What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [32]
“I will never let anything happen to you.”
The brain bleed nearly made me a liar. I wouldn’t have been there to ward off the bad things menacing him. My dad had been there for me in the hospital, but I almost wasn’t there for Andrew.
As these thoughts swirled, my future as an executive producer never came up. I did not think about how my career as a player might have been buried with me. It’s true that in the hospital I had concerns about getting back to work and whether Willie’s statement would make me seem fragile. But now, at home, only Jenny and Andrew and BLT mattered. They were what I had almost lost, not NBC.
The producer in me wanted to find someone to reprimand, or an action to take, in response to my bleed. But my efforts went nowhere. In retrospect, I wonder if the anger was simply a way to mask a deep sadness.
I did not throw things. I did not yell. The contemplation of the true seriousness of my illness had no exterior manifestations. I sought no professional help. I told no one about any of this, not even Jenny, because I’m the family’s protector and did not wish to seem weak in her eyes. I solve the family’s problems. I don’t become one. Jenny was already missing work for me and already serving as a nurse and I did not want to turn her into a shrink, holding the hand of a wimp of a husband.
But she knew.
chapter fourteen
A Walk and a Lunch
Mike Barnicle is both a classy guy and a regular one. He has a big heart and a big palette of passions, including politics, baseball, and Boston, where he lives. As I’ve said, he was born and raised in newspapers. He doesn’t have much use for journalists who sit in offices and do Google searches and call this reporting, instead of walking neighborhoods and meeting actual humans and talking with them. He is a man of rich and diverse connections whom I admire greatly.
When Mike comes to New York to do MJ, which is often, NBC puts him up at a hotel near Central Park, and he tries to take a daily walk of nearly five miles around it. One day not long after I got home from the hospital, perhaps the day the disability packet arrived from NBC, he asked me to join him for one of his strolls. I was a long way from robust, but I decided to hobble along at least partway, and the day was gorgeous and the park was in May bloom.
As we ambled from my building on Central Park West and down the sidewalks, Mike chattered about delightfully insignificant things. This, that, his broken BlackBerry, and how he was getting it fixed. He didn’t know my mental state and I didn’t tell him. No matter. I liked his company and liked being out, because I hardly had been out at all. My strength didn’t last long, and as we reached the point where Seventy-second Street meets the park and prepared to part, he turned to me.
“You really have to appreciate how lucky you are,” he said. “You’re able to see how loved you are without having to die.”
He sensed his words didn’t register as much as he had hoped. He gently nudged me again: You have great support, Chris. You’re lucky to know that.
Mike had visited me at the hospital in Washington, and had suggested then that perhaps my hemorrhage wasn’t an all-bad event, because it would reorder my priorities a bit. He really thought I was too intense about work. With or without me, he had said at GW, there was going to be television. There was going to be a Morning Joe. But there was only one me and I needed to take care of myself. He urged me to revel in my good fortune. What if my bleed had happened when the show was in still-battered New Orleans a few weeks earlier, instead of in Washington, mere minutes from one of the great neurological departments in the country?
At the corner of Seventy-second, Mike didn’t turn all this into a lecture. He spoke but a few words and was done.
“I’ll see you later,” he said, and walked off with his newspaper.
Mike had been a very close friend of Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief who had died two years before. I had been moved then by how he had helped the Russert family get through his death, and remember