by Chris Licht
Explain what the bleed was like, Mika said to me.
“To say it was the worst headache of my life doesn’t really describe it,” I said, “because it was like nothing I ever felt before.”
“You looked horrible,” Mika said.
“Thank you,” I said.
Dr. Deshmukh told the audience I was in that mysterious class of cases for which no cause for the bleeding is found. But my prognosis was good, he said.
Aside from what they had done for me on that first frightening day, the segment was the best gift Mika and Joe could have given, because it showed I was fine in every way and it made me feel so normal to be back and teasing with them. A blogger wrote: Licht Looks Mah-ve-lous in Morning Joe Return. Some e-mailers kidded that because Mika and Joe were talking with the big guest, the show had blown right through its scheduled break at the top of the hour, which would not have happened if I were where I belonged, in the control room. I even got a welcome back e-mail from the West Wing of the White House.
Yes, I was back.
“I’m back,” I said.
That’s not the same as cured.
chapter sixteen
On the Deck
Years ago, my parents bought a vacation house in Charlestown, Rhode Island, about a tenth of a mile from the beach. You can see the Atlantic Ocean from it. In the summer, Mom and Dad like to lend the house to me for a week and to my sister for one, so we can each bring our families in solitude and chill out, though in the past I often did not stay for the entire week because work got in the way.
Now, sitting out on the deck of the house sometime during the first days after returning to 30 Rock, I was watching Andrew play. I had my laptop out and was Web-surfing to no purpose but diversion. My heart filled as I looked at my son. Here was an entirely good thing, my little man playing, with nothing more on his plate than fun, overlooking the ocean on a late spring day. The gulf between the sweet scene and the anger I had been toting was vast.
Families of crime victims often say they have forgiven the creep who killed their husband or teenage daughter, because anger creates nothing good. I had always laughed at the monumental absurdity of that. Anger is not always a useless emotion. In that situation, my anger would have a worthy target: the killer. It would have a point, making sure he feels the sting of justice.
But no criminal suspect caused my event. I had gone down the checklist of possible culprits and my anger at nearly dying had nowhere to go. It could never be directed at anything, no matter how much I wished otherwise or how long I held on to it. I would only be able to sit on the deck and stay mad, and then go home to New York and stay mad, and then go to work and stay mad. I would roam like Ahab, endlessly searching for someone or something to blame for having brushed way too close to the end.
I kept sitting there, thinking in the spring breezes.
Or, on the other hand, I could accept the futility of this. As I more or less had told Phil, a life-threatening illness alters how you look at clocks. Did I wish to use up more of my life’s limited minutes being furious? Or stop that and start enjoying Andrew and the rest of my days? There is only one rational option, isn’t there? And so, as my son played, I exercised a mental muscle I didn’t know I had and told myself something akin to what I had said inside the MRI machine that first night at the hospital.
Enough. Done.
My event had been brutal proof my life could end before today’s sun sets at the beach, because the aneurysm could rupture again and I might not be as fortunate again. I was still young, but that was no guarantee that tomorrow would include me. I would not expend any more time staying angry at something I did not cause, that nobody caused and nobody could have stopped.
Still sitting on the deck, I kept following this thread of thought.
If I could do that, if I could no longer be mad at almost dying, then logically how could I get mad at much lesser things that might happen to me, the things of daily life? If a videotape got messed up during MJ, that would not be the equivalent of having a brain bleed. It would not be worth eviscerating someone with an e-mail after the show. And if others thought I might now be a pushover of a producer, I couldn’t help that. Let them think so and let them test me if they wish. It will be obvious to them soon enough I haven’t lost any moves in Control Room 3A, or any passion for the show. I’ll still push back.
If Joe and Mika got mad because we had a lousy guest or their travel arrangements fell apart, that wouldn’t be as serious as the fairly personal setback of having nearly died. It’s okay if they’re not totally happy about something on the show or not totally happy with me. It’s okay if I take a day off or use all my vacation time or make more time for my family; I shouldn’t worry what anyone will think. Besides, I knew now Mika and Joe were happy in a cosmic sense. In the emergency room of George Washington University Hospital, they had been in my trench. They had shown unconditional love for not just a colleague but a friend.
Watching my son play, I was accepting what I couldn’t control, which is the ultimate act of control. People say all the time you should “let it go,” whatever it is. A comment, an irritation, bad news of any sort. I wasn’t used to doing that. I was used to counterpunching until the situation was reshaped to my satisfaction. Giving up illogical anger might still be giving up, but I realized that in this case that meant victory.
I forgave my brain.
I left the deck happier. Throughout my illness, I had worried about where I would end up on the damaged scale, but I had never really allowed for the possibility I might end up better off in some ways. My epiphany about letting go of the anger about what had happened might seem pat, too neat, but clarity can descend like that, under the right conditions. These had been perfect. Andrew was the catalyst, though he did not know it. He couldn’t even spell it. But simply by being there, playing so sweetly, my boy helped his daddy put away not only a brain bleed, but a lot of nonsense.
chapter seventeen
The Meaning of Time
My illness started not too far from the U.S. Naval Observatory. It ended there, too.
For some time, I had been struggling with how to thank Joe Biden for what he had done during my brain bleed, from taking Mika’s call in those first hours to calling Dr. Deshmukh to cheering up Jenny and me by cell phone. I wanted to write him a letter, a suitably formal way to convey my gratitude.
The vice president was having a lawn party for journalists at the Observatory, his official residence in Washington, and Joe, Mika, and I were invited. I e-mailed Biden’s press office to ask if it would be appropriate to hand him the letter I had in mind and was told it would be. But I couldn’t finish the thing, not the way I wanted. All my attempts came out too saccharine, way over-the-top.
Just tell him, Jenny said.
Joe and Mika, it turned out, couldn’t attend the party but I still wanted to go. So on Saturday, June 5, Jenny and I stood in a receiving line at the vice president’s house. One of Biden’s staffers recognized me, perhaps because he had seen me on television. Then it was our turn to be introduced to this man who had leaped into my crisis.
For a brief second, I could tell Biden couldn’t place my name.
“You saved my life,” I said.
And from the data banks of the thousands of people he knows and all the events he has been a part of, he remembered and greeted me as if we had shared my brain bleed. He remembered everything. The usual thirty-second photo opportunity gave way to five minutes of reminiscing as the line backed up.
“I can’t thank you enough,” I said.
He hugged me. He hugged Jenny. He said he had been so worried. He is a great and kind person, and the photo taken that day of Jenny and me being embraced by the vice president of the United States will live on in our family forever. My children will be able to tell their friends that in the worst moment of Daddy’s life, a busy public official put aside the important things he was doing to help.
Among my family and colleagues, there are doubts
that this nearly dying business has changed me all that much or will. Mom is among them. Dad, too. Take more vacation days? They don’t believe it. Work still looms too large, they say. They predict I’ll be enjoying a week at the Rhode Island house and Joe will call and I’ll be gone, off on some mission.
Even Jenny says I haven’t changed as much as she expected or hoped. She thought I would feel I had been granted that classic second chance at life and would pare the hours worked on weekends and inflate family time.
I am, though, getting there. Watch, Mom. I’ll take all my vacation. I know now how important it is to make more mental space for family. I know now I shouldn’t have been on the phone as they took Andrew for his circumcision, because whatever I was discussing couldn’t have been significant. I know I shouldn’t have gone back to work right after he was born, or skipped my friend’s wedding because it was Sweeps Week. I know you can’t give 100 percent to work, because there’s no percentage left for anything else.
Few of us can pivot on a dime. Just because I had a moment of clarity on the deck about how futile and wasteful it can be to get angry doesn’t mean I never will. I’ll have to train myself, remind myself, to distinguish the moments worthy of anger from those that are not. I’m sure I’ll fail now and then. Re-jiggering my behavior and attitudes is a project that will take the rest of my life.
But in many small ways I’m already a different man. When my anger was greatest about what my brain bleed nearly took from me, I didn’t think of NBC. I thought of Jenny and Andrew. And when, on December 7, BLT entered the world as Ryan Christopher Licht, I took my full paternity leave from Morning Joe, perhaps a small step for you but a big one for me.
These days, I call home more than I used to, just to see how Jenny is. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to think any more highly of her than I did, but I do. Maybe even she didn’t realize what a steel core she has. Pregnant, juggling a job offer, given at other times to high flying emotion, she put everything aside and went more Mika than Mika to make sure I came out all right.
Dad and I are vastly closer. It was always easier to read Mom, who’s outgoing by nature. Dad was less demonstrative. But to see him in the hospital talking with my doctors and monitoring the fine print of my care, I realized I had the perfect, medically skilled, loving patient advocate. He was deeply shaken by what happened to me. Before, we’d talk once in a while. Now, all the time.
At work, I’ve noticed that when someone asks me a question or presents an issue for decision, I don’t answer as quickly and dismissively as I used to. A second or two ticks by. I consider the question. I consider them. I think it throws people off, though I’m not trying to do that. Maybe it’s because, after their incredible e-mails and cards and phone calls during my illness, my colleagues are more real to me now. Maybe I have less tunnel vision about the world in which I walk every day. I give verbal hugs more than ever. At the postmortems after every Morning Joe, I say less and let my leadership team say more because I don’t need to have my finger in every pie all the time.
True, Mr. BlackBerry and I are as entwined as ever. What might be hard to grasp is that a life-threatening illness didn’t make me care about Morning Joe any less. Quite the opposite. It’s more fun. I can go to Control Room 3A knowing there are worse things than whether people get mad at me, worse things than whether someone doesn’t push a microphone button on time, and more important things than whether I’m being included in everything Joe and Mika are doing.
Joe has an expression: “Scared money never wins.” It means, simply, play with confidence. Believe in yourself. My decisions come easier now and they’re clearer. Options are weighed on their merits without calculating the politics. I don’t pick fights anymore, which doesn’t mean I run from them. But I don’t seek out conflict to prove I’m The Man.
On the air the other day, Joe was tweaking then-Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, a potential candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, for not coming on the show in a while. But Pawlenty had already agreed to come on the show the very next week. Joe didn’t know that, nor did I, so I had no reason to get in Joe’s ear and correct the undeserved slam while we were still live.
We looked like cheap-shot kings. But I did not excoriate the person who forgot to tell us about Pawlenty’s booking. Back in the day, I would have. I would have petulantly sought to ruin her day for ruining mine. To no good end, of course.
In late fall 2010, there occurred a sad, astounding coincidence. When I worked at my first job in Allentown, a woman named Denise Cramsey was one of the producers at our company. Denise had, in fact, trained me. But I had largely lost track of her until we bumped into each other at a party, when Morning Joe visited Los Angeles a few months after my brain bleed.
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 actu
ally 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 their families gathered with Mom and Dad at the house on the hill in Connecticut for a big dinner filled with wine and laughter. It is a tradition, kept in a journal, that we select the family’s top ten events of the rapidly closing year, things like births and new jobs.
Winding up as the Event of the Year was a quirky sort of honor. But I was damn glad to be there to accept. It was time well spent.
chapter eighteen
So Zen
One September morn after my return, Phil Griffin shot me an e-mail even as Morning Joe was still on the air.
Not good, it said.
Phil was pissed about a conversation that had just taken place during the show, and he wanted to talk about it with me because, as executive producer, I’m responsible for what airs. Even so, being summoned to the front office to explain an on-air episode is so rare that I knew this e-mail was a bad omen. It was so rare that if I had gotten one like it before my brain popped, I know how the hours prior to talking with Phil would have gone.
My God, am I in trouble? What’s gonna happen? How could the folks on the set have put me in this situation?
Dread would have chewed up more of my limited time on Planet Earth in calculations of possible recriminations, none of which I could do anything about, which would not have stopped the angst. I would have been frozen in my office until the phone call or the audience with Phil, at which time a head might roll and it wouldn’t be his.