by Tom Brokaw
I knew it would be a long afternoon and worried about my stamina. Sitting in the sun, a fresh dose of chemo running through my system, I faded, fast. The Wilpons, alert to my discomfort and so attentive all weekend, were quick to get me to an air-conditioned holding room, where I stretched out for a restorative sleep. I awoke for the closing speeches, but after such a magical time I wanted nothing more than to return to New York and my own bed.
Damn this cancer. How dare it interfere with such a glorious time?
—
What was that World War I saying, “Trust the Lord and pass the ammo”?
For me, trust the doctors and the Lord and pass the Velcade, Revlimid, dexamethasone.
In August I was headed back to Rochester for a Mayo public trustees meeting, one year after my initial diagnosis at the clinic. Morie Gertz, who made the initial call, and Andrew Majka, my perceptive primary care physician who suspected myeloma, met me in front of a computer screen and started scrolling the results.
In one measurement after another my condition from a year ago showed a mark far above normal and then a steady, precipitous fall to intersect or touch the flat line of normalcy. Dr. Gertz checked them off in his usual brusque fashion: “See this? From heavy involvement a year ago a steady drop to kiss the flat line of normal.”
Dr. Gertz went from “You have a malignancy” a year ago to the welcome conclusion, “The myeloma is gone.”
Whew! Now what? I have learned to leaven my reactions with the realities of what may come next. In this case, it was time to begin thinking about the next step, maintenance therapy.
Doctors Landau and Anderson agreed the numbers were impressive, but they elected to finish another round of chemo to nail a protein issue. It was not yet time to get out the Gatorade bucket to soak the medical team and accept the trophy but we were getting close.
I still had much more back pain than I wanted. Nonetheless, as I told family and friends, “The light at the end of the tunnel just got much larger.”
—
From Rochester I flew to Denver for brother Bill’s memorial. We decided to have only immediate family gather in a leafy enclave alongside a remote stream northwest of Denver. Mike and I shared some reminiscences of brotherly brawling and family feuds that were more hilarious than serious and over almost before they began.
Having spent most of our childhood on the Missouri River on the Great Plains, I’ve always been drawn to the metaphorical qualities of rivers. Here I said, “Streams and rivers are like life—they have a source and a destination. They have stretches of calmness and turmoil. No day on the river is ever exactly the same, as it is not in life.”
Then Dan Foster, a second cousin by marriage, waded into the stream and committed Bill’s ashes to the current, where they left a discernible white trail before quickly dissolving.
We linked arms and our eldest granddaughter, Claire, led the small circle of family members in a soft, a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace.” For Bill’s favorite cousin, Angie, it was a deeply felt moment as she closed her eyes tight and swayed to the familiar lyrics.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now I’m found.
Was blind, but now I see.
Following the streamside service we gathered caregivers and close friends for a hearty Tex-Mex lunch in Morrison, a quaint touristy village just north of the Red Rocks outdoor concert hall.
Mike, cousin Dick, and Ben, Bill’s stepson, quickly got into Bill’s sneaky habit of exhibiting the middle-finger salute in almost every family photograph—a down-market version of the famed theatrical artist Al Hirschfeld working his daughter Nina’s name into every sketch.
I recalled that twenty minutes before I walked down the aisle to marry Meredith with Bill and Mike as groomsmen, Mother called us all together, including Dad, and said, “It comes to an end right here, right now.”
We didn’t have to ask what “it” she had in mind. We followed orders.
As the luncheon proceeded, various caregivers arose to pay tribute to Bill and his curious combination of sweetness, ornery charm, and quirky sense of humor.
Pete, a gregarious bus driver for the facility, described Bill’s concern for a small rabbit living in a drainpipe outside his room. He checked on him on winter mornings and made sure food was left out. Pete was aware of Bill’s fondness for pets, especially a beautiful Irish setter, Tag, who was the child he never had.
So Pete excitedly described the day toward Bill’s end when he brought in his Labradoodle puppy and placed the small dog on Bill’s bed. As he tried to describe Bill’s joy, Pete’s eyes filled and he couldn’t go on for some time.
Rorry, another caregiver, repeated the story about dreaming and women, laughing and crying at the typical Bill mischievous humor, surfacing as it did just a few days before he died.
These are heroic people, the staffs of assisted living facilities, dealing every day for modest wages with patients who mentally occupy a bizarre universe of failed neural synapses giving way to forgetfulness, loss of language, and incapacity for the most fundamental mental and physical tasks, including body functions.
—
Back in Montana, following Bill’s service, I began to expand my physical fitness routines with longer walks and longer wades in the West Boulder River, which bisects our property. Wading against the current is a test even for the physically fit but I was determined to use nature’s gift as a strengthening source. I used a wading staff for balance and despite the worries of my physicians I did not fall.
When not in the river, I pushed through waist-high grass with Red, my Labrador, hoping to locate coveys of Hungarian partridge or sharp-tailed grouse, keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes, pausing to watch our robust population of antelope do their ballet across the open fields.
Our property is at 5,600 feet, so the altitude combined with the difficult terrain is an aid for fitness. It is also a reminder of just how much I had “deconditioned,” to use a word favored by one of my therapists. I tired after a forty-minute walk in the hills or a hundred-yard wade against the current.
Two summers ago a friend thirty years younger and I climbed a steep, rocky peak laced with deadfall—trees that had given up to snow and wind—by bushwhacking through the treacherous terrain that had no trail. It was a six-hour trek up and down but I had no residual aches and pains. Maybe I’ll be ready for a similar challenge in my seventy-fifth summer. Right now I’d settle for a two-hour stretch in the river with no streamside naps.
Before I get there I have a pesky blood marker to get under control. It’s called M spike, one of the distinctive signs of myeloma. It is a gathering of malignant plasma cells in the same place. It has been greatly reduced, but Doctors Landau and Anderson want to reduce it to zero—so they’ve ordered at least two more cycles of chemotherapy.
Meanwhile, I’m feeling markedly better. The fact that I have cancer is no longer a twenty-four-hour presence in my consciousness. The cancer screen through which I viewed the world is now a faint presence. Friends remark on my stronger voice and physical erectness.
I began to feel well enough to reignite my travel schedule and plunge into the documentary I agreed to do on Angelina Jolie’s making of Unbroken as a feature film. She was deeply affected, as so many of us were, by Laura Hillenbrand’s riveting account of the life of Louis Zamperini, a world-class track star who went through hell in World War II and remained unbroken.
It was also a personal goal—to remain unbroken.
Fall
When October arrived I was grateful to feel well enough to return to gun, dog, and fields for upland bird hunting, first in Montana and then in South Dakota for the opening of pheasant season. The South Dakota trip was a pilot of sorts for NBC Sports. We wanted to see if there is an audience for a series called Opening Day, a tribute to the opening days across the country for events such as walleye season in Minnesota, duck hunting in Arkansas or Loui
siana, minor league baseball in the Southeast.
It was a welcome reunion with longtime friends even though my shooting skills were plainly in need of a tune-up. Moreover, walking the uneven ground through thick stands of cornstalks, native brush, and high grass was a wearying experience as it had never been before. My friends all commented on how great I looked but my body reminded me the way back is a long trail.
In November I was invited to join Henry Kissinger and James Baker, two formidable secretaries of state, on a trip to Berlin, where Baker would receive the Kissinger Prize at the American Academy in Berlin, a study center founded by the late Richard Holbrooke, a passionate student and architect of American foreign policy in Democratic administrations.
Kissinger and Baker reflected on how the West might have handled more effectively relations with Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, although they both thought the competing factions in Russia made it very difficult to find common ground.
We were there as Germany was preparing for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, which gave me the opportunity to revisit that memorable night in 1989 when NBC News had a worldwide exclusive. I visited the site of my original broadcast, now an entry to a glittering commercial district with luxury hotels, a Porsche dealership, and even a Starbucks. East German students who helped precipitate the revolt are now middle-aged burghers, one with a daughter pursuing a modeling career in Miami.
When NBC News showed video of me that night in 1989 and then cut to me in the same location in 2014 I was startled by my youthful appearance then and the aging Tom Brokaw now. To the audience it was just the passage of time but to me, still struggling with cancer, it was a sharper reminder of mortality.
—
Age and news of my cancer seemed to have an effect on organizations responsible for awards. There was the Personal Award at the Peabodys, a coveted journalistic prize. A lifetime achievement award from the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. In New York, the Theodore Roosevelt award, named after the cofounder of the American Museum of Natural History, an institution of such surpassing importance scientists from around the world come to study everything from the tiniest vertebrates to the vast mysteries of the cosmos.
At one ceremony I joked that I worried my cancer doctors were sharing with these institutions news they were keeping from me: “He has a limited amount of time left so you’d better hurry.” Gratefully, that was not the case.
—
All awards have their merits but one occupies a special place: the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, renewed by John F. Kennedy when he became president. I often joke that one of the unalloyed oxymorons in American life is “humble anchorman,” but I was truly humbled when the White House called to say that I had been selected as a 2014 recipient. I hung up the phone and thought of my mother and father, who had their own way of keeping me grounded.
As I began to make my way through various levels of the American success story, Red, as I called Dad, would say, “I always told you, Tom, stick with me and you’ll go places.” And then we’d both have a big laugh. His other great line, when I was doing NBC Nightly News, was “You’re doing pretty well but you’re no Paul Harvey.” He was referring to the very popular Chicago-based radio commentator who had a huge, faithful national following for his conservative views, folksy tales, and distinctive style.
I looked up past recipients of the president’s medal, and, sure enough, Paul Harvey was there. Red would be so pleased with the company I was keeping.
Mother’s standard line when I was dressed for award events came when I asked how I looked. She’d invariably say, “Nice, dear, but what makes you think everyone will be looking only at you?”
White House aides called with details on the medal ceremony, mentioning that there would be a limit—five—on the number of family members permitted. “No way,” I said. “There will be ten guests: Meredith, our daughters, two sons-in-law, and four grandchildren.” The limit was lifted.
One of our granddaughters has an aversion to dresses but for this occasion she succumbed to the idea that the White House could be an exception. By train and plane we arrived in the nation’s capital and hosted a big party so we could show off the grandkids to longtime Washington friends.
I could hear my mother, Grandma Jean, saying, “My God, Tom, how much is all this costing?” If she had been there I would have put my arm around her, smiled, and whispered, “It’s better not to know, Mom.”
I’ve been going in and out of the White House for forty-five years, during times of crises and celebration, and I never fail to get a bit of a rush walking through those corridors taking in the portraits of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, seated at a desk, with that strikingly handsome profile; Abraham Lincoln, his hand cupped at his chin, in the state dining room, looking distracted and exhausted; Jacqueline Kennedy in a long white sheath dress, American royalty; and not too far away, Nancy Reagan, equally elegant in a long red dress.
The honorees and their families were gathered in rooms just off the East Room, where the ceremony would be held after photographs with the president and First Lady. There was a restrained giddiness as old friends and new acquaintances exchanged congratulations and met spouses and grandchildren. I was concerned the Brokaws had excessively topped the limit on guests until Ethel Kennedy came through the door followed by her thundering herd of children and grandchildren.
The Kennedy offspring and ours were friends from skiing and Hyannis Port days in the seventies and now here they were, all grown up with kids of their own.
Vice President Joe Biden bounced into the room and gave special attention to the youngest members of the family, including our granddaughter Charlotte Bird Simon. He leaned over to her and said, “I’ll bet you’re just as smart as you are cute,” a line I’d heard him use before on children but, hey, this was my granddaughter and so it had to be worthy.
As we were summoned name by name—Thomas John Brokaw, Meredith Brokaw, down through the family—for the big photo with President and Mrs. Obama, I teared up as our daughters, their accomplished husbands, and their daughters marched smartly into the setting, poised and yet at ease.
When Michelle Obama gave a hug to the youngest, Claire, the eldest, a San Francisco teenager, said, “Hey, where’s my hug?” Michelle laughed and complied.
That same Claire was so at ease as I walked down the aisle into the East Room for the ceremony that she leaned out of her aisle seat and gave me a fist bump as I winked at her sister, another Meredith.
Sitting in the second row, on my right, Isabel Allende, author and niece of the martyred Chilean president Salvador Allende.
To my left, Julia Chaney-Moss, sister of James Chaney, who, along with Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1964 as they worked to register black voters. I was fully aware of the terrible price their families paid to receive this belated recognition.
As for me, it is not false modesty to attribute this singular honor to my South Dakota working-class roots. As I was coming of age, family, educators, and friends cheered me on when I fulfilled promise and cracked down when I went off the rails. How I wished Mother and Dad were at the back of the room, proud but modest, these enablers of the American Dream. This is for them—and for Meredith, I thought.
It was also a moment for my NBC colleagues who for almost half a century had been there for me. When I returned to New York I sent a memo to the entire news division, citing the role of my personal family but reminding them that they represent my other family.
I wrote them:
The response from all of you to my selection as a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom has been overwhelming and deeply gratifying.
All of you carried me across the goal line more times than I can count—in the studio, on the campaign trail, in the flood zones and Cape Canaveral.
Triumphs and tragedies. Summits. Tiananmen Square. Red Square a
nd the Berlin Wall. Nine Eleven and war, war, war. All of the continents, in palaces and refugee camps, morning, noon and night.
This is your medal as much as it is mine.
Thank you.
Drink up.
As my life was taking a turn for the better I could not fully enjoy the moment, affected as it was by two upsetting developments, each typical of the unexpected cruelty of cancer. That young man whom I described as all but a son to me and a brother to our daughters seemed to be on the mend from radical surgery to address his stomach cancer. Mitch, as I like to call him, had written a poignant letter to friends after his initial surgery.
I write to you now to let you know I am finally feeling close to my old self.
The last eight weeks really have been a daze. The will and the stamina to make contact to thank you just wasn’t there. I’m sorry. I was just too worn out.
So what did I do all that time? I took it easy. It’s funny. This taking it easy business was kind of nice. I’d never done it before.
Of course a lot of thinking went on but I will avoid sharing here “What cancer taught me.”
Why?
I don’t know yet.
Then, unexpectedly, six months later, he suffered a mild stroke. He returned to his original oncologist and received a sobering diagnosis. The cancer was back with a vengeance. It had metastasized in his lymph nodes, in several sites within his chest, parts of his abdomen and sternum. You don’t have to be a trained oncologist to know this is very serious. Systemic, inoperable, and treatable only by chemotherapy, but first he needs to get his blood condition back in order.
As I write this he and his family are committed to a radical gene therapy treatment at the National Institutes of Health. And our family is committed to helping however we can, which is mostly through the application of love and prayer.
I received this news as I was staying close to a longtime NBC News colleague whose wife and I were diagnosed with multiple myeloma about the same time. My friend’s wife seemed to be doing well at a New York City hospital until suddenly, in late 2014, she suffered a serious stroke and was completely noncommunicative. Slowly, she began to respond and we all had renewed hope. Her husband was, as they say, “cautiously optimistic,” until she suffered a severe relapse. He knew what the specialists were telling him: The chances of recovery were gone.
