It Ain't Over (32 page)

Now Laura bought some basic tools and set up shop on their dining room table. From the start, Dave was her biggest fan. “Everything I made, he would be like, ‘Wow, this is the best thing you’ve ever done! What are you going to sell that for?’ And then he would tell me to charge more.”

Selling her jewelry on Etsy, the super-popular e-commerce site where craftspeople market their wares, Laura was able to pay for the family’s groceries. “Whenever they featured one of my pieces, Dave was the first one I’d show and he’d go crazy texting all his friends.”

During spring break of 2011, Dave asked his mom to watch the kids for the weekend so he and Laura could spend some time together. “Between the kids and work, it was just really tough for us to have any time alone,” Laura says. But that Saturday morning, their romantic weekend turned into a shattering nightmare.

“Dave was sleeping next to me in bed and I couldn’t wake him. I called 911 and while I waited for the ambulance, the operator took me through how to try to resuscitate him. As I tried, I could hear the deafening sound of the ambulance; then I watched the paramedics work on him for 20 minutes until they told me there was nothing they could do.” At 38, Dave was gone.

“I remember sitting in the living room with my sister, looking out my window as the kids came home,” says Laura of the moment she had to tell the three boys that their dad had died. “I watched them walking up the path to our house and they were all laughing and giggling, and I remember thinking
That’s the last time those kids are going to feel truly happy for a long time. Their life is changing the second they walk through that door.
” Austin was six; Michaelie, five; and Aiden, three.

At first, they couldn’t take in what their mom was trying to tell them. “Once they sort of realized, they started to cry and almost immediately Austin said, ‘You’re going to die, too! When are you going to die?’ ”

Their terror was so strong, the kids wouldn’t let Laura out of their sight. “I’d be taking a shower and I would suddenly turn and look through the shower door and all three of them would just be standing there. It was heartbreaking.

“Our world crashed and then stopped. I spent those first days immobilized, trying to make this horrific thing sink in. I felt as though someone was following me around, sucker punching me in the back of my head.”

Haunted by images of Dave, Laura couldn’t sleep in their room, so every night she’d crawl into bed with one of the kids. If she heard a siren, she’d start hyperventilating and go into a panic. One night about a week after Dave’s death, when the kids were asleep, she sat in the living room with her dad and several of her siblings and voiced her fears.

“Dave and I could barely take care of these kids together when he was alive. I can’t possibly do this by myself.” Her dad leaned back and said flatly, “Well, then, I guess you’re going to have to put them in foster care.”

Laura became enraged. “I was just hysterical. I screamed, ‘How can you say that?’ and stormed up to my room. But then I got to thinking about my dad—how once when I was a little kid, a piece of hot plastic landed on my arm and I ended up with a third-degree burn. I was screaming and crying, and my dad just looked at me and said, ‘Stop crying’ and picked it out of my arm—and I immediately stopped.

“Now he’d done the same thing to me 30 years later, kind of like a big slap in the head. He made me see the situation more clearly. I thought, ‘If I just curl up in a ball and am unable to deal with any of this, what’s going to happen to my kids? They’re little, they didn’t deserve this, and they’ll be ruined if I screw this up.’ So I wiped away my tears, came downstairs, and said,
‘Dad, you’re right. I’ve got to pull it together,’ and the next day I did. I got up. I packed their lunches. And I drove my kids to school.”

A few months later, Laura started working again part-time as a teacher, but on many days she had trouble getting from the parking lot to the classroom. “I would sit in the car crying. I had been at my school 13 years and I’d built a reputation as the smiling, positive art teacher. It was exhausting to try to still be that person when I wasn’t feeling that way.” It was then that Laura’s principal suggested she try getting back to her jewelry-making.

It was hard. “Metalsmithing takes tons of concentration, and if you’re a fraction of a millimeter off, you’ve screwed up your piece,” she says. But she had Etsy orders she was behind on, and as she sat back down at her workbench, something happened: that once-familiar feeling of her working hands returned. She felt something else coming back as well.

“I’ve always thought of myself as a super-strong, really in-control person. Workwise—you have to be in control of yourself every second you’re in front of a classroom of kids. Losing Dave was a situation out of my control, and it had made me anxious.

“So getting back in my studio—and being able to make something that I could send to someone, knowing they’d be overjoyed with it—calmed my brain down and got me into a rhythm,” she says. “When I’m on my workbench, everything melts away. It’s the only thing I’ve tried that has really helped with my anxiety. I can control what I’m making, my finances, and my time.”

Laura’s business took off. Etsy began including her pieces in its promotions and late in 2011 the site contacted her to say that she was going to be promoted as a featured seller. “That means they choose you and your shop as being exemplary and they give you a feature on their front page with an interview and pictures of you in your studio for three days,” she says. “You cannot pay for advertising like that.”

After that, things got over-the-top busy for Laura. She does some occasional business from her home studio through local word-of-mouth, but Etsy is her true marketplace and she has had no trouble cracking her monthly goal of $10,000; in a good month, she can now make $20,000.

“I’m grateful every day that I don’t have to worry now about how we’re going to buy groceries or pay property taxes,” she says. “I could never stop
teaching fully, because I’m so invested in my students. But my teaching job basically pays for child care. My jewelry business is what sustains us.

“For me, this is all about stability for my children. Our home is everything to us. It’s filled with all the things that my husband fixed, repaired, or replaced. I am so proud that I can keep the home Dave and I put together. I have even established college funds for my kids. It’s very cathartic and empowering.”

The kids have also gotten in on the act. “Like one night,” Laura says, “I was sketching some new ring designs and my little guy, Aiden, came over and sat beside me and said, ‘I want to draw rings, too.’ Within five minutes all three of the kids had paper and pencil and were coming up with ring designs, too. One of them said, ‘When we get married, Mom, are you going to make our wedding rings for free, or are we going to have to pay you?’ ”

The joy of Laura’s success goes way beyond her family and their living room. Most of her one-of-a-kind pieces are for engagements and weddings, or are mementoes in someone’s life. “I’ve had men contact me because their wife is having their first baby and they want something to present to her on the day the baby is born. And I get pictures from guys who do all these crazy surprise engagements, like one guy who had the waiter make my ring a part of the dessert.”

And then there was the woman who said she planned to pass Laura’s piece down to her daughter. “Jewelry is such a special heirloom in many families, and it’s kind of cool to think something I’ve made is going to become one of those pieces,” she says. “It’s very fulfilling to be attached to a joyful point in someone else’s life.”

Laura’s own life is gaining joy, too, though it’s been only a few years since the loss of Dave. She feels him everywhere, and his love and enthusiasm are a big part of her creativity. “I’ve finally become the artist I always wanted to be, making my own designs and supporting my family. I’m really proud. And I know Dave would be, too.”

Amy Knapp, 48

Kalamazoo, Michigan

A
my Knapp had it all under control. That’s because Amy Knapp was super-organized.

She had to be. As the young mother of two, she was the owner of her own specialty advertising company, which produced custom pens, folders, and other promotional items—and she did it all: ran meetings, scheduled conference calls, managed sales incentive programs, juggled deadlines. It all came naturally to her; it was a talent she’d nurtured back in high school, when she was president of the student council and in charge of planning the senior prom. Years later, her former classmates even counted on her to organize their first reunion.

So imagine Amy’s surprise when she could barely manage her own household.

It started in 1995, when her two-month-old daughter, Natalie, was hospitalized for meningitis. The baby recovered, but several months later it
became obvious that the infection had left its mark. Natalie would have lifelong disabilities from the illness, doctors told Amy, and would require intense therapy to overcome them.

With an active toddler son and now a disabled infant, Amy decided to sell her business and dig in as a full-time mother and care manager. Who better to oversee the dizzying schedule of medical appointments for Natalie than the ultimate planning pro?

“I thought,
I have this in the bag,
” recalls Amy. “I’m used to multitasking.” But she soon discovered that running a busy household for a family with special needs was different from running a business: Natalie had appointments with occupational therapists, speech therapists, and physical therapists; she had to see a neurologist in addition to her regular pediatrician; she needed to travel to the Mayo Clinic for specialized testing. Three-year-old Kyle, by the way, had needs, too—the never-ending preschooler kind. And on top of managing all that, Amy was supposed to do the grocery shopping and get dinner on the table every night.

She was in a tailspin.

Within six months, Amy realized she needed to do something to get her life under control. “That’s when my managerial side kicked in,” she says. “I was desperate. I had run a very tight ship at the office, and I wanted things to be just as structured and organized at home.”

So she went to her local Barnes & Noble to pick up a day-by-day planner or calendar—any kind, she figured—just to help her get organized. There were certainly a lot to choose from: some offered daily, weekly, or monthly layouts; others had spaces for phone numbers, or pages for to-do lists. Many of them had pretty covers, cute cartoons, or inspiring quotes.

Amy wound up spending $17.99 on a calendar with a beautiful Monet painting on the cover. She took it home and began filling in her schedule.

But then she ran out of room.

“Within three months, the entire painting was covered with sticky notes,” Amy says. “I tried really hard to write small and squeeze the words together on the Post-its, because I couldn’t fit them into the calendar. The more I looked at them, the more I realized that these notes were not appointments, but rather all the other parts of being a stay-at-home mom—or any kind of mom, really—things you absolutely need to keep track of.”

Among these notes were Amy’s grocery list, what she planned to make for dinner, and reminders of personal calls she needed to make—a blizzard of jotted reminders that make up
life
.

Amy thought,
This is ridiculous. I’ll make a planning calendar for myself.

“I knew what I needed,” she says. “First, I needed to see everything I planned to do in a full week—starting on Monday, not Sunday. You don’t want to be flipping back and forth, with the calendar in one place and the grocery list on the back page, and your to-do list somewhere else. You needed it all in a format that can lie open on your counter, where you can see all of your responsibilities in one glance. And you definitely needed to see the weekend as one unit—not divided up with this Sunday at the beginning of the week, and next Saturday at the other end of it.”

In a flash of inspiration, Amy grabbed a spiral notebook and a Sharpie and sketched out her own system—one that chronicled her crammed schedule across a two-page spread.

“It became my lifeline,” says Amy, who then hauled her spiral notebook everywhere she went, its ratty cover and curled-up corners a testament to its indispensability.

Amy’s design wasn’t as simple as it appeared—it was actually rather ingenious. In addition to her one-glance, seven-day spread, there was a separate area for to-do notes and reminders. Down the far right column of the
right-hand page, there was a space for her to list her dinner menus for the week. The grocery items she’d need to make those dinners went on the outside of the left-hand page—on a perforated column she could tear off and take to the grocery store with her. Since this week’s shopping list appeared on the front of last week’s menu, the tear-off left her current weekly view completely intact.

“I could go right from my menu to my grocery list, without turning the page,” she says, “so it was very convenient. People would see me carrying it in the grocery store and ask, ‘What is that?’ and I’d say, ‘This is how I organize my time.’ Invariably they’d say, ‘Wow, that’s a really good setup. Let me see how you did that. I’d like to make one.’ After hearing that a couple of times, I put my sales and marketing cap on and thought, ‘Boy, there are a lot of people out there who need something like this.’ ”