by Stuart Scott
We turned toward Kiefer; he shook Sydni’s hand and I swear I thought: Man, this is so cool. My daughter is meeting Jack Bauer.
“Sydni, I have two daughters,” Kiefer said.
“How old are they?” I asked, as the three of us walked off.
“Twenty-six and thirty-two,” he said, still addressing Sydni. “I saw you in that video, and watching you up here, it made me think about my daughters. So thank you very much.”
Afterward, we took an extended family photo on the stage. The hugs continued late into the night. So lucky, I kept thinking. I’m so lucky. In the coming days, I’d realize I did what I’d wanted to do. I wanted to give those in the fight permission to not always be at their best. That was the one overriding theme of the speech. That was my purpose. You can try to be Superman, you can try to do heroic things, but you don’t have to. You can just be.
It was only weeks later that I realized I was also talking to me. Giving myself permission. Because what was to come would test even my fighting spirit.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DAD, IS THIS IT?
It didn’t seem that complicated at first. Three simple words: “You have cancer.” Sure, it was jarring, scary, and even life-altering. But at first it seemed pretty straightforward: There’s something wrong with you physically. You’re sick. Deal with it.
I didn’t know seven years ago about the mental burden cancer places on you. The way everything from that moment on would be divided into before and after, the way cancer would always be on my mind, even at the most seemingly innocent of moments. The way the disease hijacks not just your life, but also your very definition of yourself, because you’re always calling into question your relationship to this invading army of cells. You’re always asking, Who am I? Am I what Twitter says, this Superman cancer fighter? Or am I a helpless cancer patient who can’t summon the strength to do a set of push-ups?
This is what cancer does. It shatters your self-confidence and makes you question everything—including who you are. They were three simple words back in November 2007—“You have cancer”—but maybe the most insightful thing that was said to me was the very first, the doctor’s setup to the news: “Things just got more complicated.”
He didn’t know how accurate that was. What gets complicated is your own view of yourself. Three weeks after the adrenaline rush of the ESPYs, I found myself asking questions like Who am I?
The little voice inside my head, the one cancer is so expert at messing with, was telling me: You’re a fraud. It was only three weeks since an ABC headline raved “Why ESPN Anchor Stuart Scott Refuses to Let Cancer Win” and the Huffington Post reported that I was “bound and determined to beat cancer.”
For seven years, I’d embraced this idea of myself as a warrior. And I’d just given a speech that said, in effect, it’s okay not to fight if you don’t feel like it. Yet here I was, in the weeks following the ESPYs, not really taking my own advice. I was spending my days on a bed on the living-room floor of my condo—where I used to do P90X and spar!—and I’d become what I always said I wouldn’t: just a cancer patient. I’d lie on that bed for hours. No energy. No will. And getting deeper and deeper into a funk because of it.
I’d bought into the warrior myth—even as I debunked it in the speech. And I was having a tough time navigating between the two ideas of myself: the never-give-up guy versus the scared cancer patient.
My days were spent driving a couple of hours to and from Yale–New Haven Hospital for radiation to shrink a new tumor in my prostate. I’d come back home and all I could do was lie down. Scottie came over one night, and I told him of the desolation I was feeling now, this sinking, hollowed-out depression.
“I take a walk around here, I’ll do some squats, I’ll do four sets of push-ups, some curls, and it wipes me out,” I said. “I’ll do that every other day. Well, I’m an everyday guy. Even with cancer, I’m an everyday guy. So why aren’t I doing this every day? ’Cause I’m in pain like I’ve never been in pain. I’m not this warrior everybody talks about on Twitter. I don’t feel that right now. I feel like a skinny guy who has to wear a sweater all the time. A guy who is always tired. That’s how I feel.”
Scottie gets it. We both know what it’s like to be a fighter. We talk all the time about walking down the street with our daughters. We’re constantly on the lookout for trouble, sizing up rooms, taking stock—in case something goes down. We instantly look guys up and down: Here’s how I’m gonna handle you if you start something. Even if they’re big guys—big dudes go down as quick as little dudes when up against someone who knows how to fight.
Only now I didn’t feel like that skilled fighter. I felt like a fraud.
“You know, in moments of crisis, ordinary people do extraordinary things,” Scottie said. “Because they perceive what they’re doing as ordinary. Medically speaking, I don’t know how many people could have made it to Los Angeles. That was extraordinary. But that’s lost on you.”
I thought about it. “Nah, man, something’s changed,” I said. “The last four or five days, I’ve told Kristin, I don’t want to do this. Like, if this is the next month or however long, it hurts too much. I’d rather say my good-byes to Taelor and Sydni, and everybody can say their good-byes in their own way. What else can I say? I’m just tired of it. I’m tired of it. I guess I could say, Hey, this hurts, but I’m going to get through it. But I don’t feel that right now. Maybe that’s why I’m sad and feeling like a fraud, because I can’t get there and I always used to be able to get there. The very thing I did was get there. When I’d leave chemotherapy, I’d be here working out, hitting pads, even though I was exhausted. I’d say it and my actions would do it.”
Funny, now I was looking back nostalgically on times when I had cancer, as opposed to times before I had cancer. I remembered that, a few years ago, I did a Savage Race event on a Friday—three days after chemo. Savage Race is like Tough Mudder on steroids: In it, I ran a five-mile obstacle course through mud, over blockades, and under barbed wire, before finishing by swimming in ice-cold water.
Then there was the time I chartered a plane right after chemo and flew down to Nantucket for Daddy-Daughter Week; my siblings came down, and we all did P90X the next morning on the front yard of the house we’d rented. I was proud of that.
Was I now trying this on, seeing what it sounds like to not be what Twitter says I am—Mr. Warrior Guy? Ironic that that was my message in the ESPY speech: “When you’re too tired to fight, lie down and let others fight for you.” Little did I then know that I was really speaking to this me, the one three weeks into the future, who was in the depths of despair in his living room. I rewatched the speech a number of times because I needed to hear that it was okay to not be this ferocious cancer fighter all the time. It was okay to just be.
Scottie told me about this time he tiled a room—one hundred tiles. Ninety-nine were perfect. One tile was kinda scratchy. Human nature being what it is, all he could fixate on was the scratchy one. He lamented it, worked on it. “I came to think that was my only tile,” he said. Finally, he took in the bigger picture: Look what I just did. I tiled this whole room!
The funny thing about cancer is that—just like in life—you’re never just one thing. Warrior or victim. Sinner or saint. It’s more complicated than that, man. On this night, I was feeling low. On another night, I might be raring to do P90X. Who knows? Intellectually, I know that both are okay, but the struggle to get to the point that you feel that … it’s exhausting. “Just remember that this is a journey,” Scottie said. “You’re in a process.”
• • •
THERE WERE A LOT of articles written about me after the ESPYs speech, but there was one that I read and reread and talked about with my friends, one that helped me work through the two drives within me—fighting versus just being—and the guilt attached to either option. Eliza Berman was an intern at Slate whose mother had died of cancer. She wrote a piece headlined “The Most Moving Thing About Stuart Scott�
�s Speech at the ESPYs.”
It rocked me, man. It was like the writer got inside my head and exposed my thoughts and feelings better than I ever could. “Cancer is a ‘battle,’” she wrote. “People with cancer are ‘fighters,’ and if they don’t die from the disease, they are ‘survivors.’ … The problem is one of language. We have a tendency to foist heroism upon people with cancer in a way that might, at first glance, seem generous and celebratory. But it can also be damaging… .
“Saddling people with cancer with Herculean expectations fails to acknowledge that it is absolutely normal to feel afraid, to feel like you can’t go on, to actually want to give up … ,” she wrote. “‘I’m not special.’ This was the first bit of debunking Scott offered. It reminded me of the bewilderment my mom expressed at being treated as some sort of superhuman saint. ‘Wouldn’t you get up every morning and take your meds and deal with the side effects?’ she’d ask. ‘Wouldn’t anyone?’”
She got my message—and, for weeks, her take on it, her parroting back precisely what I’d meant, was just what this cancer patient needed to hear. “This guy who the video showed in the (literal) boxing ring, and on the sidelines of his daughter’s soccer game—even this guy sometimes can’t fight,” Berman wrote. “The world needed to hear that. Scott’s public ambivalence about the superhero cape he’s been given was a gift to all those who don’t always feel like superheroes.”
She even somehow saw through the tough-guy façade I put on for the girls. “There was still plenty of battle talk,” she wrote. “But I don’t blame Scott for that… . He is a dad, by all appearances thinking of his daughters before himself. If his outward show of strength is an effort to help them feel less afraid, then I applaud him for it.”
Whoa. I’ve been written about a lot. I’ve never paid a lot of attention to what people wrote or said. I like to say that what you think of me is none of my business. So it isn’t often that a piece could affect me so deeply. But when I was down, I went over that writer’s words and listened to my own at the ESPYs, and, gradually, on some days—some, because this was a working-through—I started to notice a change. On some days, there were no shoulds on my mind. I should work out. I should just crash. I should put on a brave face. No, every once in a while, it was okay to just take a deep breath and be present.
• • •
FRIENDS HELP, too, man. Scottie’s visit lifted me up. While we were sitting around, my boy Fred called. I saw the caller ID.
“Hey, man, whatchu doing callin’ me?” I said.
“Who is this? I must have the wrong number,” Fred said.
In a week, we were all supposed to rendezvous near Hilton Head, South Carolina, for Daddy-Daughter Week. Only I didn’t have the strength to make it—and I had to be in Connecticut for radiation every day. So Fred and his daughter, also Sydney, would be coming here.
“Hey, man,” I said, “when you come here, you gonna be doing the grilling every night. Because, you know, I’m too tired. I have cancer.” I faked a cough and a moan to help sell it.
“Oh, man,” Fred said. “Playing the cancer card.”
We chatted a few more minutes. “Okay, man, I don’t want to talk to you no mo’,” I said. “Love you.”
“Love you, bro,” Fred said.
We didn’t talk about anything, not really. But, hanging up, my mood was better. I actually started to throw a couple of play sparring punches Kristin’s way. “You should come by more often,” she said to Scottie. “I haven’t seen him like this in weeks.”
That’s the thing—my conversations with my guy friends run the gamut from sports to deep, life-and-death issues. Before Scottie came over, I mentioned to Kristin that he was stopping by because he and his wife were going away for the weekend.
“Where are they going?” she asked.
“I don’t know where he’s going,” I said.
“You didn’t ask?” She was looking at me like I was from another planet.
When he arrived, I shared this exchange with Scottie—and he knew right where I was going with it: the difference between guys and girls. “It never dawned on me to ask where you’re going,” I said. “I trust, subconsciously, that if I need to know, or you wanted to share, you’d have told me. And, don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t care where you go—just be safe.”
He laughed. “You didn’t decide not to ask,” he said. “It’s omission versus commission. You didn’t think to ask me until Kristin brought it to your attention.”
“Because where you’re going this weekend has no bearing on our relationship at this moment—and if it did, you’d tell me,” I said. “But what has bearing is ‘Hey, I’m going out of town, I want to stop by and see you before I go.’”
We go from nonsense like that to some real depth. Like stuff having to do with our kids. For me, ever since this last hospital stay, I’ve been worrying about how Sydni and Taelor are dealing with my cancer. Sometimes I get the sense that they’re in denial and mask it with a ho-hum “Dad’s sick” attitude. I know they care. I just worry about the wall they put up.
Last week, Taelor surprised me with a glimpse behind the wall. We were talking on the phone. She could tell I wasn’t doing well.
“Dad,” she said, “is this it? Like, is this it?”
Whoa. “I don’t know,” I said. “I hope not. But I don’t know.”
She paused. “Will you tell me when it’s it?”
“Do you really want to know that?”
Without missing a beat: “Yes, I want to know,” she said. “I will prepare myself.”
“All right,” I said. “If I know when I know, I’ll tell you.”
She’d had a teacher and two aunts die recently, so she’d been working through death lately. Good for her.
“Here’s the thing,” I said to Scottie now. “What if I don’t want to do that?”
“I was just going to ask you that,” he said.
“But since she asked me, it’s not my call,” I said. “I’ll do it for her.”
“That’s right,” Scottie said. “It may be emotionally tough for you. But she asked you so that’s it, that’s the answer. You have to honor her request.”
Interesting. As the Slate writer noted, I’d spent a lot of time trying to shield Sydni and Taelor from my fears. No surprise I had two girls who kept theirs guarded, too. Now came Taelor’s request. A crack in our façade.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
BASKING IN THE GLOW OF THE NOW
Remember how I’d grow silent with Kristin and others, withdrawing into myself? Not because I was moody or mad or depressed—though, at any given moment, I could be any one of those things—but because I felt like a broken record. My voice droned on and on: I have cancer. I’m scared. I’m going to die.
I grew more and more tired of talking about the disease. Thank God that Kristin, who had once considered nursing school, had become an expert on my condition and my meds. ’Cause I stopped asking questions of my docs and I stopped giving friends the nitty-gritty details when they’d ask, “How you doing?” It wasn’t because I was in denial. It was because I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. And I couldn’t stand hearing my own voice reciting the same things over and over again. Listening to me telling people about my meds, about my weight loss, about how, when I pushed myself to do a few lightweight curls, it would deplete my body of what little energy I had and I’d crash in a heap on the bed on my living-room floor—it made me want to shout at myself: Shut up!
Well, when I started writing stuff down, I promised to keep it real, so I’ve gotta confess: I’m feeling that way now, with you. I’ve been filling up these pages with this cancer talk, and it’s gotten to the point that I can’t stand my own voice. I feel repetitive and pathetic and self-centered. So I’m going to try to skip the medical update, man. I apologize if you’ve gotten to this point and you need the lowdown on what happened next to me physically. Go somewhere else if you want to hear about how a cancer patient’s body decays, ab
out how it betrays you. When you’ve lived it, you realize that the body’s breaking down is the least interesting part of this journey.
Suffice it to say that in September 2014, Dr. Kennedy said, “We’ve got to get you to the hospital. These are serious symptoms.” Back to New York–Presbyterian I went. This time, I was there for seventy-five days—you read that right—with Kristin on a cot by my side the whole time. Every time I thought I’d be going home, something would happen: blood clots, grotesque swelling in my legs and feet. I lost track of how many surgeries and procedures I had. At one point, I was in the intensive care unit to have two stents surgically implanted to keep my veins and arteries open. Had we waited another day for that surgery, I likely wouldn’t have made it. (See? Try as I might, cancer still finds its way into our conversation …)
I went home two days before Thanksgiving, one day before all my siblings arrived in Connecticut to celebrate turkey and football. No one said it out loud, but the truth of the matter was it could be my last one.
You’d think seventy-five days in the hospital would be awful. And it wasn’t fun. But there were many times I was grateful to be there. For years, I’d been racing against time, hoping to make it long enough to be there for my girls’ aha moment when it came to our relationship and our lives together. Well, I’d made it, man.
• • •
THERE WAS NO MORE HIDING. I’d long struggled with the balance between protecting Taelor and Sydni from what I was going through and being honest with them about what I was feeling. Until now, I’d always talked about “beating” this thing—there’s that battle-metaphor language again. And they bought into the whole warrior thing. After all, after each major surgery, when I’d come home looking all gaunt and tired, they’d see me get back in the gym and start looking like me again—putting on some pounds, getting some muscle definition, recharging. Full disclosure: I might not make that kind of a comeback now. I still didn’t want to scare them, but I knew I had to level with them. “This is as serious as it’s been,” I told the girls during that long hospital stay. “I’m more worried now than I’ve ever been about my own mortality.”