. . . And His Lovely Wife (27 page)

twenty-two

Starting Over

W
HEN
S
HERROD AND
I
FIRST AGREED THAT HE SHOULD RUN FOR
the Senate, we made several promises to each other.

Sherrod would run a progressive race, championing the working men and women of Ohio who felt betrayed by their own government. By the end of the campaign, we knew that voters didn't care about labels, about liberal versus conservative. What they cared about was who was on their side. By a margin of 12.4 percent, they decided it was Sherrod.

We also agreed that whenever DeWine and the Republican National Party attacked Sherrod, Sherrod would fight back—and he did, every time, often with the help of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. We stayed on the high road, too, no matter what DeWine alleged. In the last few weeks of the campaign, people stopped us everywhere we went and said they noticed the difference. So many of them thanked Sherrod for making them proud.

We had promised ourselves that, unlike John Kerry's 2004 race in Ohio, Sherrod's campaign would be in all eighty-eight counties, no matter how conservative or supposedly pro-Bush. We had coordinators and phone banks in every county, thanks in large part to the organizing efforts of our field director, John Hagner. Sherrod carried forty-six of those counties, which was thirty more than John Kerry had won in 2004.

Just as important as all of these promises was the one about our marriage. We vowed this middle-aged couple's young marriage would remain a priority throughout the campaign, and we kept that promise. We were together at least every weekend, and talked and e-mailed throughout the day. Whenever possible, Sherrod slept at home. Most mornings, he still made my coffee, and just the way I like it. He took out the dog, collected the day's newspapers from the driveway, and fed the cats, too.

A single memory of us as a couple on the campaign has crystallized in my mind. We were at Dulles International Airport, waiting for a late-night flight to Cleveland that would end up being more than two hours late. It was around ten, and we were exhausted. We moved away from the blaring television screen and found an empty bench. I laid my head on Sherrod's lap, and it wasn't long before he leaned over and laid his head on my hip. We slept that way for an hour, cocooned like twins in the womb.

This campaign would not have become such a strong and fluid operation had we not tended the marriage, too. Sherrod waited until I was ready for him to run, which cemented us as husband and wife, united for the same journey. So many have now declared Sherrod's race one of the best run in the country. Whenever they say that, I think of how we ended as many nights as possible in each other's company. Most nights, we were all we had for each other, and every night, that was more than enough.

May Sarton once wrote, “The fact remains that, in marrying, the wife has suffered an earthquake and the husband has not.” That tumbled through my mind a lot, as there was no denying that marriage to Sherrod had changed virtually every aspect of my life. But the earnest wish of Winnie-the-Pooh also floated around me. His words are stitched on a pillow I gave to Sherrod after he once pulled me tight and said, “I sure hope we live long and die together.” He was lamenting that we had married later and didn't know how much time we had together. But then again, who ever knows that?

The pillow, now on our bed, reads: “If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.”

         

A
FTER THE ELECTION,
S
HERROD AND
I
HAD HOPED THAT THE REST
of 2006 would settle into something resembling a normal life—our version of normal, anyway, which would include a lot of evenings at home by the fire with our pets cuddled up beside us as we mapped out the next course of our life together.

My first order of business was deciding when, not if, I would return to
The Plain Dealer.
Nearly a year away from my job had stoked a real fire in me to continue writing. I used to joke that whenever I had a column idea on the campaign trail, I'd hit Sherrod with a pillow. So many opinions to write, with nowhere to put them. I was eager to return to work.

While I was away,
The Plain Dealer,
like so many newspapers around the country, had tried to shave its expenses by offering buyouts. A total of sixty-four staffers in the newsroom alone took early retirement. I scheduled a meeting with Doug Clifton,
The Plain Dealer
's editor-in-chief, during that time to make sure we agreed on when and how I would return to writing my column. It was a thrill to drive my own car for a change, although I couldn't remember which side the gas tank was on. But I knew how to find my way back to
The Plain Dealer,
and I knew what question to ask. If there were going to be a lot of new limitations on what I could write, there was no point in my going back.

“What will be the parameters?” I asked Doug.

“You'll write the same column you used to write,” he said.

That was all I needed to know. We agreed I would return in late January, which
The Plain Dealer
's reader representative, Ted Diadiun, announced in a November 12, 2006, column titled “Connie Schultz's Fans—and Others—Have Reason to Cheer.” Ted and I rarely agreed on politics, but we had found our way to an abiding friendship nonetheless, and he said he was glad I was coming back. He told me he was already getting complaints from some conservative readers who insisted I had no business writing a column now that Sherrod had been elected. Ted's lead sentence in the column was “Connie Schultz often drives me crazy.”

It was good to be home.

Sherrod was busy organizing his transition team and hiring Senate staff. Some key members of the campaign, including John Ryan and Joanna Kuebler, would stay with Sherrod. Several from his congressional offices would also transfer to the Senate staff. Jay Heimbach came on as his chief of staff, and Ngozi Pole agreed to be his deputy chief administrator. Once they were in place, Sherrod relaxed a little and let the reality of all the changes in his world sink in. For a few days, we actually felt that we might have life under control.

Two weeks after the election, though, life reminded us who was in charge.

On November 29, hours after Sherrod and I both received e-mails from him, our dear friend John Kleshinski died in his sleep of a heart attack. John had almost single-handedly made the last two weeks of the campaign bearable, and we had just had dinner with him and Emily earlier that month in Boston. John was in the middle of organizing Sherrod's swearing-in events for January, and many on the campaign staff had come to adore him. At the age of fifty-five, he was gone.

Bob Marotta, another longtime friend of John's, forwarded to Sherrod an e-mail that John had written right after the election. It was John as we remembered him in those last days of the campaign:

My two weeks in the car with Sherrod and Connie were the adventure of a lifetime. I could write a book about all the TV stations I visited, radio station interviews, tense scheduling moments, schmoozing local public officials who Sherrod couldn't get to, union guys asking for a photo op, courthouse steps I climbed with all the statewide candidates, early mornings and late hotel arrivals, aggressive press, adoring crowds, famous people (Obama, Cleland and Michael J. Fox) and simply good decent people from Cleveland to Gallipolis just looking for somebody to act like they mattered. I'm still fairly overwhelmed by what my old buddy has achieved and the convincing manner in which he has done so. We made a bet at the beginning and I said it would be under 4 percentage points…. I got my ass kicked. I'm certain he will do the great state of Ohio proud.

Jk

At home, Sherrod could barely say John's name before his eyes filled and he repeated what became his mantra: “I can't believe this, I can't believe John is gone.” Publicly, he did what John would have wanted. Sherrod delivered eulogies for his oldest friend at services in their hometown of Mansfield and again in Boston, where John had lived with Emily.

“It's going to be like this from now on,” Sherrod said on the flight home from John's memorial service in Boston.

“What is?” I asked.

“The longer we live, the more of our friends we'll lose.”

No one, though, will be missed more than John.

         

T
WO WEEKS AFTER THE ELECTION,
I
ATTENDED
H
ARVARD
U
NIVERSITY'S
Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference, where I was scheduled to give several talks.

Sherrod tagged along, and it felt great to be back among what I always joked were “my people”—in this case, about eleven hundred fellow writers and journalists. Sherrod looked like one of us, what with his rumpled shirts and scuffed shoes. We're a ragtag bunch, we journalists.

While I relished the chance to talk about the reporting and writing I love, I often found myself responding after my talks to questions about how I was going to fit in with the “Stepford Wives” of the Senate. I was surprised at how much this depiction of my counterparts troubled me. By then, I had met many of these wives, and this stereotype of the robotic wife was such an unkind and unfair depiction of the women I was getting to know.

One of the wives, whose husband has been a longtime senator, told me she spent the first two years of his Senate career constantly angry. “I hated what had become of my life,” she told me, “and I was trying to figure out where I belonged, especially since we had moved to Washington.” Another Senate wife, who sat next to me during a dinner, said that she, too, was trying to figure out exactly who she was since her husband's election. “We work so hard for our husbands to get them elected,” she said. “Then they win and get these great jobs, and so many on the campaign move on to great jobs, too, and we're the only ones who don't really have anything at the end of it all.”

These were not Stepford Wives, nor were any of the other women I met. For the most part, they were bright, articulate women who were navigating the land mines of political life, with varying degrees of success. I was grateful for my career, but I could also see what I had in common with many of these women, rather than focusing on our differences, which was what I did when Sherrod was a congressman. Regardless of where we live or what we do in our daily lives, all of us are married to men who belong to one of the most exclusive bodies in the world. There's no denying that, and the challenge is how to keep intact our own identities and still support them in these high-profile jobs. I do not think of myself as a Senate spouse. I am Sherrod's wife, happily so.

I am asked a lot, “What's it like to be a senator's wife?”

My answer is always the same:
I'll let you know.

         

T
WELVE DAYS AFTER THE ELECTION,
S
HERROD AGREED TO AN INTERVIEW
on CBS's
Face the Nation,
his first with this Sunday-morning talk show. As usual, he buttoned himself into a starched blue dress shirt that had passed my inspection for a frayed collar or cuffs. He chose his dark blue pinstripe suit and pulled on two pairs of socks for warmth, black over brown, before slipping into a pair of the scruffy dress shoes he'd logged so many miles in during the campaign.

“What happened to the new shoes they gave you?” I asked, referring to the post-election gift from two fundraisers who thought Sherrod's shoes needed an upgrade now that he was about to become a senator.

“These have worked for me so far,” he said, not even looking up until he finished tying them. “That okay with you?”

I didn't bother answering as we headed downstairs. He knew it was more than okay.

“Which tie?” he asked, holding up several that he'd wrapped around the banister at the foot of our stairs. Two of them were red, including his “lucky tie” that he'd worn for three of the debates. Another was the familiar blue tie used for too many television interviews, but the fourth tie was always one of my favorites. One of the consultants had warned us away from it because “many voters see it as a cowardly color.” I'd rolled my eyes then, but now I just grinned at the memory. The things we worried about only two weeks ago.

“Wear the yellow striped,” I said.

Sherrod pulled it around his neck and we headed for the studio a few miles from our home.

Over the years we'd both sat for televised interviews at this particular studio, and we knew everyone who worked there. We were surprised to see the owner there on a Sunday, and he hugged me when we walked through the door, full of praise for the race we'd run. The crew fluttered around Sherrod like ducklings, congratulating him and assuring him they'd voted for him.

He sat more patiently than usual for the obligatory plastering of makeup—fatigue is a wonderful sedative—and as he sat under the lights I couldn't help but notice signs of life sprouting all over his head. His curls were coming back, declaring their freedom in every direction around his collar and brow. I fought the urge to reach over and ring one of them around my finger.

“Your hair's coming back,” I said.

“Just for you, baby,” he said, and everyone laughed.

I sat on a nearby stool as another staff person helped him adjust his earpiece and clipped on a microphone. Then Sherrod sat in silence for a few minutes, jotting down notes before the show began.

The cameraman pulled off his headset, leaned out from behind the lens, and pointed to the canary pin on Sherrod's lapel.

“You gonna start wearing a flag pin now that you're a senator?” he asked.

Sherrod hesitated for a moment, then looked at me with raised eyebrows. We both grinned and shook our heads.

“No, I like this one,” he said, tapping his lapel. “I'm going to keep wearing the canary. As a reminder.”