by Bruce Feiler
And we did so on a high of positive news. The day before releasing me, Dr. Healey had paid an unannounced visit to my hospital room. Linda and I were eating a mushroom and anchovy pizza she had smuggled onto the seventh floor. Dr. Healey had just come from the Tumor Review Board, he said, and had some news. The pathology showed that the chemo had been astonishingly successful, and the kill rate for my tumor was 100 percent. This result substantially increases the chances that the chemo killed the invisible cancers in my blood that have been our primary concern since July and likely improves my overall prospects. The normally reserved Dr. Healey could not contain his enthusiasm. “This is not a small skirmish,” he said. “This is victory in a major battle.” He then reached out and shook my hand.
Even with this burst of momentum, the following weeks proved extremely challenging. Back at home, the pain was intense, the inconvenience enormous, and the progress of regaining my strength and mobility far more tedious than I had feared. My days became consumed with drug regimens, bedpans, sponge baths, physical therapists, and my pitiful attempt at exercises designed to regain even nominal movement in my left leg. The simple act of turning over in bed would often leave me howling; going outside to visit the doctor required three people to assist me, including someone elevating my leg as I bumped down the stairs on my rear end like a toddler, out the door, and down the icy stoop. My orders call for no weight at all on my leg until Valentine’s Day, followed by six weeks of 50 percent weight on my leg, then months of physical rehab to help me learn to walk again.
And to make our lives significantly more complex, ten days after being discharged from the hospital, I began three months of postoperative chemo. Suddenly I layered all the miseries of last fall—nausea, weight loss, low blood counts, and mental anguish—on top of the pain in my leg. I’ve been hospitalized once since that time and on more than one occasion found myself just crying out unexpectedly, “I don’t want to have cancer anymore!”
But, of course, I don’t have cancer anymore. We must live with the threat that it could return at any time, but for now, at least, I am cancer-free. The one strategic decision we made last summer was to delay the surgery for half a year in part to tell if my body would respond to the chemo. Boy did that decision pay off. The news from phase one was as good as we could have hoped; phase two, the surgery, also appears to have been a remarkable success. We are now well into phase three, and we do so with momentum and firmly focused on the future.
So how did everyone else bear up? Linda braved this unimaginable ordeal with more grace and good cheer than almost anyone else I can imagine. Our families rallied in extraordinary ways, kept the girls occupied, and spent all hours of the day and night, first at the hospital then at home, moving necessities to within arm’s reach. My mother even sacrificed a few afternoons of vigil to beat me in every single game of gin rummy we played.
On one memorable afternoon five days after the surgery, we brought the girls to the hospital for a visit. I had worried about this occasion for months, eager not to traumatize them. I persuaded the nurses to unhook me from my IVs, ditched my gown for civilian clothes, covered up my wounds and all the scary equipment with sheets, and welcomed the girls into my bed. We had scripted the event down to the nanosecond. The girls gave me a gift, I gave them one, I read through Curious George Goes to the Hospital, then we whisked them away before they could take in too much information. Tybee was especially excited to meet Dr. Healey near the elevator, and when everyone got outside, Eden announced, “Thank you for taking us to the hospital, Mommy.” Upstairs, I wept like a baby and proud father all at the same time.
With the passage of time, our lives have once more settled into a routine. With such a long lag since my pre-Thanksgiving chemo, my eyebrows and eyelashes returned in force, along with my military buzz cut, and the unwelcome addition of my first-ever five-o’clock shadow. The girls excitedly tracked my leg’s evolution from stitches to scar and have come to relish their late-afternoon ballet performances in our bedroom. (The one mandatory note: tossing pretend flowers for the “grand finale” and pretend candy for the “encore.”) Our little family once more is a unit—hobbled but moving forward.
We fully expect February and March to be challenging months. Linda is headed first to California, then later to India; I am surely heading back into the hospital. But I have promised the girls I will begin to walk about more freely by their birthday in mid-April and that my hair will grow back by this summer. On some days, these landmarks even seem close.
Until then, we take comfort that so many of you are taking this journey alongside us and know that even in the face of your own setbacks, standoffs, snowstorms, and heartaches, you’ll take an afternoon with someone you love, think of the many blessings you’ve sent our way, and use our struggles to help you persevere a little more easily through this season of challenges.
And, of course, please take a walk for me.
Love,
.17.
BEN THE SECOND
Live the Questions
BEN SHERWOOD WAS PUSHING ME in a wheelchair around the seventh floor of Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital, looking for a place to talk. A month after surgery and back under twenty-four-hour care for a depleted immune system, I was haggard, immobile, and scared. I was in the one place I least wanted to be.
And Ben was where he had been from the beginning.
He was present.
From the moment of my diagnosis, Ben had peppered me with e-mails—two, four, ten times a day. He called from traffic jams, television studios, backyards playing catch with his son, treadmills where he was trying to lose weight through diet, exercise, and competition with me, even though I had an unfair advantage, since I was losing mine through chemotherapy. He flew from his home in Los Angeles to be at the hospital at 5:30 A.M. on the morning of my biopsy.
He was, as he liked to say, a soldier in my army.
We found an abandoned conference room. Ben rolled me to the head of the table and pulled up a chair. Though Ben was one of the first dads on my list, he was about to become one of the last to know. The reason: Ben is the friend who questions. He challenges assumptions and picks apart flaws. If some friends are cheerleaders, bulwarks, and backstops, Ben is the inquisitor. He’s the drill sergeant making sure every decision is thought through and every emotion pure. Push it! Push it! Just one more round. No pain, no gain!
I had to be prepared.
I exhaled and read my letter. Will you tell them what I would be thinking? Will you be my voice?
Ben choked up as I was reading. Tears streamed down his face. He was caught unprepared. “Oh, Brucie,” he said.
Then he caught himself. “But I completely reject the premise,” he said. “And I hereby tender my resignation.”
It was a classic Sherwoodian thrust: Bold. In-your-face. Attacking the foundation.
But I knew it was coming and quickly parried. “But Linda wants you in my Council,” I said.
He knew he could no longer resist. “In that case,” he said, “I know the perfect place to take you.”
ONE SURPRISING OUTCOME OF creating the Council of Dads was I unintentionally gave six men carte blanche to voice their opinions. Not so much about child rearing—my experience is that men are generally less judgmental about that (or at least less vocal with their judgments)—but about the Council itself. The Council has to meet. The Council should never meet. We should take the girls somewhere. We should leave them alone for now.
We should go fishing!
I hadn’t really thought through these issues, and I was reluctant to prescript a set of rules. I was more interested in creating a well-balanced cabinet and letting life take its course.
But I quickly realized that part of the Council’s magic was it put six men together and let them be, well, men. Their purpose was to help fill the Dad Space in the girls’ lives. And for all the heavy breathing about my generation’s equal parenting—Jeff’s cuddling; Max’s 2:00 A.M. diaper changes; David’s bi
scuits—most people still think a father should perform certain functions. These have to do with boundary drawing and expectations setting, prodding and enforcing, listening and embracing. Whatever else they do, Dads these days are still expected to push, to shape, to voice a code of responsibility.
And in my Council, no one pushes harder, shapes more thoughtfully, or has a stronger voice than Ben Sherwood.
Ben is big. He has a big family—the larger-than-life grandfather, the towering father, the path-breaking older sister. He has a big résumé—the high school debating trophies, the Rhodes Scholarship, the multiple Emmys. He has a big body—the “unusually large, and misshapen head,” as he puts it, the Kennedy cleft chin, the six-foot-four frame. If I were his height, I’d be in the NBA.
And he has a big heart.
On a gloomy morning in Los Angeles, he invited me to the backyard of his childhood home off Sunset Boulevard, to sit underneath the family’s sycamore tree with white camouflage bark and broad, pea green leaves. “This tree is where my father and mother courted,” he said, “where my sister and husband were married, where Karen and I were married, and where we gathered fifteen years ago to have a memorial service for my dad. My sister and I played here. My son plays here now. It’s home base.”
Place looms large in the Sherwood family tree. The flats of Beverly Hills were to him as the dunes of Tybee Island were to me.
“My grandfather, Ben the First, was a jeweler,” Ben explained. “He wasn’t educated, but he was a dynamic, charismatic, life-of-the-party figure who tormented family members with practical jokes, needled people, and pushed their buttons. I certainly inherited some of that.”
His father, Dick, was quite different, a soft-spoken, studious man who would have preferred to be a professor or foreign service officer but whose father demanded that he pursue a professional degree. He became a litigator and eventually argued before the Supreme Court. But in a manner resonant with my own dad, Ben’s father directed his deeper passions into what was known at the time as “building the institutions of the city.” He was a classic, late-twentieth-century Wise Man.
“My father was a gentleman and a gentle man,” Ben said. “But he was not his father. He was distant, uncomfortable with the direct expression of emotion. He was stoic. I remember being shocked the first time I saw him cry. I came into his bedroom after his mother died, and he immediately tried to compose himself.”
He was also focused on family. “Dad’s parenting style was to be present as much as possible, given the demands of his life. That meant he was here for breakfast and dinner, during which time it was expected that we would have a serious conversation about the world. My dad had a voracious curiosity. He ran a famous clipping service in which he dispatched yellow envelopes from his law firm with articles on some obscure topic from some esoteric publication, pertinent to someone’s work or family. We all got them. In college I had stacks of unopened envelopes because I just couldn’t keep up!”
At times Dick Sherwood’s bookishness collided with his parenting, as when he played baseball with his son, using a mitt that had never been broken in and clumsily tossing the ball into the bushes. “Image: Dad, at the Roxbury Park Little League, in a sport coat and tie, reading the New York Times in the bleachers. When it was my turn to bat, the paper would come down. When I was done batting, the paper would come up.”
Above all, Dick Sherwood led by gentle inquisition. “Dad’s part was constantly testing our hypotheses. He would question every decision. He would make sure our ideas had been stress tested in the modern sense of ‘Do you have answers that stand up to rigorous thought?’”
He even turned his passion into sport. “We often played a game called Box,” Ben said. “He would ask a question, and at the end would be a box.” Ben made a rectangle with his fingers to represent the ideogram. “He would say, ‘In the United States, we have a president. In England, they have a…BOX.’ He had this wonderful deep voice, so it came out BAAAWWWXX. And you had to fill in the box.
“My friends in college loved it when he showed up and boxed them,” Ben said. “They would say, ‘My topic is Mexican trade policy,’ and he would say, ‘The first president of Mexico to initiate trade with California was…BOX.’ And my friends would be stumped! Barry Edelstein is the only person who ever reverse-boxed my dad, and my father couldn’t fill it in. It was one of those amazing moments. ‘Oh, my God, you’ve just knocked down the champ!’” (The question: “The original Sweeney Todd on Broadway was played by…BOX?”)
“So what’s the meaning of the game?” I asked.
“It’s a way of thinking about things. A way of knowing things. A way of learning to ask questions about the world.”
The game worked. Ben became a broadcast journalist, rising meteorically through prime-time news, nightly news, then morning news. In 1993, while working in Washington, Ben got a call one Friday evening from his mom. “Something has happened to Dad,” she said. Dick Sherwood had been standing, reading the Financial Times at his secretary’s desk, when he collapsed. He got up briefly, then collapsed again, at which point he was rushed to Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles, where doctors determined he had suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. He was sixty-four years old.
When Ben arrived the following day, his father was in a coma. “The doctor said to me, ‘You need to hope that your dad does not recover from this, because if he wakes up, he will not be who he was.’ And I remembered having a conversation with my dad, six months earlier, in which we talked about the brain, and he said that what gave him an advantage in the courtroom was that, in basketball terms, he was a half step ahead of everybody else. And that half step, that tiny increment, was what gave him the greatest joy in life.
“So I realized,” Ben said, “that the next five days were not about his recovery. They were more about the family coming to terms with the fact that we would eventually have to unplug the machines, which we did.”
“Did you say good-bye?”
“Yes. I was with my sister. I stroked his face. Kissed him good-bye. Said we would take care of Mom.” He paused. “One of the peculiar things is that he was very much there. His heart was pounding. He had a beard from a week of not shaving. But, of course, he wasn’t there.”
“What do you most miss?”
“I don’t miss the questions,” Ben said. “He taught me how to ask those.” His voice grew strained and thin, as if each level deeper of emotion sounded an octave higher.
“I miss his voice.” He inhaled deeply. “I can still hear it.” Ben was sobbing now, like a boy. Watching a man of such measure reduced to such essence offered a glimpse into the private conversation the two of them had shared over the arc of the question marks.
“He had a wonderful voice,” Ben said. “The timbre. Which is why your project struck home with me, Brucie. Because if you weren’t here, I would want your girls to be able to hear you and your voice. And not in the saddest moments. That’s not when I miss my dad the most. In the happiest moments. The times of greatest joy are the times that are bittersweet because my dad’s not here to enjoy them. To witness them. And to add his voice.”
WHEN I MOVED TO New York in 1997 I started a weekly happy hour with two friends. We weren’t joiners, so in a bid to save face we called it the No Name Happy Hour. It became a place for writers, editors, and television types to beat the city. About a year in, a friend announced, “I’m going to bring somebody new next week. You’re going to either love him or hate him. His name is Ben Sherwood.”
Ben in those days cut a particular swath through New York. He was tall. He was successful. He was single. He was stiff. He worked for NBC News all day; he wrote romantic novels all night. The onetime champion debater seemed uncomfortable in social situations unless there was a prescribed set of rules—the eight-minute constructive speech, the three-minute cross-examination, the four-minute rebuttal. He would have been ripe for a send-up on Sex and the City, and, considering he went on a few dates with a wri
ter for the show, he might have been.
His first impression of me was skeptical. “I thought you were an intense talker, with a big personality, big hands, and big stories. I believed you were always on output, so it took me a while to realize how intensely sensitive you are to all the feedback around you. To recognize that you’re also on input. I doubt we would have become the friends we are today if we both didn’t listen intently.”
Ben and I quickly formed a sort of round-the-clock running commentary about politics, girls, media, the Page Six creatures we wanted to puncture, the men we wanted to become. The only thing missing was sports. He sadly inherited his dad’s disinterest in athletics.
Above all, we created one of the hardest things to create: a close male friendship later in life. And as he courted, married, and became a father, I watched the once starchy caricature morph into a warmer, fuller man.
What never changed during those years was his heart, or his mind.
He never stopped asking questions.
And it’s that voracious, sometimes relentless, curiosity I wanted him to pass on to the girls. The commitment to unveiling the truth behind the spin. The thirst to acquire information, then rearrange it into something surprising and fresh. “If something happened in the news,” Linda said, “and I wanted the girls to have an unexpected view of it as you would have given, I would send them to Ben.”