What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [19]
It was difficult, taking this new job. The only news I had ever done was broadcast and local, and I was a big deal in that familiar world. I was nothing in cable news and my new job was a lesser one, compared to what I had done. But it would be in New York, hub of all things media. And the move wasn’t about me, it was about us, Jenny and me, and I had promised to do whatever it took to preserve us.
A week after arriving to start with Scarborough Country, I proposed to her during a previously planned trip to Acapulco. A year later, at a hotel overlooking the Pacific Ocean just north of San Diego, where Jenny had grown up, 150 people watched our marriage begin.
At the rehearsal dinner the night before, my sister made a speech she had carefully typed. Stephanie began by saying that most of her life, her older brother could be pretty focused on himself, demanding, driven, sharing few feelings, willing to be unpopular to get what he wanted. Then, she said, I met Jenny. Remember that scene in Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise tells Renée Zellweger, “You complete me”? Well, that’s what Stephanie said Jenny does for me.
She’s even made me a better dresser. I’m not nearly the sartorial commercial for NBC I used to be. My relationship with her kind of sums me up. You might not like me when we first meet, but you’ll warm up after a while. If I hadn’t met her, if we hadn’t clicked, I don’t know how I would have gotten through what was happening to me in George Washington Hospital.
chapter nine
A Jacket
As Jenny entered my ICU room, the only thing I could blurt out, for the second time that day, was an observation of magnificent dumbness. It came nowhere close to conveying my joy.
“You’re here,” I said. “You came.”
Jenny had spent the previous few moments in a bathroom outside my room, lecturing herself about how important it was not to add to my fears by dissolving in front of me. Jenny is a crier. But the woman who now came to my bed was neither distraught nor frightened as she took my hand, but radiant and calm.
“I love you,” she said.
To her I looked, considering the brain bleed, not too bad. This was an odd thing about my event. I never looked sick. I was probably the least sick-looking patient in the ICU. No bruises, cuts, punctures, rashes, spots. No limbs in casts. I wasn’t weak. My breathing was fine and my heart chugging along. The malfunction was out of sight, visible only with exquisitely calibrated technology, and manifesting itself, so far, only as a horrible headache.
Before entering, Jenny had imagined her husband might be unconscious or unable to talk. She could tell by my eyes, though, I was still operating in the here and now. We said very little to each other, because the usual first questions between spouses already had answers. How was your day? A personal worst. And yours? Same.
Ever since Louis reached her as she was feeding Andrew in his high chair that morning, she had been in motion from our apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Penn Station in Midtown and then down the East Coast via Amtrak. She had been in perpetual communication with my parents, Mika, my sister, her father, and our babysitter, who took control of Andrew as Jenny departed.
She hadn’t tried to call me. If I was in the hospital, where I had never been, I was too bad off to disturb. Someone had said “aneurysm” to her in the flurry of calls, and brain bleeding, but Jenny had no more knowledge of the medical technicalities and risks than I or any layman did. But she knew it must be bad, because she knew my parents were now bound for Washington and “they are not dramatic or overreactors.”
On the train, Jenny did not fast-forward to a world in which I had died. Get there. That was all. Work the problem. Because she had no idea what she would find at the other end, her three or four hours of travel were beyond anxious, even weird. As the train passed through New Jersey and Philadelphia and into Maryland, folks at CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 reached