A Reason to Believe (20 page)

She looked at me in stunned silence for a long time. “How did you know that?” It was true.

For the first several days at McLean, we placed a premium on secrecy. The doctors felt that the stigma of mental illness and the meanness of the media would not be useful. For the first few days, even my staff did not know; I literally sneaked in and out of the hospital in the evenings. (One thing I have noticed about being a black man: If you’re dressed in jeans and a casual shirt with a cap on, people will often look right past you.)

But Diane was worried that the story would leak, and we would be chasing it instead of being forthright. She was also tired of being ashamed, of feeling bad.

“I don’t like you sneaking in and out of here to see me,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of not feeling well. I think we should tell people I’m here so we get ahead of it.”

She knew it was going to hurt—talking about mental illness is the ultimate sacrifice of privacy—but she felt that was the better option. I supported her, but the doctors thought it was a big mistake. “Diane’s already dealing with profound stress because of public scrutiny,” the chief resident told us. “This will make it much worse.”

Diane knew, however, that at some point, she was going to have to face her friends, her colleagues, and her clients, and she wanted them to know the truth. It was also the reassertion of her control over her own circumstances,
and it struck me as amazingly brave. Besides, her medical team, her sister, and I were right there to help her deal with the reaction.

My office released a brief statement: “First Lady Diane Patrick is being treated for exhaustion and depression. The governor will work a flexible schedule for the next few weeks in order to spend more time with her and his family. The family asks for the prayers and understanding of the public.”

Then we waited.

We had long conversations about the possibility of my resigning and resuming our private lives. There were moments when I was willing—being governor is an episode in my life; Diane
is
my life—but she didn’t want to feel responsible for giving up something we had worked so hard for. There were other moments when Diane, imagining the resumption of her role as first lady, asked me to quit, but I said we should wait to decide until she got out of the hospital.

Ultimately, we decided together that I would continue as governor, and it was for the best. If I had resigned, it would have appeared as if the pressures had forced Diane into the hospital and me out of office. The reality was that Diane’s difficulties were far more complex and could be traced to her first marriage and even to her childhood. And given how hard so many people had worked for us—how much hope people had invested in us during
the campaign—I wanted to complete my term and carry through on my promises.

What was most gratifying was the response Diane received to the announcement. The letters and cards began coming in, many from others who had suffered from mental illness, often hiding it for years. Colleagues, friends, legislators and others in public life, their spouses, total strangers—they thanked her for going public. Schoolchildren sent letters, poems, and pictures. One woman knitted a prayer shawl. E-mails came from overseas. Even the media displayed a restraint and respectfulness that was reassuring, even touching. I would carry boxes of letters to the hospital. Thousands would eventually write.

Some letters said we care about you.

Many said we’re praying for you.

Others: we love you.

Diane drew strength from this outpouring of affection and support, and she believed she had to be strong for those individuals. Each one made her “incrementally brave,” she likes to say. She was released from the hospital after two weeks and was soon ready to return to her job. Her first day back, she woke up, put on her suit, and told me, “I’m back.” She resumed devouring the morning newspaper.

Since then, she has given many public speeches about her experiences. After one such appearance, a woman told Diane that she was alive today because Diane’s openness
made her think that “if the first lady can publicly acknowledge her illness—and survive—then surely I can acknowledge mine to myself and get help.” Television reporters have interviewed her, mental health organizations have given her awards, and she continues skillfully to juggle her full-time responsibilities as lawyer, mother, wife, community activist, and first lady of Massachusetts.

In many ways, the political adversity I’ve faced as governor has paled in comparison to the personal adversity Diane has faced, so it’s entirely fitting that her poll numbers, if tracked, would be higher than mine. Hers is the lesson that endures. It would have been easy for this intensely private woman to quit her public life and just lie low until my term in office ended. But she took the hard road traveled by heroines. She did not give in but fought to overcome her circumstances. She did not try to go it alone but sought help from friends, family, and professionals. She did not engage in self-pity but took responsibility for her own well-being. She was not too proud to acknowledge her own limitations.

By speaking out, she has helped remove the stigma of mental illness and—I believe—given courage to anyone who has a disease to be open about his or her condition, to seek help when necessary, and to strive to be a role model for others. She is amazed at her own strength. The people of the Commonwealth—and the governor—are awed by it.

I was six or seven years old the first time I heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak. He was addressing a crowd in a park on the South Side of Chicago, and my mother took my sister and me to see him. The crowd seemed large to my child’s eyes and solemn, like church. I remember none of King’s words from that afternoon, but I remember the sense of optimism. Long before I knew the clarity of King’s vision or the power of his imagery, I understood that hope is a tangible thing. I could feel it.

Even at that early age, I had already sensed that I did
not belong in some parts of town and that there were paths through life that were not for me. I knew that I was not liked by people I had never even met. Yet with such moral certainty and command, King made me feel not only that I was welcome at the table but that the feast was as much mine as anyone else’s. He was the consummate idealist who made us believe that we could perfect our community and our country.

Idealism is vital. It sustains the human soul. The ability to imagine a better place, a better way of doing things, a better way of being in the world is far more than wishful thinking. It is the essential ingredient in human progress.

Idealism built America. The persecuted religious refugees who set out over a vast ocean in small wooden boats with barely a notion of what awaited them in the New World were fortified mainly by an ideal of the community they wished to create. Just before some of the newest settlers arrived in New England in 1630, John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, gave an oft-quoted sermon aboard the
Arbella
in which he acknowledged the grand experiment they were about to launch. “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” he said. “The eyes of all people are upon us.” They imagined a new kind of community, and they reached for it.

That idealism has always been at the core of our national character. From building a new society in a wilderness to ending slavery, from the Industrial Revolution to
land grant colleges, from social security to the civil rights revolution to, more recently, national health care reform, Americans have envisioned bold improvements and created new realities. Ours may be the only nation in human history not organized around a common language or religion or culture so much as a common set of civic ideals. And we have defined those ideals over time and through struggle as equality, opportunity, and fair play. For centuries, our perennial challenge has been the gap between our reality and our ideals. Our great strength is that we repeatedly confront that challenge. We keep asking ourselves how our actions measure up. When we are true to our ideals, we are at our best and are justifiably proud. And we are an inspiration to the world.

Idealism is magnetic for me. It explains so many of not only our national triumphs, but my personal ones as well. As a father, husband, and friend, I have tried to demonstrate that idealism can be a lodestar to guide your life. As a lawyer, civil rights advocate, and political leader, I have tried to inspire hope. I value the leaders who have come to see our highest calling as giving someone else a reason to believe.

Even when so many of our national achievements have been the product of this faith in the unseen, we discredit visionaries. For every Lincoln, FDR, or Kennedy, dozens of other political and public leaders were ready to replace a beacon of hope with the flag of surrender. Unfortunately, cynicism is not limited to politicians or the world-weary.
Nowadays, even young people wallow in low expectations. The media and popular culture, reflecting their own limited vision, peddle cynicism like a drug, dulling the senses against hope and celebrating scornful indifference. But the truth is that cynicism is despair in toxic measure. It passes for sophistication. It is mistaken for being “cool.” It attempts to be a surrogate for inner strength but fails every time. It is simply a way of giving up on life, the world, and oneself. Good and able people try to make a difference, confront setbacks, and cope with their disappointment by curbing their passion. Cynicism becomes the scab over their wounded idealism. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Mark Twain’s childhood dream was to become a riverboat pilot. As a boy in the late nineteenth century, Twain obsessed about learning to navigate a riverboat on the Mississippi River and wanted the prestige and command that went with the job. In
Life on the Mississippi
, he recounts his journey to fulfill his dream. He describes learning to “read” the river like an expert but losing the sense of awe that had drawn him to piloting in the first place. He wrote:

And yet, as other passages reveal, even after learning the hazards of the Mississippi that lay beneath her beauty, he is still able to evoke and love her charms, to see her qualities, to feel his own passion about life on the river. His ability to overcome even the most sabotaging moments of cynicism and despair is his triumph.

Everyone, especially young people, must learn that their ideals need not be casualties of their confrontations with reality. I learned this early, from what Dr. King and so many others tried to convey to me, and that lesson itself was a gift. It has made all the difference. I have had my
setbacks and outright failures, like anyone else. But I have managed to avoid the apathy, pessimism, and even immobilizing sadness that so often come in the wake of struggle. Idealism is an act of will, to be sure. But we are all up to it—and nothing of any lasting value happens without it.

That lesson must be learned again and again, generation after generation, because I am convinced that cynicism, spawned by disappointment, cultivated by the media, and perpetuated by too many leaders today, holds us back. The courage to look a challenge straight in the eye, to measure our reality against our ideals, and to strive to close the distance between the two has been the hallmark of the American experience. Cynicism is the greatest challenge to that tradition. All of us, but especially young people, must learn to resist it, to nurture our optimism, and to imbue that idealism in others.

That skill comes more naturally to some than others. When I worked for President Clinton in the Justice Department, I remember being struck by his oratorical and political skills. He was a master at reading public opinion. At the same time, he had little appetite for shaping it. Once, not long after I had been appointed, he called me while I was back in Boston for the weekend. I was standing near the checkout counter in the Sears at the South Shore Plaza, not far from our home, when the bulky government cell phone rang.

“Mr. Patrick, this is the White House operator calling,”
said a brisk, authoritative voice. “Please hold for the president.”