by Chris Licht
No, none of that. I was innocent.
Were Mom and Dad to blame for passing down aneurysm DNA?
No, they hadn’t.
Was it the job, the television industry, that did this?
Lots of people assume stress was involved. But Dr. Deshmukh had told me stress does not cause arteries to inflate into aneurysms.
Nothing I had done caused this flaw in my brain. Nobody had done anything to me. Mine was the worst kind of anger. It came without a release valve.
My thinking spiraled.
It was a Jimmy Stewart sort of spiral, as in It’s a Wonderful Life, which is a corny analogy, but I did begin to imagine what the world would have been like without me.
I had always envisioned a certain woman with certain characteristics coming into my life and then she had, and her name was Jenny. We were going to have a Norman Rockwell sampler of kids, sports, and family gatherings. Andrew and I would play catch. Andrew and I would do his homework. He would get married. Jenny and I would flow gently into old age.
My brain bleed nearly snuffed that.
I imagined Jenny as a single mom. She enjoys her job, but she prefers being at home. If I had died, she would have had no choice but to continue working to support herself and Andrew. She would have given birth to Baby Licht Two, a child I would never have seen, and she would have become a single mom with twice the parental responsibility.
I imagined how it would have been for Andrew if I had died in the hospital. He would have been at his aunt’s house in Boston and they would have driven him back to New York, where he would have found only Jenny in our apartment from that day on, and he wouldn’t understand why Daddy was gone for good. I wouldn’t have been there to witness the make-your-heart-melt trick he has perfected of late. In veteran Manhattanite style, he throws his two-year-old arm skyward and yells, “Taxi!”
At Vanity Fair’s party following the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2009, I had a long conversation with a fellow Syracuse graduate, Taye Diggs, the Broadway and screen actor who is married to actress Idina Menzel. Taye and Idina were a few months away from being parents for the first time and Taye asked that night what fatherhood was like, because Andrew had been born a few months earlier. My answer was unoriginal. That made it no less felt.
I would kill for my son, I told Taye. I would never have killed anybody before, but if someone threatened my son now, I would do it. In the first minutes after his birth, they had handed Andrew to me, and as they tended to Jenny, it had been him and me alone in another room. I had made a promise.
“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 how Peggy Noonan, a Wall Street Journal columnist, had written that the standard by which each of us should be measured is whether we wind up as beloved as Russert had been.
Mike had a point. People had been wonderful during my crisis. I hadn’t expected it. And I had been lucky, indeed. Our walk in the park, coming during my days of silent anger about nearly dying and having no one to punish, made me think there was, after all, some good here, the love of other people, not the least of them Mike.
Three days or so after the walk, I met Joe for brunch, the first time I had seen him since Washington. E-mail had been an okay way for us to stay in touch if the topic was my health, but not if it was work. If I passed my third cerebral angiogram in a few days, I would be on a glide path back, and that meant I needed to know in depth what had been happening at 30 Rock and what he was thinking.
As we ate at a restaurant in New York called P.J. Clarke’s, Joe mentioned that Mika had scolded him for using only e-mails and not phone calls to stay in touch with me at home.
No, I said, your e-mails were perfect.
Throughout, he and Mika had shown so much concern, making me feel so much better. There was no more appropriate moment to tell him, even if such a naked expression of gratitude might make a very private man uncomfortable.
No matter what happens, I told Joe, even if we have fights, even if my contract is not renewed and I leave MJ for some reason, “I will never forget what you did for me.”
&n
bsp; I got teary.
“I will never forget,” I said again.
He suggested I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
“Of course I love you,” he said.
Which I now knew beyond doubt.
On Friday, May 21, still feeling angry but perhaps not quite as much after talking with Mike and Joe, I took the train to Washington, looking to put a period at the end of a sentence. Jenny came, too, of course. I could have had this third angiogram done by someone in New York, but I trusted Dr. Deshmukh and the hospital, and no other institution could possibly have treated us as well.
Once again, I was taken to the angiogram suite and a catheter went into my leg and all the way through me, and the peering at monitors began. Once again, Jenny waited.
She was very nervous. If an aneurysm was found, after having eluded Dr. Deshmukh for more than three weeks, I would be devastated, she feared, demoralized. It wouldn’t mean death or an inability to speak or anything like that, but it would mean more doctors and tests, more invasion of me in an effort to eliminate the now-found aneurysm, more hospital time, perhaps days of recovery, pushing normalcy further away.
But if my arteries were clean for a third time, all the statistics suggested my brain would not rear up again, that my event had been a rogue. It might have been merely a vein that leaked, not an artery. Being under less pressure, veins are less troublesome if they bleed. Or it might have been an aneurysm so very tiny it was simply not visible, that it had bled and sealed itself completely and was not a candidate for future bleeding.
The test finished. Dr. Deshmukh looked at me.
My brain was fine. No more tests were necessary. No more cutting into my leg. No more doctors.
Go to work if you wish, Dr. Deshmukh said.
I wished.
“You can consider this event behind you,” he said.
Well, in a physical sense I could.
chapter fifteen
Back
Twenty-six days after my brain popped, I walked down the stairs of a subway entrance near my apartment and joined the Monday-morning crush on a southbound train, emerging a few minutes later at Rockefeller Center.
I don’t usually ride the subway to 30 Rock, not because I shun the masses, but because Morning Joe begins so early NBC sends a car to make sure I get there. Coming out of the subway flooded me with sensations I hadn’t felt in a month. Thousands of workers pounded toward their offices, sidestepping one another on the sidewalks, buzzing on phones, noshing bagels, lining the low marble walls of the plazas on Sixth Avenue to read for a few minutes with their coffees.
The cacophony and energy were soothing. I was back among the living, feeling the pulse of the city. I bought a coffee, too.
On this first possible day I could return after Deshmukh’s green light, May 24, I was easing back. I wasn’t running the day’s MJ, which was nearly finished by the time I got there. But for days now, my eagerness to rejoin the team had grown as my headache faded, even if I was still secretly fencing with bigger issues.
Jenny didn’t quite understand why I was going back right then. Nobody was pressuring me, or her, so she assumed we would have weeks of family time, at least more than the few we had had. But we hadn’t been doing much. By going back to work, I wasn’t abandoning idyllic days of museum tours and leisurely lunches; I hadn’t been up for things like that. At least by getting off the couch and going back to work I would be productive. I missed Control Room 3A. I wasn’t going back as a heroic statement of awesome dedication to the National Broadcasting Company. Television is what I love. The job was never a labor, and the sooner I went back the greater my morale would be and the healthier I would feel.
Besides, even if I had waited weeks more to return, Jenny knew there was never a chance I was going to quit outright after my illness and turn toward a life of monastic chanting or buy a cozy place above San Diego and tend llamas and support the legalization of marijuana. “He would be miserable,” she says.
That first morning, I sat, not in the executive producer’s chair, but one seat over as Pete Breen, who had been running the show during the past weeks, took the team through the final minutes. During a commercial, they turned on the 3A camera, so Mika and Joe and everybody on the set could see that although Elvis had left the building in April, he was back now, whole and alert.
There was a mountain of mail on my desk. After the show, I started sifting it, enjoying the leisurely routine of it. My BlackBerry had only one appointment, lunch with Phil Griffin. I had been hoping to come back below radar, but word soon spread beyond the MJ family and into the rest of the building, because journalists can never keep any news to themselves.
Of course, everybody wanted to hear the story.
What did it feel like, Chris? Where were you when the pain started? Were you scared? And Jenny was pregnant during this? Biden was involved?
I love telling the story because it is quite a story, and I’m aware that the contrast between what I had been—healthy and young—and what happened to me leads almost everyone to ponder the possibility of random death. I am both a cautionary tale and a lottery winner, and fascinating either way.
Quite a few people treated me as gingerly as a Wedgwood plate. The MJ family knew I hadn’t suffered any neurological tics. But others knew only what the rumor mill had churned up or what Willie had said on the air, and not knowing much about aneurysms, assumed I was now a child to be spoken to slowly and loudly.
“Helllooooo, Chris. How arrrre you?”
Some seemed surprised I was vertical. They had never expected to see me alive and intact again. They would tell me to take it easy, as if without their wise counsel I would be pondering an Iron Man competition. If I was still at the office in midafternoon in those first few days, they would ask why I still was. I began to think they were worried I would start bleeding again right in front of them, and they would be blamed as my face hit the tile in a spectacular dive of death.
Still others thought my intensity was the cause of my near miss. Chris is volcanic, see, and his brain exploded. He paid the price. Be quiet around him.
None of this made me mad, or at least any madder than I already was about what the brain bleed had nearly done. I didn’t say anything to people about their assumptions or their clumsy advice. It wasn’t worth getting upset over. In time, people in the building would see my skills were still there, my decision making sound, and maybe even find out that aneurysms do not grow inside the brain because you happen to be type A.
That first day, Phil Griffin took me to lunch at a sushi place. The president of MSNBC had been shaken by my illness in a way that had nothing to do with any problems my absence created or threatened to create for one of the network’s best shows. It made him feel vulnerable, as it probably makes everyone feel. He never asked in so many words at lunch, but I sensed he was curious how I saw the world now, not as an executive producer, but as a person. How was I different?
My answer was a plug for myself, which might have been smarmy but it does show that the brain bleed has killed none of my desire to be a player. In fact, it heightened it, as I now told Phil.
Bigger things. I want to do bigger things, I told him.
The message wasn’t that I was itching to leave MJ. Hardly. I merely wanted Phil to know that not only had illness not finished me, I hoped to be even more of a player at the network, have a bigger role.
In my business, young talent is often told something like this: Wait your turn. Don’t try to get it all at once. Don’t overreach. Put your head down, work, good things will come to you. Be patient.
But what if you don’t have unlimited time to wait as the line slowly moves and you inch toward the front? What if you carefully map a five-year plan but don’t get five years, because an aneurysm gets you in three? My brain bleed was an official public notice that no one can count on having the time they expect. If you’re ready and capable, reach for the next level of whatever you do. If something looks appealing and challeng
ing, have a go. Otherwise, it’s a pretty average life.
I haven’t wandered so far into the realm of cliché that I now have a bucket list—win Iditarod, excavate Mayan ruins, stomp grapes—but I’m far more open to spontaneity. You sometimes hear that illness is a way of telling the victim to slow down. That’s not the message my illness sent me. Mine said, “Get moving.”
At the end of that first, low-key day back, I went home and crashed. I was surprised by how exhausted I felt. But by Tuesday, June 1, it was me in the EP’s chair as Morning Joe began. There was no way my return would pass without formal recognition on the air. I knew they would inflict something upon me, but figured Mika and Joe would do no more than ask that the control-room camera be turned on so the audience would know I was back and I could wave. Oh, they did much worse.
Without telling me, they had lined up Dr. Deshmukh as a guest, as well as the chief operating officer of the hospital, Kimberly Russo. They ordered me to come out of Control Room 3A, march down the hall, and sit with them on the set, on the air, no makeup, no prep. If you see the video, I look uncomfortable, because there is always a risk that this kind of thing comes across as self-indulgent. At least I knew which cameras to look at.
“Awwwww, he’s back,” Mika said, “and I’m so glad for so many reasons. Do you remember that morning?”
“Yup,” Joe said.
“Yeah, I do, too,” she said, slightly miffed.
Joe realized she was making a joke.
“Oh, is this the blame Joe thing? Is this the blame Joe thing?”
They were referring to how, on that day in Washington, Joe had gotten irritated at my inability to get him the camera angle he wanted, and minutes later I had commenced a brain bleed, as if his irritation and my event were cause and effect, even though they weren’t.