A Lucky Life Interrupted
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She died the same month Dr. Landau declared my sixteen months of treatment had worked. My blood numbers were back to normal. The chart of the critical markers from September 2013 to January 2015 was a steep, steady decline from the ceiling to the ground floor. I was relieved and grateful for the expert care, hugging Dr. Landau when she finished her presentation, but because of the continuing struggle of friends and the drawn-out death of my friend’s wife it was a tempered moment.
Her death, and the emotional pain it brought her husband, was another reminder of Dr. Paul Marks’s astute observation that with cancer “medical science has never faced a more inscrutable, more mutable, or more ruthless adversary.” For me, it will never again be an abstract condition, something that happens to others. When I read that someone has been diagnosed with cancer or died of it I will know there was nothing routine about his or her experience. The charts showing the improved survival rates for various forms of cancer are instructive, if not always comforting, until the day your physician declares you healed, and even then it is not a money-back guarantee.
My cancer is manageable but remains incurable. However many stories I hear of patients resuming normal lives while keeping multiple myeloma in remission, the numbers, not the anecdotes, tell the hard truths. It’s estimated that 24,050 MM cases were diagnosed in 2014, and in the same year 11,090 died of the cancer.
The much more encouraging news is that the five-year survival rate has been improving steadily, from just over 26 percent of MM patients in 1975 to approaching 50 percent now. As the eternal optimist I intend to hang around for longer than five years.
I often think of Louis Zamperini's simple recipe for success that got him through his years as a special object of torture and brutality while a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. “I never gave up,” he said, “no matter how hard the beating and torture.”
I am not being beaten by a sadistic prison guard. I am subject to the realities of age and the possibilities of recurring cancer or a stroke or a heart attack, but in my mind and in my everyday life I am not thinking, Oh my god, the odds are getting tougher every day.
I want to wake up in the morning with Meredith at my side, that sunny smile assuring me it will be a good day, not all dependent on the high-profile, jump-on-an-airplane life that had been so routine. Our daughters, their husbands, and now their children provide another narrative rich in its rewards of awe, pride, and laugh-out-loud moments of pure joy.
A marked difference in parenting for our generation is the continuing very close relationship with our children on many levels. When Meredith and I left home we rarely consulted our parents, even though we loved them and respected their judgment. Our lives were sufficiently different about the big decisions—careers, home purchases, child rearing—that we were separated from our parents by changing styles, finances, goals. Now, our children, all in their forties, are constantly in touch about their lives, and I treasure their confidence in us, even when they ignore my advice. It works both ways. They don’t hesitate to suggest a new course for me, a subject I am more actively contemplating. There are big ideas to be encouraged, books to be read, museums, films, and theater to attend, river and saltwater flats to be fished, fields to be hunted, fine food and wine to be enjoyed with friends.
If that seems like a mail-order list of clichéd goals, add this: I want more mornings at the seaside in a white terry cloth robe, a large mug of black coffee made with freshly ground beans in a plunge pot or in a filter-lined ceramic cone, Meredith near, reading aloud a quirky item from The New Yorker or an email from a grandchild.
Maybe I’ll think back to that summer night in 1961 when Meredith and I were sitting on a beach along the Missouri River near our hometown. We’d been seeing each other for nine months, a relationship that surprised her friends and mine. Thanks to Meredith, I was a reformed hell-raiser. She had written me a scathing letter the preceding autumn about my errant ways. I had gone from being a high school whiz kid to being an aimless, hard-drinking, skirt-chasing college student of subpar grades, eventually dropping out.
We’d known and liked each other through high school. She was amused by my ability to twin achievement with roguish behavior.
I admired her discipline, scholarship, and cheerfulness framed by timeless beauty.
When I put my life together after her scolding letter, she apologized for being so harsh and I said, “No, I had it coming.” One thing led to another and we were soon dating steadily.
That night on the beach she had recounted how a mutual friend had asked her where this relationship was going and she had answered, “Well, I think we should get married.”
I was stunned and momentarily at a loss for words, a rare condition for me.
Really? Yes!
There on the shore of the Missouri River my life took a new direction. More than a half century later I count that occasion as the night my lucky life took a turn that endures to this day because it has been shared with Meredith.
—
Has cancer changed me? Am I a better person? That’s for others to judge. All I know is that in family, access to excellent care, the resources to pay for it, the chance to remain a journalist, and with a cohort of interesting friends, I remain a lucky guy.
—
So far the early reassurance about my condition is holding up. I will die someday but it is not likely to be the result of multiple myeloma.
I do think about mortality in ways I did not before the diagnosis. It no longer seems a faint, distant reality, in part because I’ve experienced the ruthless nature of cancer. Simultaneously, at age seventy-five I’ve moved into the neighborhood of life where there are few long-term leases.
It is not enough to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” It is also a time to quietly savor the advantages of a lucky life and use them to fill every waking moment with emotional and intellectual pursuits worthy of the precious time we have.
Life, what’s left.
Bring it on.
Tom Brokaw
Two six four oh
This book is dedicated to
the next generation of our family,
our grandchildren:
Claire Vivian Fry, Meredith Lynne Fry,
Vivian Aranka Simon,
Charlotte Bird Simon, and
Archer Thomas Merritt Brokaw.
Five reasons to live long
and drink deeply from their love.
Acknowledgments
I am eternally grateful for the medical expertise, general wisdom, availability, and compassion of each member of my medical team, beginning with Doctors Andrew Majka and Morie Getz at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota; Doctors Heather Landau and Eric Lis at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York; and Dr. Ken Anderson at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard.
My home-grown and very personal physician, Dr. Jennifer Brokaw, was an invaluable member of the team and brought with her large measures of familial love and daughter-father candor.
Our two other daughters, Andrea and Sarah, and our sons-in-law, Allen and Charles, were also part of the extended Team Brokaw.
Steven Brill’s personal friendship and his seminal work, America’s Bitter Pill, first a magazine article and then a book on the complexities, contradictions, irrationalities, and genius of the American healthcare system, were invaluable resources. Another journalist, Frank Lalli, personally went down the multiple myeloma road before I did. His personal experience and editor’s eye were beacons for me throughout.
As she has on past book projects, Ruby Shamir turned her critical research eyes to the many questions about drugs, treatments, types of cancer, and the changing place of hospitals in our daily lives.
At home and in the office, Geri Jansen, Goldine Nicholas, and Mary Casalino were all part of Team Brokaw, keeping me on schedule personally, professionally, and for my medical life. They’re uniformly cool, efficient, and resourceful in keeping me vertical and moving forward.
&
nbsp; My other family, the men and women of NBC News, were there for me here and abroad, as they always have been. Mike Barnicle and Ann Finucane were there early and often. Stephen Burke, CEO and president of NBCUniversal, generously gave me time to heal and maintain my own work schedule.
This is the seventh book I’ve written with the encouragement and wise oversight of Kate Medina, my muse, editor, and friend. I wouldn’t start another without her. Her encouragement, light but ever-so-effective touch, and friendship were, as they always have been, a tonic during dark days of trying simultaneously to deal with cancer and write about the experience.
Others at Random House include Gina Centrello, Susan Kamil, Tom Perry, Avideh Bashirrad, Benjamin Dreyer, Dennis Ambrose, Evan Camfield, Carolyn Foley, Paolo Pepe, Carole Lowenstein, Theresa Zoro, Sally Marvin, Barbara Fillon, Sanyu Dillon, Leigh Marchant, Erika Seyfried, Anna Pitoniak, and Derrill Hagood.
Finally, a deep bow to all those who know me only as a broadcast journalist and yet took time to write or signal in other ways that they were sending best wishes and hopes for a speedy recovery. As I often say, if there’s an oxymoron in my business it is “humble anchorman,” but this has been a humbling experience.
BY TOM BROKAW
The Greatest Generation
The Greatest Generation Speaks
An Album of Memories
A Long Way from Home
Boom!
The Time of Our Lives
A Lucky Life Interrupted
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOM BROKAW is the author of six bestsellers: The Greatest Generation, The Greatest Generation Speaks, An Album of Memories, A Long Way from Home, Boom!, and The Time of Our Lives. A native of South Dakota, he graduated from the University of South Dakota with a degree in political science. He began his journalism career in Omaha and Atlanta before joining NBC News in 1966. Brokaw was the White House correspondent for NBC News during Watergate, and from 1976 to 1981 he anchored Today on NBC. He was the sole anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw from 1983 to 2005. In 2008 he anchored Meet the Press for nine months following the death of his friend Tim Russert. He continues to report for NBC News, producing long-form documentaries and providing expertise during breaking news events. Brokaw has won every major award in broadcast journalism, including two duPonts, three Peabody Awards, and several Emmys. In 2014, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He lives in New York and Montana.