Intelligence of the Heart

By Susan Belfiore

The Intelligence of The Heart is a moving, real-life account of one woman's journey from  Princeton, New Jersey, to Constanza, Romania, in the aftermath of Nicolae Ceaușescu's dictato

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sailaway
• Release date: Nov 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088267325

Book preview

Intelligence of the Heart: A Memoir.

© 2023 Susan Belfiore.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Publisher.

Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

ISBN (paperback): 9798218962432

ISBN (ebook): 9781088267325

Interior Design: Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Cover Design: Endpapers Studio

For Bill, your unconditional love has nurtured my soul, allowing me the fullest expression of myself.

And for Ramona, Loredana, Ionel, Mihaela, and Aidan—you all taught me what it means to love.

Foreword

This poignant memoir tells the life story of a courageous woman who followed her heart from a comfortable existence in New Jersey to the chaos of a collapsing authoritarian regime during the last days of a Soviet Union satellite, where 120,000 abandoned children were being warehoused in hellish institutions as uninterested caregivers waited for them to die. In this unlikely environment, Susan Belfiore discovered four children who looked to her to find a better life. And she looked to them to provide the family for which she had long yearned.

Attempting to save those children and many others she encountered, Susan endured the nightmare of a sadistic game played by petty bureaucrats. Her mental and physical health strained, she was cursed, humiliated, lied to, laughed at, and ignored by officials who had no interest in caring for the children she had grown to love.

Susan gradually took the children out of the dark shadows of this human hellhole and brought them into the light. She has watched the four children who became her family grow into healthy and compassionate young people. This book shows the steps that Susan took to get here. It is a helpful guide to all who will read it, especially those who are attempting to follow their own hearts to do what is right in their lives.

—Brother Toby McCarroll, a founding member of Starcross Community and the author of Morning Glory Babies: Children with AIDS and the Celebration of Life (St. Martin’s Press)

Introduction

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

—Blaise Pascal,

philosopher and mathematician

We all have a story to tell; stories help us feel connected. I have two reasons why I have chosen to share my story. The first is straightforward. I have a friend who has encouraged me to share this story. After his many attempts over many years to persuade me, the simple words that finally convinced me were, Susan, there is enough bad news out there; we need to hear something positive. These words felt right to me.

I started this book during the COVID pandemic, when the news was consistently bad, and fear was so thick it was hard to move. In fact, we weren’t moving; we stopped traveling and stayed in our homes. In this atmosphere, I saw the need to acknowledge a time in my life that was life-affirming. A time when I opened up to new possibilities that I didn’t even know existed.

My second reason for writing this book is more difficult to explain, but it speaks to a form of communication I feel is overlooked and yet powerful when acknowledged. I have come to realize that the decisions and unexpected learnings that have brought the most joy and growth in my life have come not from my mind, but, surprisingly, from my heart. The intelligence of my heart gave me a life I could not have imagined, a life I could never have planned for myself. This book speaks about times in my life when I allowed reason to take a back seat to my heart. I want to share this story to spotlight the power of the heart and its ability to guide us.

If I could manifest my greatest desire for this book, it would be that you might see a bit of yourself in these pages and that you will recognize or continue to recognize the power of your heart. You will identify and share your heart’s story; we will open our communication from a place of love. We will gain comfort with the ways of the heart. Our lives will no longer be based solely on reason. It will be okay to not know why we know, to not question our heart-found, heart-led knowledge.

Part I

Prime Time: August 1990

It was a warm summer evening. The sound of the crickets could be heard from inside the kitchen. All the doors and windows were open to let a little heat of the day warm up the overly air-conditioned house. Someone, probably me, had forgotten to turn down the air before leaving that morning. Bill, my husband of twenty years, and I had lived in this very unusual postmodernist house for about three years, but I never got tired of how the fading sun played with the shadows on the wall. An associate of Michael Graves had designed it, and, like a home designed by Graves himself, it had many unusual angles and designs that caught the light.

Bill and I sat at the kitchen counter eating our dinner, a meal neither of us was very interested in. We were tired. Bill had a long commute home from New York City, where he worked on Wall Street. Traffic on Route 1 south to Princeton had been at its worst that night due to an accident. I didn’t have a commute at all. I worked from an office in a separate building, only twenty feet away from the house. My work, called Hellerwork, entailed structural bodywork or myofascial manipulation and movement education. The work was physically demanding, and my weariness came from the sheer number of clients I had that day.

Although we were tired, we talked about our day and then moved on to the question of whether there was anything good to watch on TV. As we cleared our dishes, we decided to see if something might grab our attention. I curled up on the couch with our golden retriever, Falkor, at my feet. Because of problems with infertility, we didn’t have any children; it looked like this big goofy dog that ate everyone’s socks whole and leaped to kiss strangers was our heir apparent. Although it would have been nice to have children, we weren’t unhappy. We had many friends and the support and love of our families, and most of all, we had each other.

Bill flipped through the stations looking for anything that would catch our interest.

Wait a minute, I said, Stop there!

It was Primetime Live with Diane Sawyer. On the TV screen were babies, maybe twenty or twenty-five of them. The scene was shocking. Infants and toddlers with shaven heads, dressed in rags and rocking back and forth in their metal cribs. There were flies swarming around their heads and landing in their eyes. The children didn’t even bother to swat them away. They were eerily quiet, with blank looks in their eyes. Some children looked ill; others were skin and bones. The room they were in was dark, and I saw nothing to stimulate them. I heard the announcer say that the children spent their whole lives in these cribs.

Then they showed an older gentleman, maybe in his sixties, with a white beard. He reminded me of Santa Claus. He was wearing black pants and a white shirt and had a plain wooden cross hung around his neck. I assumed that he was a clergyman.

A little boy with big, dark brown eyes raised his hands pleadingly for the clergyman to pick him up. The man seemed very upset as he lifted the small, dark-haired toddler from his crib.

I leaned in to hear what he was saying.

This is intolerable. This has to stop. Something must be done, the clergyman said, while he walked around the room, observing and carrying the young boy with him.

When the man returned to the crib to put the dark-eyed little boy back down, the child wouldn’t let go. I saw him cling tightly to the man’s neck. As he peeled the child’s hands from him, the clergyman uttered an emotional plea: We have got to solve this problem!

This scene broke my heart. I have never forgotten it, nor has its impact lessened with time.

The camera switched to Diane Sawyer, who identified the man as Brother Toby McCarroll, a member of Starcross, a Catholic community from Northern California. I learned that the children were Romanian. Romania had recently gone through a revolution, leaving the country with over one hundred thousand orphaned children. Ceaușescu, the country’s despotic former president, had required families to have children they couldn’t afford in order to build up the workforce. In addition to being orphaned, these children had been infected with the AIDS virus. Romania’s failing health care system had unknowingly infected thousands of children through contaminated needles and commonly used blood transfusions. These innocent children had been abandoned and warehoused, left to die.

Brother Toby was an AIDS activist in the United States; he had come to Romania to assess the situation to see what could be done to help these children. The broadcast followed Brother Toby from Romania back to his home in California, to his own adopted family of five children, four of whom were infected with the AIDS virus. As their adoptive father, he now spoke live from California about a child’s right to have a family, lead a normal life, and, when—or if—the time came, to not die alone. In 1990, children with AIDS were not expected to live more than five or six years. The contrast between the lives of children in Romania and his children was profound. The anchor explained that these children could not be brought into the US for help since there was a law here prohibiting anyone, even a child, from entering the country with HIV. This was 1990; the law had been in effect since 1987 and still had a majority of support in the Senate. This law reflected the fear and prejudice that surrounded AIDS in the US.

Diane Sawyer asked, Brother Toby, do you still intend on helping the children in Romania?

He responded, Yes, very much so. But we can’t do it alone.

What do you need? she asked.

We need volunteers. Volunteers who are willing to put their own needs aside for a while. People who would be willing to come to Romania and stay at least six months, put up with a hard situation, be flexible, and most of all be willing to cry a lot.

As I watched and listened, I thought, I’m really good at that last one. Over the years, I had learned to appreciate a good cleansing cry; I no longer saw it as a weakness as I had in the past. The situation with the children in Romania was extremely sad; tears alone could not solve it, but Brother Toby seemed to realize that for someone to commit to helping these children, they could not be afraid to be moved deeply.

I believed that Brother Toby was speaking to me. Although I wasn’t aware of it as I sat with Bill, watching the horror and heartbreak, this scene touched an unresolved part of my childhood. A part of my past I had walled up and packed deep down, so far down that I believed it had no effect on me. I felt proud when people would say, You are so normal for having lost so much. Even though I had pride in my ability to carry on so well, I never spoke about my loss.

The scene playing across our television was the first shred of light to pierce through this wall in a long time. I thought to myself, I could help these children, not realizing that through them, I would be helping myself.

Bill and I were moved to tears, and as soon as the program ended, I quickly turned to him. Do you think I should go?

Without missing a beat, he said, Yes.

We were on the same page, and it felt so good. This was an example of how our marriage had grown through the years. My heart filled with gratitude for this selfless man who now embodied, so effortlessly, a higher purpose for our marriage. This shared intention for our marriage led us to moments such as this, where we seemed to be of one mind.

The next day I got the details about Brother Toby’s Starcross Community and sat down and wrote a letter. In the letter, I wrote about my work and personal background. The letter was not long, but the part that felt most important for me to say was this: My belief in God does not allow me to believe that these children are victims. I cannot believe that these children were put on this earth solely to suffer and die. I believe that they were put here for a reason . . . to teach us. I feel like I am someone who could learn from them.

I am not exactly sure why that was so important for me to say, but it was. Maybe because people with AIDS were being referred to as victims at that time. I didn’t want to see these children as weak of spirit or somehow less than, marginalized because of a disease.

From that moment on, even before I sent the letter, Bill and I knew that I would be accepted by Starcross and sent to Romania.

Brother Tolbert McCarroll

Brother Toby, as he is called by most who know him, is a man who has sought to live a contemplative life. This endeavor has often been challenged by his desire to help children in need.

In his former life, Brother Toby was an attorney for humanitarian causes. After raising his children and losing his wife, Brother Toby, along with Sisters Julie and Marti, founded Starcross Community, a small community in the monastic tradition. Their work together often led them to care for disadvantaged children in the US. Brother Toby has become the adoptive father of six children.

When I met Brother Toby, he had become an advocate for those who had been infected by HIV. Starcross Community had four children who carried the virus who were being fostered or adopted. His involvement with HIV/AIDS drastically increased after seeing a show on television about abandoned children who had AIDS living in subhuman conditions in Romania.

He traveled to Romania to see what could be done to help. He was so heartbroken by what he saw, he called for volunteers. I was one of them.

Childhood, 1950–1961

Iwas born June 2, 1950, to an Irish Catholic family from Long Island, New York. My father was a lawyer, and my mother was a homemaker. I have five siblings—three brothers and two sisters—and I am the youngest by far; my oldest brother was eighteen years older than me. I think my family thought of themselves as a typical middle-class family of the fifties. I’m not so sure that is correct, but keeping up appearances was important. I have a sense of this from what I’ve been able to gather from my early memories.

My brother-in-law told me that before he and my sister married, he was having dinner at our house, and my mother, an alcoholic, was upstairs threatening to kill herself as my father calmly said, Please pass the butter. My father was known as a gentleman, so he would never have raised his voice or done anything that might have made a guest feel uncomfortable. Although I don’t have any recollection of this time or other times I’ve learned about, I’m sure they added to my sense of uncertainty. Uncertainty, like my shadow, clung to me in those days.

Looking back on my early childhood, it feels fuzzy and unclear—a little like when I forget my reading glasses and try to read my texts on my phone. I can make out some words if I concentrate, but then other parts I just guess at, trying to decipher meaning from stray letters. That’s how my childhood was, although instead of figuring it out in a timely manner, it has taken me years or decades to put the pieces together. This lack of clarity left me, in my early years, walking around in a fog.

My mother died the summer that I was six and she was fifty-one. That summer, our family had rented a beach house on the north fork of Long Island. The place was busy since four of my five siblings were there. My best friend, Shelly, was with me, so that made six kids and my parents. There were many hot summer days of swimming and warm nights sitting on the porch.

I have only three memories of that summer. One is my thirteen-year-old sister, Pat, getting in trouble and threatening to run away. It was very late, well after dark, when she returned, and I remember being afraid. I’m not sure if I was worried that she wouldn’t come back or that she would and there would be more yelling. She was always getting in trouble, and I never got used to it. We roomed together when we weren’t on vacation, so I had a front-row seat to all—the tears, yelling, and threats. On that night, the police were called. Thankfully, Pat walked through the door before they showed up.

My second memory is falling through the ceiling. My brother Mike slept in a dormer on the second floor. My parents were out shopping, and I’m pretty sure he was asked to watch me and wasn’t happy about it. To keep me distracted so that he could read his comic book, Mike would have me close my eyes while he threw playing cards around his room. Then I had to find all fifty-two of them. One of the cards landed on an unfinished area of the dormer that was just beams and plasterboard. To retrieve the card, he told me to go carefully one foot and then two and then—I was through the ceiling. He watched me quickly disappear. I landed in the middle of the living room, surprising my parents, who were just coming in the door with packages. I got scrapes on my arms but was otherwise unscathed. To make me feel better, my parents gave me the new Davy Crockett drinking glasses they’d gotten at the gas station (as an incentive to buy gas), much to the disappointment of Rick, my ten-year-old brother.

My third memory is of my mother dying. I don’t know much about it, even though I was there. She had a stroke late at night or early in the morning. My brother Rick came to my room, pulled down the shades, and told Shelly and me, Something has happened. But I can’t tell you what. You have to stay here.

Then the guessing game started as to what was going on.

I asked and then pleaded, Is it good or bad?

Did something happen to Mom or Dad?

How about anyone else in the family? Or maybe it was a surprise for us? It was kind of exciting to wake up to this game with my brother, who never wanted to play with us. I loved getting his attention. He was good at this game; no matter how we begged, he wasn’t telling us.

Then I was sitting on the back stairs, the ones that went down to the kitchen. Here is where I can’t see it clearly. Someone—maybe my twenty-four-year-old brother, Charlie—was telling me my mother had died.

That was it. She was gone . . . entirely and forever. No one ever spoke of her or asked me if I missed her. They never talked about what she cooked or liked to do. No one cried. I didn’t go to a service or see her body go into the ground. She was just gone.

At the time, my mother’s death didn’t seem to bother anyone, so I guessed it wasn’t supposed to bother me. I didn’t have the chance to miss her around the house because I didn’t go back to my home. I went to live with my twenty-something sister, Mary, who had three kids of her own. My father brought me there and told me I needed to stay because there was no one to care for me. I remember being really sad about not being able to go home with my dad. Not crying sad, but, like, in a fog sad; the world was even less clear. I loved my dad. He sang songs to me and would tell me stories that he made up. Every time I did him a favor (like getting his glasses), he would tell me I was a gentleman, a scholar, and a judge of good liquor. I heard these words so often that I never gave them much thought. It was only as I got older that I thought it was a strange thing to say to a six-year-old girl, but that was the Irish in him.

I loved my sister Mary, but living in her house was different from what I was used to. She was strict. I didn’t know then, but later I learned that my mother had been a severe alcoholic, and as a result our home had had very little structure. I learned this fact from bits and pieces I overheard. When she was drinking, she gave little attention to raising us. She seemed to lie on the couch all day. Since I was so young, I’m not sure how accurate that recollection is, but when I picture my mother in my mind, the only image I have is of her lying on the couch. A neighborhood friend told me that if it weren’t for her developmentally delayed daughter, who often watched me, I would have gotten hurt or fallen down the stairs. This explained why my sister’s home felt so hard for me. I had chores, bedtime, and cleanup to do; I felt like Cinderella. I was in first grade and my second school while I lived with Mary; my father would visit on weekends when he could.

My father got remarried in the spring of that year, eight months after my mother’s death. He married a widow, also