As founder and CEO of Clark’s Botanicals, Francesco Clark is ever on the move, juggling appointments and emails and deadlines. There are clients to call, products to conjure, shops to visit. It is work that Clark loves — work that once saved him — but lately, he knows something better still awaits him at day’s end.
The moment arrives when Clark is finally home, in the kitchen, considering dinner. As his partner Alberto Mihelcic-Bazzana plays the piano nearby, Clark listens for the sound of tiny feet scrambling his way. Suddenly, they are at his side, Elettra and Amedeo, the one-year-old twins at the center of his life.
Each night, the scene is the same. Clark cooks, Mihelcic-Bazzana plays, and the babies whirl around them. It’s nothing special — but it’s also a dream.
“It's like an enlightened sense of being,” he says. “I didn't know that I could feel this fulfilled.”
In 2002, Clark shattered his C3-C4 vertebrae after diving into what he thought was the deep end of a swimming pool. He was just 24 years old.
In the hours after the injury, doctors told the family that Clark would spend much of his life in bed dependent on a ventilator. His mother Mariella Clark knew better, warning them that they didn’t know her son.