Click to buy Before and After by Brian F. Mullaney, Co-Founder of Smile Train and WonderWork.
Before and After: Chapter 11
Ever since 1977, when I first left home and went to Harvard, I’d always called my mom on a weekly basis to catch up with her, telling her all my crazy stories in an attempt to make her laugh or smile. Like everyone in the family, I was painfully aware that Mom wasn’t a happy person. Over the years, she’d done her best to try to heal from the tragedy of Maura’s death; she went to therapists and counselors, tried this medication or that, but nothing really made a difference. She still would break down in tears at the smallest provocation, and often struggled to get out of bed in the mornings.
One of the only things that could reliably lift Mom’s spirits was traveling. My dad’s work often required him to travel overseas, and she was always eager to go with him. One of her favorite sayings was, “The world is a book, and if you don’t travel, you only read one page.” While she was away, it was as if she actually escaped from her mourning for a little while. Over the years, my parents visited 165 countries together—and there are only 196 countries in the entire world. She always came back from these trips energized and smiling, almost like her old self.
The other thing that seemed to make her tangibly happier was hearing about Smile Train. Ever since I’d gotten involved in helping children with clefts, I’d noticed a real change in her tone during our weekly calls. Whenever I told her about our latest milestone or the progress we’d made, she would respond with genuine excitement in her voice. This was a stark contrast to when I updated her on any accomplishments in advertising, which never seemed to make her leap out of her seat in excitement. My mom’s positive reaction to my Smile Train work made me feel like I was finally doing something she respected. She also loved the fact that I was traveling—just like her. Wherever I went, I’d be sure to send her a postcard—from Vietnam, China, India, all over—and it gave us both a lot of pleasure, comparing our experiences in far-flung parts of the world.
After my second year as interim president of Smile Train, it became clear that it would be be best if I stayed on just a little bit longer. We were forging more and more partnerships, bringing in more and more donors, and constantly refining our model, and I wanted to keep up the momentum. It was challenging work that often kept me up at night, but it was also compelling and personally fulfilling. There was always the next hurdle right around the corner, or one more obstacle I wanted to overcome before I left. My second child, Charlie, was two years old and Cricket was pregnant with our third. We’d moved out of Manhattan, to a leafy but fairly affluent suburb on Long Island. I had long since sold my Porsche and left my high-rolling days in Manhattan behind me. While all the other dads in the neighborhood were mostly bankers and brokers, I realized I really liked that fact that I was doing something that was meaningful to me, something that I’d be proud to tell my kids about someday.
Going into year three as interim president, there was another factor preventing me from leaving: we were closing in on funding 100,000 surgeries, and I wanted to stick around long enough to celebrate that milestone. When we started Smile Train, people had told us it would be impossible to reach our initial target of 10,000 surgeries a year. Now, a few short years later, we had sped past even the most optimistic expectations for our success.
To celebrate all we had accomplished, we decided to throw a party and invite some of our major donors to New York to celebrate. But this wasn’t going to be some boring rubber-chicken charity dinner. We wanted to do something different. The way I saw it, donors were our shareholders. Why not say thank you by giving them an amazing night out?
So we rented a room that would fit 150 people and sent out invitations. They said:
Please come and help us celebrate our 100,000th surgery, because generous donors like you made each of these surgeries possible. This is not a fundraiser. Come to New York and we will show you what we’ve been doing with your money! Our treat.
Soon the RSVPs began to arrive—in much higher volume than we’d anticipated. We were going to have to find a bigger room! The evening started shaping up to be a great one: actress Candice Bergen agreed to host, and we arranged to have Smile Train’s very first patient, Wang Li, fly over from China. Dr. Adenwalla, the man I’d met on my first trip for Smile Train in India, was also going to come, to talk to donors about his work.
The night of the party, I stood at the entrance, shaking hands with people as they walked in. There was a real feeling of energy and excitement in the room. One person told me, “I have given money to hundreds of charities, and not one of them has ever invited me to anything where I didn’t have to write a check.” Even Candice Bergen told me that this was unlike any other charity event she had ever attended. I told her that was because everyone who had come really wanted to be there. There wasn’t anyone in the room filling a chair just because a friend had bought a table.
After everyone arrived, I got up on stage and made some brief remarks. I told people about the progress we’d made empowering doctors and hospitals. I told them about all the training we’d funded, the equipment we’d bought, and the financial support we’d given to help these communities become more self-sufficient. While I spoke, photographs of our patients and their transformations were projected behind me.
And then I invited Wang Li onto the stage to tell her story. She was still so petite that we had to find her a milk crate to stand on so she could reach the microphone. I felt I’d done a pretty good job of warming up the crowd, but sixteen-year-old Wang Li stole the show.
INSERT PHOTO: WangLiPodium
Speaking through an interpreter, she began to tell her story. Wang Li had grown up in a family of peasants, in Jiangsu Province, north of Shanghai. Her father earned a meager living working at the local brick factory, and her mother made fishing nets to bring in extra income. Although Wang Li’s four sisters went to school, Wang Li stayed at home. Her cleft was so severe that whenever she left the house, she was taunted and shunned by the rest of the village, so she stayed at home as much as she could. Meanwhile, the surgery to fix her defect would have cost more than her family’s income for an entire year.
“Before my surgery, I couldn’t see any future for myself,” Wang Li said. “I used to watch my sisters go to school and cry because I couldn’t follow them. My parents were so worried about what was going to happen to me. They thought I would never get an education, never get married.”
One day a traveling salesman was passing through the village , and he happened to see Wang Li, who on this rare occasion was playing in front of her family’s home. The salesman stopped and asked Wang Li to call for her mother. He wanted to tell the family about an advertisement for free cleft surgeries he’d seen in a local newspaper. A few weeks later, Wang Li traveled with her father to the capital of Nanjing to see if they could enroll in the program. Not long after, on the first day of the Chinese New Year, Wang Li received her free surgery.
On the stage that night, Wang Li thanked our donors for saving her and so many other children from a long life of suffering. “Since my surgery, I have been able to go to school, which was always my dream. And I hope that one day, I’ll be able to help someone the way that you’ve helped me.”
The entire room rose to its feet to give Wang Li a standing ovation. On her milk crate, Wang Li had tears in her eyes, shaking her head in disbelief while 1,500 people cheered wildly.
Over the course of the evening, there were many more emotional moments and standing ovations. Dr. Adenwalla described his work at the Jubilee Mission Hospital, and the incredible transformations he witnessed in his work on a daily basis.
“It is the duty of every human being to help another,” he told the crowd. “Especially when he is in need.”
Toward the end of the program, I stood up and made some closing remarks. As I looked around this room, filled with people who had come from all around the world to attend the event, I happened to catch my mom’s eye. She was sitting in the front row, beaming, clearly having the time of her life. Later that evening, she handed me a card.
“Brian dear,” it said, “you have given us 100,000 reasons to be proud of you.”
Before she left that night, my mom gave me a giant hug and we said good-bye.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the last hug I ever got from my mom. A few weeks later, my parents were at home watching TV. My mom got up to go to the bathroom and didn’t come back for quite some time. Eventually my dad went to look for her and found that she had collapsed. The cause of death was never established—the doctors said that her heart had simply given out. She was seventy years old.
When a close family member dies suddenly, it throws you completely off balance. My mom had seemed so young. Despite being in her seventies, she’d had a checkup just one week earlier and had received a clean bill of health from her doctor. There wasn’t any identifiable reason for her death—even her doctors were mystified.
In the days and weeks that followed, it was like I was trying to find my way around in a fog. My mom had always been there for me, pushing and supporting me. She was the one who encouraged me to get better grades in school. She was the one who read me the riot act when I was in danger of flunking out. She was the one who insisted I was good enough to get into Harvard. She was the one who told me never to resist a generous impulse. I knew I wouldn’t be half the person I was without her.
One of my mom’s favorite quotes was from George Bernard Shaw: “The man I miss the most is the man I could have been.” When I was younger, and screwing up my life, my mom would often remind me of this quote. I think she was trying to get me to think about what I was doing in terms of the regrets I might have in the future.
And in many ways, I think she was talking about herself and the woman she might have been. She had given up a career as a teacher to marry my dad and raise us kids. And then after Maura died, she never managed to recover. Maybe that’s why it was so important to her that I learned to pick up the pieces and move on. She was filled with regret about the path her own life had taken—but she didn’t want me to struggle in the same way. Many times I felt like she saw a lot of herself in me and wanted me to be all the things she dreamt of but never achieved.
For most of my adult life, I had been trying to make things up to her: trying to make up for my sister dying, trying to compensate for not being nicer to Maura when she was sick, for being such a jerk in my teenage years, for dropping out of Harvard, for not turning my Harvard education into a career in law like my dad and brothers—just trying to make up for all the times I could have acted better and done better. Deep down, while I was running around the world trying to help children with clefts, all I ever hoped was that I could make my mom smile.
What was I going to do with my life now? I was at a crossroads both personally and professionally. There was no real reason for me to stay on as president of Smile Train. The 100,000th surgery celebration was over. I had achieved what I’d set out to do. The organization was running successfully. It was time to hand it off to someone else, as I’d promised I would do, so I could to go back to my real life: making ads, making deals, and, most importantly, making a lot of money.
Or was it? I was wavering. I knew going back to my for-profit career would be a much more lucrative path. But I had begun to suspect that if I left Smile Train, I would miss the work every single day I was away. Advertising would feel empty and unfulfilling by comparison, the kind of void that money could never fill.
Not so long after Mom died, I was on a crowded train from Long Island, traveling into New York City with my son, Charlie, who was about to turn four. As we pulled into a station, he suddenly sat up in his seat and started pointing out of the window.
“Look at that, Dad!” he shouted.
I turn around and saw what he had seen: a Smile Train billboard.
“You know something, Dad?” Charlie asked me, smiling proudly. “None of these people on this train know that you did that. They don’t know what you do for work.”
I just smiled, but on the inside I couldn’t have felt happier that my four-year-old son was proud of my work. Was I really prepared to give this up?
After I got home that day, I told Cricket about what had happened on the train. I asked her whether she thought I should stick with Smile Train or go back to advertising. She told me that I should follow my heart.
A few days later, I went to my colleagues and the Smile Train board and told them if they wanted me, I would stay on as president. I also told them that 100,000 surgeries certainly was something to be proud of, but our next goal should be one million surgeries.
From that day on, my title changed from “interim president” to simply “president.”
I had a feeling my mom would approve.
Click to buy Before and After by Brian F. Mullaney, Co-Founder of Smile Train and WonderWork.
