When No One Could Diagnose Him, Faith and Family Got Him Through

Lee: (00:10) This is Lee Habeeb, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. And we love sharing faith stories with you on this show. Send yours to OurAmericanStories.com. Up next is exactly that, a faith story. Here to tell it is the author of Cliff Falls and Guideposts magazine contributor Cliff Shiepe. We begin our story in Boston. Take it away, Cliff.

Cliff: (00:44) We moved to California when I was four. We left in a nor’easter. We were the last plane out, and my dad took me into the restroom. We had taken off all our winter coats, the scarves, the jackets, and we put them on the hooks. And so when I washed my hands, I turned towards the hooks for my dad to take them down so we could put our winter coats on again. And I felt this hand on my shoulder, and my dad said, “We are never going to need that stuff again.” We got on the plane and landed in Southern California in January, and it was seventy-six degrees. The Christmas decorations were still up, and my dad had the taxi driver go down Hollywood Boulevard and Beverly Hills, and that was just the lens of coming to California, of the possibility of a new beginning.

So when I was in fifth grade, my parents did something wonderful. They told my sister and me that we could pick ten shares of any stock. My sister picked McDonald’s, and I picked Disney. As a result, every year I would get the Annual Report in the mail. I felt like an owner, right, a little fifth grader—but I would read about coming attractions, what worked, what failed, what they were planning on doing, and then seeing the reality.

(02:10) I always wanted to work at Disney. That was always my goal: to work on the back lot at the studio. And there was this one temping agency, these two wonderful Jewish women. I can still remember one with a poodle, smoking as she held the poodle, and they placed temps only for the presidents, the chairmen, and the top producers on the back lot, and so I worked for everyone. But my first temp job at Disney had the biggest impact on me. I was working at a place called Disney Character Voices, and they were responsible for the voiceovers for all the rides and the movies, and I saw a man who had been let go through no fault of his own. He was a little bit older. They were downsizing, it was during a recession, and this man’s specialty was knowing all the different characters, all the intricacies, like the difference between Chip and Dale, the difference between Pluto and Goofy. And he was packing up his cube and all these hundreds of figurines of each character, wrapping them up in tissue paper and putting them in a box. And I watched a grown man fall apart. He didn’t just lose a job; he lost his identity. And I knew in that moment, having idealized Disney, that I wasn’t going to make the same mistake.

And then I started getting a series of fevers—one hundred and five, one hundred and six, one hundred and seven point eight—and that one I don’t even remember. A friend called my mom to come to my place, and I have a vague memory of her at the bedside, and I just remember waking up in my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house.

(04:02) And the strange thing is, I was getting these fevers, and then I’d recover and I’d be okay, and the doctors are like, “Oh, it’ll run its course, it’ll run its course.” Well, it wasn’t running its course. So I didn’t know what to do. But the desert is about two hours away from where I was living, and there’s an area called La Quinta, Indian Wells, and there was a new resort there. I got a good rate, and I’m like, I’ll just go there for two nights. I’ll just sleep. I realized pretty soon that it was a mistake. The symptoms that I had at home of vertigo and the room starting to spin, and I felt sick right after I ate. It felt like I was in a snow globe somebody had just picked up and was shaking. And in that moment, I made an unwise choice.

I should have gone to the hospital. Instead, at about two in the morning, I tried to drive home, and I got about a mile away on a deserted street, and my body was shaking so much, trembling. And in that moment, you don’t have the objectivity to say, “Oh, my body’s shutting down, I’m going into septic shock.” You just know how bad you feel. But that’s what was happening, and I literally stopped the car in the middle of the street, praying to God, “Don’t let me die here.”

And I still can’t remember when I got out, if I collapsed, or if I just kind of settled down in the middle of the street, and I have no memory of how long I was there. The remarkable thing is, somehow, eventually I made it back to the hotel, and I went into the lobby, and all the workers were there vacuuming and cleaning, and there was this side lobby and there was this little trickling fountain, and I spent that night listening to that fountain, looking out those windows into the darkness, waiting for the sun to come up. And I was never the same after that night. I would return to my apartment, thinking it was only going to be a few months.

I had packed up in salvaged boxes from a dumpster at a supermarket, some of them still smelled like produce, and everything I owned got put in these boxes and moved to my parents’ house, thinking it would only be a few months. And in truth, fifteen years went by. Even after I was healthy again, this health crisis went on for almost ten years, three bedridden, the rest starts and stops. I saw seventy doctors in the first seven years. Everything that meant life to me was taken away.

Lee: (06:43) And you’ve been listening to Cliff Shiepe tell one heck of a personal story, starting in the end with his move to California. He became a part of the Disney family as an intern, and then came the sickness, and then years and years of struggle. To find out more about what Cliff’s up to, go to CliffFalls.com. That’s CliffFalls.com. When we come back, more of the story of Cliff Shiepe here on Our American Stories.

Lee: (07:28) And we return to Our American Stories and the story of Cliff Shiepe. When we last left off, Cliff had lost everything—his apartment, his dream job on the back lot of Disney, and most important, his health. He would end up bedridden for three years and find himself in his childhood bedroom during the prime of his youth. One of the oddest things about it all was that he and his doctors had no idea what was going on. Let’s return to the story. Here again is Cliff.

Cliff (08:37) Everything I’ve learned about belief I’ve learned from my mom. If you’ve ever been on an airplane in terrible turbulence and you look at the stewardess and you’re like, if she’s calm, we’re all right. That was my mom. Maybe three years in, I’m in bed and I hear my mom at the end of the hallway, “Cliff, are you up?” She knocks on the door and opens it, and she’s standing in the doorway with a cake that’s lit with candles and streamers. I’m like, what is this? What are you doing, Mom? It’s not my birthday. And she goes, “You don’t know what today is?” I’m like, “What is it, Mom?” She goes, “Today’s your pity party!”

(09:26) “We’re throwing you a pity party. For the next hour or so, we’re going to talk about what a raw deal this is, how you were a good kid, and you’re still the one who kind of got sick. And then when we’re done eating cake, I’m going to kick you in the pants. I’m going to start working the problem. We were in this together.” And I will tell you that is the smartest thing she ever did, because so many people won’t move on and do what they can do until someone in the land of the living acknowledges the reality of what has happened. And she did that for me. I didn’t know for years that she would go to the church and pray and cry. And there was a house a block from the church on the way home that had this beautiful garden up front. And my mom told me years later that she would stop her car and just look at that garden and wipe her tears and pull herself together so she could come home and be strong. And one day she came home and she couldn’t wipe the tears away, and it was obvious, and she said, Cliff, I did something today that I never thought I would do. I said a prayer that “God, you know I love Cliff more than anything, but you love him more than I do. She put me on the altar, and she said to God, if you want him back, I give him to you. If not, heal him. I can’t do this anymore.”

I watched her surrender, and I had said I had surrendered many times, but I hadn’t. Seven years in, I ended up at a research center. They said that whatever was going on, you now have a bacteria in your system that’s throughout your body, and it can’t fight it. They tried me on multiple courses of antibiotics for months. It didn’t kill it off. They even gave me predigested food that they give stroke victims because when you eat it feeds the bacteria, so it never dies. But that didn’t work. And finally, I said, “Well, what will work?” And this doctor—I’ll never forget it—looked at me and he goes, maybe a fast. And I said, You mean like three days before Easter. I can do that. And he said no, it would have to be water only for about ten or eleven days to completely starve it out of your system. And without skipping a beat, I said okay, and he goes, “Okay, you’re going to do that?!” I would have done anything.

So ten days—it was ten and a half days—nothing but water, and I will tell you, in that waiting room, when they test the bacteria, you have to breathe into this bag every fifteen minutes for three hours. The only magazine they had in that waiting room was Bon Appétit. I was reading about food in my lowest moment. But the amazing thing, the miraculous thing, is after the ten, eleven days, it was eradicated. I had a new measure of healing that I hadn’t had in ten years.

So I’m healthy, but I’m keeping to myself. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks when he’s on the deserted island. I cry like a baby in that thing. And it’s not when he’s on the island. It’s when he tries to come home, and he realizes that time has just moved on. And that is a little bit what happened to me. I’d run into friends from the past. Everyone’s married with kids, or their first home, or their second home, or their new job. And I am living as if I were Rip Van Winkle or something. When I was pursuing acting and Disney, even, and building my life, I was holding onto my dreams so tightly, and I kept being confronted with the reality that the dream isn’t really what you expected. So how do you surrender a dream but not surrender the desire that inspired it?

I got an invitation one Christmas from a friend who had been there for me, and she said, “I’ve moved to Pasadena, Cliff, and I know you don’t do these things, but please just stop by my Christmas party. I just want to hug you.” So I’m driving up El Molino looking for this place, and I see all these cars parked out front, and I quickly realize that her apartment is kitty-corner to my old apartment where I used to live all those years ago, and as chance or God would have it, the only parking spot open was right in front of my apartment. So I get out, and it’s all decorated elaborately for Christmas. And there was this young kid in the bushes, and he covered, you know, with strings of light, and I said, you know, this is really impressive. You’ve done a good job. It was a little over the top, and he goes, “You know that snowman, those were pumpkins from Halloween. I spray-painted them!” And I’m like, “Really?!” Obviously, I realized that before he told me, and I just, as almost a throwaway, said, “You know, I used to live here fifteen years ago in that apartment, that one right up on the top floor with the hardwood floors and fireplace.” And he looked at me, he goes, “That’s my apartment!” And then he said something that was the most unexpected. He said, “Do you want to see it?” I answered yes before I could even consider the question. I walked up those steps with carpeted steps and into that apartment, hearing that same squeak of the door, and over the fireplace, there was this little brass emblem that my girlfriend at the time had given me, and I had hammered it into place. And he said, “I was wondering where that came from. None of the other places has that!” And I looked around, opened the closets, the kitchen, and this was all mine at one point, and that mattered. I will say that I left that apartment knowing that I had finally come back. It was time for a new dream.

And I woke up one morning, I said, Mom, I can’t spend another day in that bedroom. I can’t do it. I packed up my car and I drove up north, and this irritability and anger—I dare say a righteous anger—came up inside of me, and I said, Okay, God, you didn’t promise that the friends would still be there, the job would still be there. But you know what you did promise—green pastures, still waters, green pastures. You’ve promised me peace. Where is my peace? When are you going to show up? Now? I showed up at a church I used to go to and volunteer at.

Nobody knew I was coming, and I kind of signed up to work with the—I did sign up to work with the high school department writing dramas. And they said, you know, there are some families who will put up the volunteers and the interns at the church until you find housing. And there’s a family in the Portola Valley, and I got the address, and so I’m driving down this valley, and it is pouring rain, and it’s a winding road, and I’m thinking, where’s my peace? Well, I arrived at their home, and the family was so nice, and they actually made the bedroom for me, and I fell asleep thinking, “How did I end up in this spot?” The next morning, I felt the sun against my face as it was coming through the mini blinds, and as I pulled the cord and the blinds inched up, I realized in that moment, it’s the Portola Valley. But all that time I thought I was winding down into the valley, I was actually ascending. I was high on the hill, on the mountaintop, and I didn’t know it. And I looked out that window, and you know what was exactly out that window? Green pastures. As far as I could see, rolling green unobstructed pastures. And it was like God was saying to me—you know, for some reason, God sometimes sounds like Frank Sinatra in my head—You want green pastures, kid? There’s your green pastures. Who’s your God? Who’s your God? Who do you believe? He was going to get me to where I needed to be, even if I didn’t understand it. And had you told me those years ago when I packed up my stuff and moved out of my apartment, that I was going to be an author, not an actor.

Lee: (17:34) And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Montie Montgomery. Be sure to check out Cliff Shiepe’s website at CliffFalls.com. That’s CliffFalls.com. Cliff Shiepe’s story—a beautiful one—here on Our American Stories.