Moritz's Story

Moritz today is a medical student at the University in Munich, one of the most difficult med-school to get into in Germany. Three years ago, he was a philosophy student here in the US, cramming for exams, living on Coca Cola and not much else. The son of a famous physician in Germany he was an exchange student here in his senior year of college. He had a nervous breakdown so severe, he thought his roommates were trying to kill him, and that he was being hunted by the CIA. His parents knew old friends of ours in Germany. They called us in hopes we could pick him up, off the streets of San Francisco. We found him, still thinking his roommates were going to kill us, too. When he thought we were CIA we started to worry. He spent the night. Our kids left to sleep at friends. My husband removed the knives from the kitchen. We made it through the night. The next day, instead of putting him on his flight home to his parents, we ended up taking him to our local hospital. His mother stayed on the phone with us trying to convince him to trust us until she would get here the next day. We all were complete strangers to each other. I wrote "Keep it simple" into Here You Are and gave it to Mo after we left him at the hospital. The nurses said he just kept reading it to calm down. His mother later said the same and wanted me to publish the book. To this day, three years later she keeps asking about it. The books are sitting in customs, on a ship from China, and will be here next week. Next week I will send her a copy.