What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [39]
Like me, Denise had gone on to do much bigger things in television, receiving multiple Emmy nominations and winning twice. At the party in L.A., she had raced across the room to give me a warm greeting, a big hug and her card, and when I got back to New York, she was one of the old acquaintances I had made a point of finding time to e-mail, to say we needed to get together again. She was forty-one, a couple of years older than me. She, too, was a graduate of Syracuse.
Two days before Thanksgiving, Denise collapsed and died of a brain aneurysm.
Rarely have I felt such chills. Her death transported me right back to April, and how close I’d come indeed.
When I get a head twinge now, there’s always a microsecond of wonder about whether it’s all happening again. It passes quickly, and I realize this is a normal headache, the kind we all get. I will probably always wonder whenever that happens. There are other reminders of my bleed, too. One day, NBC sent a benefit form to executives. One section told us to check a box if we had been absent from work for more than five days in a row in the last year.
I checked.
If you’ve checked, it said, explain.
“Subarachnoid hemorrhage.”
Never had to confess such a flaw, ever. But I don’t, and won’t, fear a second event. Such worry about the unknowable is pointless.
On that day in April, at the moment Dr. Mayersak said the CAT scan had found blood, I knew my life would be different, but I never imagined it would become what it has. I hope you never hear a doctor say anything as frightening to you or anyone you love. But I am so much smarter now. I am so much more confident. I feel at peace. A hole in my head wound up cutting the knot in my stomach. Isn’t that bizarre, to come so close to leaving the premises and wind up new and improved?
But it’s simple, really. What can they, anybody, do to me? Nothing can be worse than what nearly happened. Being fired was always my greatest fear, because I loved Morning Joe and wanted to remain a part of it. Now, if they boot me out, I will find another job in television somewhere and I’ll be okay, because I’ll be alive. And in the unlikely event I can’t get a job in the business, that will be okay, too, for the same reason. I will take my two boys and my beautiful wife and we’ll figure out something. I won’t curl up in a ball and moan that nobody wants me. Maybe Jenny, the children, and I would go run a B&B in Vermont after all.
I never thought about dying before any of this. The young rarely do, especially if their bodies have never been less than perfect. I think about it now, about how close death is for all of us, about how I dodged it and my friend Denise didn’t, how I was lucky and she wasn’t.
But my thoughts about death are not morbid. They’re more useful. What happened to me was an unsolicited, but invaluable, reminder that none of us gets to choose how many days we have. Everybody’s supply is limited, some far more than others. There are no hours to be wasted on anger at an illness that is not your fault. There are none to be wasted on anxiety about who says what about you or whether they like you. These things are beyond your power to influence. What you can control, though, is how you use the unknowable amount of time you have. And if you choose not to invest in the uncontrollable and the trivial, something wonderful happens. You actually wind up with more time: more to enjoy family and friends and colleagues, more to keep yourself sane, more to appreciate simply being here. It is a lesson underscored every time Morning Joe goes to Washington, because inevitably my daily shuttling around the capital takes me right past the entrance of the George Washington emergency room.
On Christmas Eve 2010, as we do every year, the Licht siblings and