stories about my friends and family.