What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [0]
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Copyright © 2011 by Chris Licht
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition May 2011
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Licht, Chris.
What I learned when I almost died : how a maniac tv producer put down his BlackBerry and started to live his life / Chris Licht. —1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.
1. Licht, Chris. 2. Television producers and directors—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN1992.4.L45A3 2011
791.4502’33092—dc22
[B]
2011011244
ISBN 978-1-4516-2767-1
ISBN 978-1-4516-2768-8 (ebook)
To my family—who make life worth living
Contents
Prologue: The Killer Producer
Chapter One: The Event
Chapter Two: The Little Anchor
Chapter Three: A Migraine Guy
Chapter Four: Captain Intense
Chapter Five: Free Fall
Chapter Six: The Superheroes
Chapter Seven: The Doctor
Chapter Eight: Jenny
Chapter Nine: A Jacket
Chapter Ten: A Kiss
Chapter Eleven: The Caller
Chapter Twelve: A Head in a Lap
Chapter Thirteen: An Angry Man
Chapter Fourteen: A Walk and a Lunch
Chapter Fifteen: Back
Chapter Sixteen: On the Deck
Chapter Seventeen: The Meaning of Time
Chapter Eighteen: So Zen
Acknowledgments
What I Learned
When I Almost Died
prologue
The Killer Producer
Lately, if I happen to be looking through my address book for a phone number, I’m apt to stop when I come across the name of someone I haven’t been in touch with for a while. A friend, maybe, or an acquaintance. When I do, I’m likely to fire off an e-mail with no more length or gravitas than this:
Hey, how you been?
The gesture is a small one, but I didn’t used to do this. Days that were filled with the pressure and crises of running a national cable television program had little room for casual nicety. If I wasn’t in the control room producing it, I was in my office thinking about how to produce it. If the talent was unhappy, I’d let it gnaw at my gut. If somebody screwed up, I could go off like a roadside bomb, in a finger snap. I knew this. But the show so consumed me that it couldn’t be merely acceptable. It had to be great. I had ambitions. I had to be the killer producer.
Then one day, with no warning whatsoever, I became scary sick in a random and hard-to-figure way, given that I was not even forty years old. Most people with the medical emergency I had do not emerge from the experience physically intact, if they emerge at all. Weeks later, my health restored, I went back to work, and was eager and happy to do so. Illness hadn’t scared me into some big life makeover. I had no urge to surrender my spot in the fast lane for ownership of a B&B in Vermont.
But serious illness had recalibrated me. It had brought a trove of knowledge, as if I had involuntarily paid a painful tuition for an elite education. It was about letting go of my fears. It was about what I could control and what I couldn’t, and how people felt about me, really felt about me. It was about how to use time. It was even about Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States.
It would be nice, I thought, if everyone could get the education I had gotten without having to nearly die.
So I decided to write a book.
chapter one
The Event
The man who would become my neurosurgeon doubts that a brain can make a noise. Mine did. I’m sure of it. On a cool, partly cloudy