Karen Schaefer and Jessie Hayden

[00:04] JESSE HAYDEN: My name is Jesse Hayden I'm 58 years old. Today is October 21, 2023. I'm at StoryCorps, Atlanta with Karen Schaefer who is my mother.

[00:21] KAREN SCHAEFER: And I'm Karen Schaeffer, Jesse's mother. I'm 80 years old. Today is October 21, 2023. I'm at StoryCorps, Atlanta. I'm here with Jesse Hayden my daughter.

[00:35] JESSE HAYDEN: Okay. I wanted to start our conversation by asking you to shed a little light on your childhood. What was unique about your childhood and even going into adolescence, what do you think was unique about it?

[00:51] KAREN SCHAEFER: I had a very unique childhood. My father was an anthropologist, and from the time I was less than two years old, I went on field trips to remote places with him and my mother and my brother. In fact, my earliest memory is riding in a dog sled in far northern Canada. And I don't know how much of this is actual memory and how much I was told or how much I've made up, but I recall riding in the dog sled with the dogs in front and bundled up in blankets with my brother beside me in a frozen river to the right and snow all around. That's my earliest memory. And after that, we did many field trips almost every two years, at least to northern Canada, as well as later on to Pakistan. Once when I was about ten, and another time when I was 1312, turned 13, and then the last one when I was 16, and we lived in Austria. So it was a very, very unique childhood.

[01:58] JESSE HAYDEN: What were some of the names? Do you remember some of the names of the villages you lived in in any of those locations and maybe shed a little life on light on what life life was like in those places?

[02:12] KAREN SCHAEFER: I don't remember the name of the first memory. Great whale river in Quebec. I do remember that was an eskimo settlement, summertime settlement, because they were nomadic and in the winter would go off to hunting grounds and then come back to Great Whale river in the summer where there was a Hudson's Bay post.

[02:39] JESSE HAYDEN: I remember, what's a Hudson's Bay post?

[02:44] KAREN SCHAEFER: Hudson's Bay company set up warehouses where the people who lived in the area could come and trade their furs and get paid. And then there was like a tiny store. I mean, not much of a store, but they could buy canned goods and that sort of thing, but mostly they could sell the furs that they had a trapped during the winter. Also at the Hudson's Bay company was my favorite part of being there. They would clear the floor and hold dances in the Hudson's Bay Company store. And there would be fiddlers, local fiddlers, who would play what I realize now were probably irish tunes, old irish tunes. And there was a sort of a jig that the Eskimo would dance, and if you looked at their faces, you wouldn't think they were having any fun. But then, every now and then, they would let go, go with sort of a little yip that just showed they were having a wonderful time. But I loved the music and the dancing. I would get up and dance, and finally, I remember I would fall asleep on piles of fur coats and parkas that were stacked in the corner because I was only about seven years old at the time. We also lived in a place in Canada, also in Quebec, out of which was on the Atoapiscat river. That was an indian settlement, similar. Also a Hudson's Bay company store there, and a mission, the catholic missionaries, who were probably irish Catholic, I mean, literally from Ireland. So there was a church there, and there wasn't a whole lot to do. So sometimes I would just go to the evening service at the church, although I was not Catholic, just for entertainment. In Pakistan, we lived. My father went to three different areas. So we lived in little villages, remote villages, no running water, no electricity. The southern part of Pakistan, which was called Sindh, and then in the middle part, the Punjab, lived near the Indus River. I can remember going to the Indus river, walking to it, although my brother, who had had polio when he was younger, got to ride on the donkey, and I was always kind of jealous because he got rid on the donkey and I had to walk. And then we lived in the far northern region, which was called the northwest Frontier, which you heard about in the news during the afghan war, because it was very near the afghan border. And then in Austria, which my parents. My mother decided she'd had enough of roughing it and convinced my father to do some research in Austria, in the Austrian Alps. And we lived in a little village called alt eardning. Alt means old, so it was old erdning. There was another town nearby called Erdningen, and it was lovely. I mean, it was just like being in this middle of Heidi.

[05:57] JESSE HAYDEN: What were some of the things you remember about Alt yeardning?

[06:01] KAREN SCHAEFER: Well, I was 15. It was the summer, I think, the summer before my senior year of high school or maybe my junior year of high school. And I made friends with a girl named Lotha who knew English. And we just. We had a ball, got bicycles. I wish she had a bike and loaned me a bike. And we would ride all around this little town. And about a couple of miles away, there was a lake which was frigid because it was melted snow. But we would go swimming and meet her friends there. And I had a horrible crush on one of our schoolmates. His name was Dietrich. I don't think he was interested in me, but we had a great time. It was really fun. Yeah.

[06:47] JESSE HAYDEN: So when you're in these places with no running water, no electricity, you mentioned most of them were during the summer. So I assume school is out for the summer for you. But did you ever live somewhere during the school year? And if so, how did you, how did you continue your education during those times when you're out in the basically kind of a very almost bush like environment?

[07:14] KAREN SCHAEFER: Well, the Austrians, that was the summer that we lived in Austria. And most of the, except when I was very young, most of the trips to northern Canada was during the summer, but Pakistan was during the school year. And the first school year, I was in fourth grade. And so my parents, my brother was in 6th, I was in fourth grade, he was in 6th. And so they got the textbooks that we would be have used in our classroom, talked to our teachers and got the textbooks, and we figured if we got halfway through them, that we would be ready to. We were going back in January, going back home in January, so we would be ready right at the level that they were at. But as it turned out, of course, we were way ahead because we went much faster. And it was great for me because I was very close to my mother. But my father was aloof. He was from, originally, his parents were German. He was born in New York City, but his first language was german, and he had a very german personality.

[08:25] JESSE HAYDEN: What's a german personality?

[08:28] KAREN SCHAEFER: Things were on schedule. Breakfast was at 06:00 a.m. dinner was at 06:00 p.m. and he had his routine. After dinner, he would sit in the living room, listen to classical music on the radio. Bedtime was 10:00 p.m. and if things interfered with his schedule, he would get annoyed. He was never cruel. He was kind to me, but I felt I didn't really matter to him. He had all these other things that took precedent. But when we were in Pakistan that year, he became my geography teacher, social studies and geography teacher. My mom did math. My father wasn't a math person, but my mom helped with math, but my dad helped with geography and social studies. And I remember being. I still remember the feeling of elation when he assigned me to write an essay on a country. I think it was Brazil or something that I was studying in geography. And I wrote it up, I think, because I had heard him talk about his research. So I compared and contrasted how Brazilians would be different from Pakistanis because their environment was different. And my father read it and he said he had college students who couldn't have written a better essay. And I still remember being just so pleased that I had managed to get praise from him.

[10:04] JESSE HAYDEN: Wow.

[10:04] KAREN SCHAEFER: Yeah.

[10:04] JESSE HAYDEN: Yeah, that's cool.

[10:06] KAREN SCHAEFER: So. And then the second time we went to Pakistan was an entire year. It was my freshman year of high school. It was the only time I really minded going because I was looking forward to being with my friends and being in high school, and they were taking us off to Pakistan. Once I got there, I was fine. But I remember being furious that they would do that to me. But for school, my brother and I took correspondence courses by mail. This was back in the fifties, and there was no Internet and no way to do it except do your lesson and mail them in. Well, the mail was by boat, so it would take about two months for the lessons to get back to.

[10:53] JESSE HAYDEN: To get graded and graded back.

[10:56] KAREN SCHAEFER: Yeah, another two, maybe six weeks. So three or four months before we got any information back. But I have to say I learned more that year, in one year than in any other year, probably high school or college, but certainly in high school, just because we had to figure it out on our own. Interesting.

[11:19] JESSE HAYDEN: How do you feel that. That. That childhood, those experiences of, you know, intercultural experiences and just, you know, having to adapt, having to be resilient? How did that shape? How has that shaped your life? I mean, has that played a role in your life, you think, or are some of the choices you've made or experiences you've had or approach to living?

[11:46] KAREN SCHAEFER: I think it's definitely had a huge effect on my life. I think the good side, it's given me tolerance and appreciation for all sorts of different cultures. I don't see one as right and one as wrong. I see them as a different, you know, different cultures as different. But I don't think I judge. I felt, I mean, just to have seen the world, I was given the world as a child, which was a tremendous benefit. I don't know, per se whether that experience affected a sense I have of never quite belonging anywhere. I've never felt a part of any particular group. Now, whether that was just me, whether that would have been true anywhere, like.

[12:43] JESSE HAYDEN: You haven't felt a part of any group, but do you feel like you can find a way to adapt to any group, I mean, maybe without necessarily feeling like a sense of kinship with it. I mean, is there another side to that? Or is it just sort of feeling like. I mean, would you describe it as alienation or just not sort of a sense of a kinship?

[13:03] KAREN SCHAEFER: Just not a sense of kinship? I mean, I get along okay with just about anybody.

[13:07] JESSE HAYDEN: Yeah.

[13:09] KAREN SCHAEFER: But I've never felt, you know, I'm thinking now, I think joining the Peace Corps, which I did when I was in my fifties, was something I could do and wanted to do because of my childhood. And now I think back on it, I can remember feeling a part of that little village and why that and not, you know, anything here in the US do I feel, I mean, my family, of course, I feel a part of. But I guess having not been raised in any particular religion, I've never felt a part of a religious community or a church or a synagogue, but I felt part of that little village.

[13:54] JESSE HAYDEN: So can you talk a little bit more about that village and what it was like to feel part of it? What was that community like?

[14:01] KAREN SCHAEFER: It was a small village in Tanzania called Mzumbe. I went as a teacher.

[14:09] JESSE HAYDEN: How old were you when you went there?

[14:10] KAREN SCHAEFER: I landed in Africa. We landed in, actually in Nairobi, Kenya, on my 53rd birthday. And I was then stationed in Tanzania for two years. The village was small, but it had a high school, secondary school that was a boys boarding school, and it was for the reserved for those students throughout the nation, throughout Tanzania, who had scored the highest on their entrance exams. So I had extremely bright students who were very eager to learn and it was a joy to teach them. There was never a discipline problem when I walked in the classroom, walked in the classroom the first day and all the students stood up and I started looking around, you know, why are they standing? And then I realized they weren't going to sit until I told them it was okay. So fortunately, I thought of doing that. If any of the students talked during class, you know, outside of answering a question, the other students would shush them. Wow. Yeah. They were so eager to learn that if I spent too long on a certain subject, thinking we needed to continue, maybe they hadn't quite caught it, they would say, no, we need to move on, teacher. We need to move on. They were wonderful. And then I made friends. Because I was an older volunteer, the younger volunteers tended to spend weekends with other volunteers from the US who were closer to their age. The other volunteers were younger than you, younger than my children. And so I made friends with the local village women. And I think I had a richer experience for it, some of whom I still keep in touch with. And now that we have email.

[16:11] JESSE HAYDEN: Yeah. And you said you felt connected to them.

[16:13] KAREN SCHAEFER: I did. I felt connected, I think because they accepted me, you know, I think they felt connected to me as well. It was.

[16:23] JESSE HAYDEN: They brought you into their. They did, yeah. To their network, their community.

[16:27] KAREN SCHAEFER: Yeah.

[16:28] JESSE HAYDEN: Interesting.

[16:28] KAREN SCHAEFER: Yeah.

[16:30] JESSE HAYDEN: I'm gonna try to shift gears a little bit, but when. If you could talk a little bit about motherhood. When did you become a mother and what did you learn from being a mother and raising three girls?

[16:47] KAREN SCHAEFER: I was very young when my first child was born. 19 years old when your older sister was born, 21 when you were born, and 26 when your younger sister was born. I know it's young, particularly in these days, but I think it was wonderful. I feel like we grew up together, you and me and your sisters, and it was one of the richest experiences of my life. The richest experience. It's what I'm proudest of, having raised three wonderful, wonderful girls who are good citizens, responsible people, kind people, caring people, and good parents themselves. And I feel if I've done nothing else, I did that right.

[17:37] JESSE HAYDEN: Was it hard becoming a mom at 19? And, I mean, you didn't have much. And, I mean, financially, I imagine you were pretty, pretty strapped.

[17:48] KAREN SCHAEFER: I was clueless, I will say that. And my parents, who I lived at the time, your dad and I lived in the same town that they lived in, but typically they had planned a research trip and left to go on a six month stay in northern Canada when your sister was, I think, nine days old.

[18:16] JESSE HAYDEN: No help there.

[18:17] KAREN SCHAEFER: No help there. I was on my own, but a sweet woman who was a friend of my mother's came and helped me give Sudie your sister, her first bath. Yeah. And I struggled, but I think, you know, basically, I was too dumb to know what I didn't know. And she survived.

[18:39] JESSE HAYDEN: Yeah. You're also a grandmother and now a great grandmother. What are you learning from that experience and what does it mean to you?

[18:51] KAREN SCHAEFER: It means a great deal to see that line continue. I remember after your dad and I divorced, meeting with a friend, and of course it was upsetting, and I remember thinking, but I've got this long lineage of strong women behind me that will keep me strong. I don't know why I felt that, but somehow I just could sense that that was going to help me. And I hope that that same strength, inner strength, is being passed on. And I see that happening with you and with your children and my other grandchildren. And now, of course, in my great grandchild, who seems to me got a lot of pluck.

[19:47] JESSE HAYDEN: So what were some of the hardest moments you had while raising the three of us? Me and Sudie and Molly.

[19:59] KAREN SCHAEFER: The hardest one was, of course, your younger sister, who kind of went off the rails there for a while, but has come around. So I don't remember it as being particularly difficult. I really enjoyed. I enjoyed the years. I remember other parents would be so grateful at the end of the summer when the kids would go back to school. And I always felt sad because I loved the summers with you guys. I don't remember difficulties.

[20:28] JESSE HAYDEN: What are some things you remember about, just things you did with us as kids that are particularly memorable? Maybe things in the summer that we did or just. Was it just having us in the house? What was it?

[20:42] KAREN SCHAEFER: I remember when you learned to swim, we would go every morning to swimming lessons, and I remember sitting, watching, and you. We used to call you the little peanut because you were very petite. And I remember sitting with a friend, watching you finally make that swim across the width of the pool. The little peanut has learned to swim. But, yeah, those were fun days. I remember the time, it was like the first day of summer, and Molly, your younger sister, was a little baby, and I wanted to take a shower. And so Molly went down for a nap, and I thought, you know, finally I can have a little break. And so to keep you and your sister and your friends who live down the street busy, I made a paste of flour and water and spent some time stripping, cutting strips of newspaper so that you guys could do some papier mache out on the front porch, which had a tile floor. So I thought, okay, you know, it won't get too messed up, and I can go take a shower. So it took me quite a while to get all this together. I set you guys up on the porch, went to take my shower, and when I came out of the shower, you guys had done nothing with the paper mache, but you had spread the paste all over the tile floor and were sliding on it like a wonderful time. And I think it took me a few more hours to clean up.

[22:24] JESSE HAYDEN: Leaving us to our own devices, maybe, and then not having all that cleanup afterwards. Are there any other, like, particularly memorable moments from our, you know, raising kids when we were kids that were particularly meaningful to you from that era of your life?

[22:41] KAREN SCHAEFER: Well, I remember when I had gotten a job. It was after everyone was in school. I had gotten a job that I really was unhappy with. I didn't like at all what kind.

[22:56] JESSE HAYDEN: Of job was it?

[22:57] KAREN SCHAEFER: Well, I had gotten my first undergraduate degree was in geography, and what I liked was doing map making. And this was before computers that would do it all for you. You had to actually draw them by hand. And I liked that. And I'd gotten a job. I thought it was going to be making maps, but it wound up being filing maps for this company that had done run sewer lines, and they had maps of their sewer lines, but nobody had organized them. It wasn't. The job was kind of dull and not what I wanted, but the people I was working with were very unpleasant and very sexist, and it was just an uncomfortable situation and I didn't like it. And I was helping you with your math homework after school one day, and you said you were 13, I think. Twelve or 13. And you said to me, you said, you explain it well, you should be a math teacher. And I said, oh, Jesse, I'm too old to start a new career. And you said, mom, you can be anything you want to be. And I thought, well, she's right, I can. And so I went and back to school and got another undergraduate degree in math and started teaching math.

[24:12] JESSE HAYDEN: And talk a little bit about your teaching career. Where did you teach math and how long did you teach? And what was that like?

[24:20] KAREN SCHAEFER: I got a job right after finishing my undergraduate degree teaching math at Grady High School, which is now called Midtown High School. And I, at the time, it was quite small. It only had about 600 and some students. And of course, because I was the new teacher, I was given the lowest level classes. And they were pretty rough. The kids were. I liked the kids, but they were wild. And I was not a discipline. I never was a disciplinarian when it came to the students. So I had a lot of trouble with discipline.

[24:59] JESSE HAYDEN: Did you think about quitting?

[25:01] KAREN SCHAEFER: Were you like, I remember going home in tears after about six weeks and going to the principal, who was a lovely man, his name was doctor Adger, and telling him, you know, I just feel like I don't know how to do this. I can't get through. And he said, he reassured me, he says, you're doing fine. He said, don't lower your standards. He said, whatever you set the standards are, they'll be a little below it, so you keep your standards up. He says, you're not doing them any favors if you lower your standards. So that was reassuring. And then there was another teacher who's a latin teacher. I don't think they teach Latin there anymore, who had been an, he'd been a priest and had left the priesthood and was teaching Latin. And he said to me, don't approach this job like a missionary. He said, approach it like a salesman. A missionary tries to convert everybody, but a salesman tries to make one or two sales and is pleased if they can get one or two sales. They contact as many people as possible, but are pleased if they can make one or two sales. And that helped tremendously.

[26:16] JESSE HAYDEN: Yeah. Is there one particular highlight of your time at Grady now, Midtown High School that really stands out for you?

[26:27] KAREN SCHAEFER: Well, I thought of it this last week during the eclipse, because there had been an eclipse during the time I was teaching at Grady. It was a complete solar eclipse, and the high school is right across from Piedmont park, and the center of the eclipse was going right over Piedmont park. So I wanted to see the eclipse, but it was during the school day, and it was also during a time when I was teaching my lowest level class. But I thought they could learn something, and anyway, I want to get outside. So we spent several days before the eclipse. I tried to explain the eclipse to them. I drew diagrams on the board. I had them acted out. I had one student be the sun, one be the moon, and then one be, you know, the person looking at it. They could see how, if the moon was standing between them and the sun, they couldn't see the sun anymore. And we made pinhole cameras so they could see it without looking up at the light. And the day before the eclipse, a directive came down from the superintendent's office that nobody was to go outside and watch the eclipse. And I was thinking, you know, we've worked so hard. And the kids were looking forward to it. I was looking forward to it. So I went again to the principal and said, you know, we've been working on this. The kids were looking forward to it. And he said, it's okay. Just take them outside. So we did, and they loved it. They used their pinhole cameras, and then they realized that you could just squeeze your fingers together and make a little peep hole through your fingers. And then they were shining eclipses on each other's backs and having a wonderful time. And as we're going back in, one of them turned to me and said, thank you for the eclipse. I thought, well, anytime.

[28:19] JESSE HAYDEN: That's great. I wanted to ask you how your life has been different, maybe than what your younger self might have imagined like. Is this a life you saw for yourself when you were 15 years old? Could you imagine the life that you've had? What's been different? What might surprise you about your life.

[28:45] KAREN SCHAEFER: And the direction it took. Some of the. Some of the, I won't say tragedies, but some of the hard times I would never have anticipated. What were they?

[28:59] JESSE HAYDEN: If you don't mind, if you feel.

[29:01] KAREN SCHAEFER: Comfortable talking about, well, of course, the divorce from your dad, then the death of my second husband, who, six weeks after we married, who I love dearly, and then your younger sisters bout with cancer. I would never have. And those were hard.

[29:22] JESSE HAYDEN: Yeah, yeah.

[29:23] KAREN SCHAEFER: But, you know, that's part of life. I would never have predicted those things and then I wouldn't have predicted some of the best things that came out of it as well. I mean, again, having three wonderful daughters, having had the experience of living in Tanzania, having had the opportunity to have a student come home with me. Cassandra.

[29:52] JESSE HAYDEN: Yeah. Could you talk a little bit about that?

[29:55] KAREN SCHAEFER: Yeah. As many of the students that I taught in Tanzania did, he came to me and asked, how can I study in the US? And again, all of them were so bright, they were so capable. Any of them could have done well, but I would give them this little brochure. Well, a little brochure. It was a hundred page brochure that I had from the embassy that told you all the steps you had to go through to qualify and get into a university in the US. And inevitably everybody else brought it back within two or three days and said, you know, thank you very much. That was the end of that. I mean, it was overwhelming, right?

[30:33] JESSE HAYDEN: Yeah.

[30:33] KAREN SCHAEFER: But I gave it to Cassandra and it didn't come back. The brochure didn't come back. And about six weeks later, he came and brought it back. He had an application for taking the TOEFL, the test of English for non english native english speakers. He had an SAT application. He had done all the things he needed to do. And I thought, well, here is somebody I'm willing to help. Also, his father was a teacher at the school, so I knew his parents, they lived in this little village and so I could make sure that they were okay with it and asked them. And I said, now, you know, he can apply to colleges, he'll have to pay for applications. And I said, it's not going to be cheap. And a teacher in that school made $50 a month. Wow. You know, that would be an application fee. I said, it may cost you money and he may not succeed. And his mom, who was a lovely, lovely woman, said, well, we know if he doesn't try, he will not succeed. And so he tried and he succeeded.

[31:44] JESSE HAYDEN: And you were very instrumental in him coming over, because then he lived with you?

[31:51] KAREN SCHAEFER: Yeah.

[31:51] JESSE HAYDEN: Yeah. And did you pay his tuition? Well, his college tuition or support him?

[31:57] KAREN SCHAEFER: I told him if he applied to Georgia State, that he could live in my house for free, which he did. I loaned him money for his tuition at one point, after he'd finished and done extremely well, I told him he didn't need to pay me back, but he insisted, and so he paid me back every penny.

[32:18] JESSE HAYDEN: Wow.

[32:19] KAREN SCHAEFER: Yeah. Wow.

[32:20] JESSE HAYDEN: Yeah. It's a great, great story. If you imagine your life as a novel, what theme or themes are most central to your life story?

[32:38] KAREN SCHAEFER: Well, certainly having seen the world as a young child was certainly a huge theme, and I think gave me the ability to view people as people, and I think allowed me to feel a part of the world. Even though I don't feel part of any particular isolated thing, I do feel a part of the world, like a global.

[33:09] JESSE HAYDEN: A global citizen.

[33:10] KAREN SCHAEFER: A global citizen. And I wish more people had that sense and had that opportunity to understand that we're all people. We all want the same things.

[33:19] JESSE HAYDEN: Right? Right. Yeah. So are any other themes you think have been central to your life or, like, kind of define you?

[33:33] KAREN SCHAEFER: I have a thing about, I guess it's kind of like that indian sect, east indian sect, where you don't, you know, people who would go through the streets with brooms, so they would sweep anything out of the way, they might step on and kill. And I don't. I don't want to. I don't want to harm anything, you know, any living thing.

[33:56] JESSE HAYDEN: So you feel like maybe more than even being a steward, but just feeling.

[34:02] KAREN SCHAEFER: Like it's our job.

[34:04] JESSE HAYDEN: Like a guardian.

[34:05] KAREN SCHAEFER: Almost a guardian. There you go.

[34:06] JESSE HAYDEN: Yeah, nice of like, everything. Just living things.

[34:09] KAREN SCHAEFER: Living things like that. Yeah. I'm not a religious person, but I feel like we're all God's creatures, you know? Yeah, that's true in a very non religious sense of God, but we're all part of it.

[34:23] JESSE HAYDEN: And while we're on the subject of religion, you've mentioned that several times that you don't have religion. There's, you know, you. So why? Why is that? I think some people might be curious about that.

[34:36] KAREN SCHAEFER: Well, my parents were. It was a mixed marriage religiously. My father was raised Roman Catholic, but was not a practicing Catholic, and in fact, was an atheist, very clearly. My mom was raised as an orthodox jew, and when they married, they had to get married by a priest in order for it, I guess my father's mother, to even accept it. My mother's parents didn't accept it anyway, so it didn't matter. And in fact, she had a brother who had a funeral service said for her after she married my father, and he never spoke to her again. Her parents, however, after my brother was born, took her back. I mean, they said, you know, now she's a mother. I don't know why that made a difference to them, but now she's a mother. They took her back.

[35:33] JESSE HAYDEN: Wow. Wow.

[35:35] KAREN SCHAEFER: So anyway, it left me. You know, we didn't practice Catholicism and Judaism, or Judaism, although my mother told me all the stories.

[35:44] JESSE HAYDEN: She did?

[35:44] KAREN SCHAEFER: Yeah, I know a lot of the Old Testament stories from my mother.

[35:52] JESSE HAYDEN: What would you like your legacy to be to your family for generations to come?

[36:00] KAREN SCHAEFER: I want them to be the kind, caring people that I know they already are. I mean, I feel like I've left. My legacy, to me, is very gratifying.

[36:13] JESSE HAYDEN: So continuing that guardianship and that caring quality and just love of humanity.

[36:20] KAREN SCHAEFER: Yes.

[36:21] JESSE HAYDEN: And what words of wisdom would you like to share with me and the rest of your family today?

[36:30] KAREN SCHAEFER: It's funny, I thought about that this morning. Not in context of this, but I was just thinking about it. We're living in very difficult times right now, and I thought, you know, I can't fix it. I mean, there are people who can make great contributions to the world, but I'm afraid I'm not one of them. But if each of us simply kept our own little space clean, you know, cleaned our own, metaphorically speaking, yards and houses, if everybody did that, the whole world would be clean. And so if we were just good to one another, we wouldn't have these problems if we thought about other people and were kind and caring.

[37:19] JESSE HAYDEN: Well, thank you for sharing this time with me today.

[37:23] KAREN SCHAEFER: Thank you. Love you.

[37:25] JESSE HAYDEN: I love you, too.