All That Is Bitter and Sweet (70 page)

I quoted the effervescent light that is Marianne Williamson, who said, “We are, all of us, not just some of us, children of God, and our playing small does not serve the world.”

I was standing before the United Nations because when it comes to human dignity and rights, I refuse to play small. Knowing I was surrogate for the real experts, the survivors whose stories I told, I remembered Elie Wiesel’s quote, “Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.” And in my head, a plan was already forming that would expand my game beyond anything I had ever thought possible.

I had always wanted to go to graduate school, but I never pictured myself at Harvard. I had briefly considered divinity school and had thought I might go for a master’s in public health at Berkeley. I also considered Vanderbilt University, an outstanding school that was less than an hour from my front door. I talked it over with a friend, Dr. Volney Gay, a head of the Religious Studies and Anthropology Departments at Vanderbilt. I explained to him that I wanted to learn, to study, to expand my mind, but a degree should be highly relevant to my interests—not so much a professional credential, but a passion credential. He was prepared for our appointment, offering me names of Vanderbilt colleagues I should look up, suggesting different courses of study. Just as we were about to close, he asked me, “Ashley, why aren’t you going to Harvard?”

Thunderstruck, I blurted out, “Why am I not putting a rocket up my ass and flying to the moon?”

I went straight home and called Carol Lee Flinders, one of my mentors, who cooed, “Oh, the Women and Public Policy Program, founded by Swanee Hunt, is at the Kennedy School. Of course, it’s the perfect place for you!” I did some Internet research, cried when I read the WAPPP website (my
people
! I thought), and linked over to the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy site, also at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. I asked a fellow board member at PSI, one of the first women ever to graduate from Harvard Law School, what she thought, and the next thing I knew, I was on the phone with the dean of admissions, being recruited to go to Harvard. The Kennedy School offers an intensive, year-long midcareer master’s in public administration, aimed at established professionals from all over the world who want to broaden their horizons and increase their efficacy in public service. Alumni range from Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the United Nations, to New York police commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. Well, hey! Why not add a Sicilian-hillbilly rabble-rousing actor-activist to the roster?

When it came time to fill out the application forms, I had some welcome help from an unexpected source: my father.

Dad and I had become increasingly close in the years since we reconnected during Ted’s therapy sessions and our remarkable experiences during the family weeks at Shades of Hope. He and his wife of ten years, Mollie, are frequent occupants of our smokehouse guest cabin, and they spend summers in our house in Scotland. When Dad sat down with me on our sleeping porch to help organize my essay topics and put together a comprehensive curriculum vitae (not a small task, as I’ve never kept close track of my zillions of endeavors), I felt as if I were being given a second chance to do over the whole college application process that I had missed out on twenty-three years earlier. I needed him, and he was there for me. It was a joyful time.

In early 2009, to my astonishment and unbelievable gratitude, the dean of admissions personally phoned to tell me I had been accepted into the program. The committee vote was unanimous, he added with a smile in his voice. I threw back my head and hooted and hollered at the top of my lungs, racing from room to room in our big Scottish house, my excitement echoing off the old walls. I kept my new knowledge to myself for a few hours that afternoon, reflecting on this amazing turn of events while hiking up the ben in record time. Now, I reckoned, all I had to do was let my various colleagues know I would be unavailable for anything for a full year. And then move to Cambridge.

I still wanted to make movies, but I had purposefully slowed down the pace of my filmmaking career after I went to Shades of Hope to focus on recovery, put it first in my life, and continue digging deeply into my healing process and new way of life.
Crossing Over
, about labor trafficking in Mexico and California, was my first picture in recovery. I played a little supporting role, gently dipping my toe in the water again, and the experience was just what I wanted. Then I took on a much more challenging project, playing the lead in
Helen
, an independent film about a woman who suffers major recurrent suicidal depression. As soon as I read the first pages of the exquisite script by the auteur director Sandra Nettelbeck, I knew I had to be involved with the movie. I was concerned that the material might be too close to the bone, so I had copies of the script sent to Tennie and Ted. My question was, “Can I play the disease without being in the disease?” Both of them read it and quickly called me back with essentially the same reaction: “Ashley, how dare you not?” It was an answer that sent a frisson through me.

Filming
Helen
was a wonderful revelation, and I was reminded of why I love to act. My only bad experience during that snowy winter in Vancouver was not psychological but physical: An attack of acute appendicitis landed me in the hospital for emergency surgery and shut down production for two weeks. I had an otherwise extraordinary experience playing the role, using all my tools while delving deeply indeed into a performance of which I am very proud. I sacrificed a vestigial organ for that movie! I did a delightful and touching children’s comedy called
Tooth Fairy
after that and then told my longtime agent, Michelle Bohan, that other projects would have to wait until after my graduation.

Next I found a homey, quiet place to rent in Cambridge, a beautiful brick house with a peaked slate roof, sycamores in the front yard, and lots of evergreen shrubs and trees in a large (for a town!) fenced backyard. We shipped up some furniture and then all the pets. Shug was skunked in the backyard on the first night, and giving her a bath with my magic deskunking potion made it feel instantly like home.

I had shipped up my Mini Cooper, but when I inquired about having a car on the quirky campus streets, the secretary’s response was to hold the phone away from her mouth and cackle. So I outfitted myself with a pink Hello Kitty bicycle and began practicing riding back and forth to Harvard. I wheeled up in front of Widener Library, with its crimson flag proclaiming
Veritas
(“Truth”), the Harvard motto, and I had to seriously pinch myself to believe this was all true for me.

Classes started on July 22, 2009. I looked around at my 208 classmates, who represented ninety-eight countries and an encyclopedic array of backgrounds and prior achievements, from humanitarian aid workers to hedge fund founders, cabinet members, and NGO directors. When I inquired what one woman did at the World Food Program, she replied, “I run it.” We were all unabashed do-gooders, united by a desire to change the world for the better. I was just about twisted inside out, I was so excited. I was twisted inside out, too, because I was starting to grasp the basics of the academic schedule, which for midcareers included intensive course work in microeconomic and quantitative methods. I had not done math in years, much less math at Harvard. It was easily the most intimidating thing I have ever done in my life. (Sorry, Morgan Freeman, that includes that first day on set with you on
Kiss the Girls
. Even though you are a legend, you’re a lot less scary than quant.) There were former ministers of finance in my class, economic policy experts, and other wonks whose math was lightning fast, and I had zero shame about placing in the lowest-level section; I was right where I needed to be.

It was easy to decide to forgo socializing in the quad, and missing the volleyball games to which I had been looking forward. Instead, I set up tutoring in economics and math, the latter with Professor Graeme Bird, a Renaissance man from New Zealand who is equal parts mathematician, Greek scholar, English teacher, and jazz musician. He is so kind, so genuine, and so flawlessly patient that he could actually make me believe he liked sitting in his office with me six hours per week, eraser litter all over my scrambled papers and his desk, doing the work everyone else seemed to have mastered yesterday.

“Graeme,” I would choke, “I am making you think I am an idiot, that you cannot believe I was accepted at this school, you are bored sick, and you wish I would leave your office so you did not have to explain this yet again to me, who is clearly remedial in math.” He would just smile and talk me down. Then explain it again. (When I graduated, I awarded Graeme a diplomalike certificate students may give select people for whom they have exceptional gratitude for the role they played in helping them achieve their academic dreams.)

We were advised that something was wrong if we were devoting more than ninety minutes per class on homework; in my case, then, something was seriously wrong. But it was what was wrong with the past, not the present. So much old fear kept coming up, I was battling across lifeline time zones. I would have blessed stretches during which I rocked and rolled on homework, ripping through problems, reconnecting especially with anything related to algebra, which I loved in high school and still find very creative. But then I’d hit a wall, and the crap from the past would fill the room like unseen smoke, and I’d be confused, despairing, inept, facing intractable quant calculations. It was definitely consoling to know I was not alone. We midcareers, facing academic rigors in some cases for the first time in decades, would group up in the lunch room and corridors, before class and outside the tutoring hall, comparing notes about our cycles of confidence and doubt, hard work and peace, procrastination and angst. Many of us experienced identical patterns: Satisfied at the end of a long day that we had given it our all, we would lay our heads on our pillows unperturbed (after shoving my school work off the bed; my resolve never to do homework in bed lasted less than a week). But long about dawn, some icy fear would grip us and we’d bolt awake, racked with shame for not having been able to do better or more, and we’d arrive in class exhausted and full of doubt, until some placating professor soothed our spastic emotions and our minds began to work again.

On top of this, I was heartsick because our beloved cat Percy went missing a mere two days after he arrived in Cambridge. I searched frantically for him, my voice bleating his name every moment I was home from school. We put up laminated posters and endlessly called neighbors, businesses. I felt terrible guilt:
If only I hadn’t brought him here … if the doggie door had been closed.…
I would wake up in the middle of the night and stumble around the neighborhood in my nightgown, crying, searching. Then I would go to class, go to tutoring, and do homework. It was hell for me.

Dario was traveling most of the time on the IndyCar circuit, but I think God arranged for us to be together when I finally found Percy’s remains in a field. I believe the body is but a jacket, a garment we lay down when it is time for our souls to change rooms. I believe the soul, which contains the essence of all I know and love about a person, is immutable, unchangeable, eternal. Yet I am human, and I have a terrible attachment to the bodies of those I love, the home in which I have known their soul. Finding Percy was a crushing, devastating blow. I wailed and wailed in grief.

I called Tennie in the depths of my pain, and when I was able to calm down a bit, she asked me, “What is the lesson Percy came to teach you?” The answer, clearly, is unconditional love. God is everyone’s personal Percy. Totally, beautifully, unflinchingly focused just on that one person. I began to picture every woman, every child, somewhere with Percy, the most beautiful cat in the world, the biggest baby boy, sitting on their chests the way he did mine, paws folded, purring, heavy-lidded, but oh, watching with utter devotion, occasionally reaching up to kiss me. Scraping his cheek along mine is his signature expression of adoration. God as Percy. I loved it. It worked.