Goodbye Leroy Sievers

Leroy Sievers documented his battle with cancer in a series of NPR commentaries and by keeping a daily blog, My Cancer, at NPR's website. My husband just called out to me from another room to say that he passed away last night. I just shed a few tears reading what he didn't realize would be his final post, a brief snippet about the small comfort of having dog at his bedside, even though it was a stuffed animal.

By reading his blog last year and a half, Leroy helped me to understand the highs and lows of what my friend might be feeling like as he battled with his own cancer. When my friend finally passed this spring, I wrote Leroy to thank him for his posts.

One of the things that struck me was that TV was not as irrelevant as you might think to Leroy. Yes, he was a TV journalist for Nightline, but he didn't just watch the TV for the news--in fact, a daily reminder of the harsh realities of life was exactly what he didn't need. He was thankful that in the midst of the writer's strike that there were new episodes of Lost to transport him to a distant island so he didn't have to resort to watching American Gladiators.

And even one of his final posts on Wednesday was about TV, this time how it could bring people together:

We watch, we hope, we wait, along with everyone else, glued to the games in Beijing.

It's these games that give us hope, too. It's these little bits of normalcy that let us think that there's hope for all of us.

For a few minutes, here and there, we're not cancer patients. We're spectators, rooting for our athletes.

I almost forgot how much fun that can be.

If TV can connect us in a common experience, the same could be said of Leroy's blog. For him, it was, in his own words, "A daily reminder that none of us walks this road alone. What could be better than that?" It was never soaring or saccharine and yet remained positive, or at least accepting. Those living through cancer, or living with someone with cancer, could hear someone speak about the types of experiences they were having. They could gain and give support to each other.

For the sake of the community that grew up around this blog, hopefully My Cancer will live on in some form and remain a lasting legacy to Leroy, but it will be hard to replace the dry wit and honesty he shared with the world.

Nothing Left Unspoken

Last weekend, I got an email from my friend's wife. He has been fighting cancer for over a year, but in the last two months, the tumors spread. She said the latest tests had shown it had spread to a vein in his liver and that the doctors said this was the time to calling his family.

I just sat there. The moment had almost arrived. Knowing that he had cancer for the last year has allowed me to get used to the idea and I am grateful to have known, since probably spent more time with him than I might have otherwise in our busy lives.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I would periodically check the blog of Leroy Sievers, a journalist keeping a record of his life with cancer at NPR's website, to get some insight into how my friend might be feeling. Strangely, over the last year, their ups and downs seemed to be running in parallel. So after I closed the email, I went to NPR's website to see how Leroy was doing.

Leroy had stopped blogging on February 5. His partner Laurie, had been maintaining the blog. He had had a third surgery on his spine and his legs had given out and he was in pain.

I burst into tears. What was abstract became real.

I put together a letter to my friend and his wife, along with a photo of us with our dormmates from college, playing broom ball at an ice rink, and mailed it on Tuesday, after President's Day.

On Friday, I got the latest email from my friend's wife, Subject: My Husband has Passed. He passed on Thursday, February 21, at 6:30 PM.

Today I checked Leroy's blog. He is writing again. I am glad of it. He is undergoing physical therapy and took a few steps.

I don't know if my friend got my note before he died, but it didn't say anything more than I hadn't already told him previously--for instance, that I still remember that he helped me move into my first apartment, which everyone knows is sign of a really good friend. Even if he didn't see my final thoughts, I know his family will appreciate it.

But I've never told Leroy what his blog has meant to me. I am taking the time to do so today.

Taking a break from all your worries

A friend of mine from college told me he had stage four melanoma and his doctors had given him four months to live. This was about 16 months ago. He had melanoma about 10 years ago and his doctors removed it before it spread. But after finishing law school, getting married, and having two kids, it had come back. The goal with stage four cancer was not cure, but extension of life.

A few years ago, I became more aware of the finite length of my lifetime and that I might be halfway to a third of the way through it; I think this realization must come to everyone in their thirties. I won't say that I radically changed my life at that point and started living it to the fullest. But I did question the use of my time and I suppose TV was one of those things I questioned.

So my friend's news hit me like a Mack truck, and when he called me, I took the rest of the day off and cried. It's one thing to realize you have another 40 to 60 years left on this earth, quite another to realize that at such a young age, you might have months, maybe a year to live. I couldn't imagine what he was going through. Mostly I cried for his wife and kids, because it's not the natural order of things to to have to raise two children on your own or to have a father taken away so soon. And after the tears dried, I did wonder, what I would do if I only had a year left in my life?

A few weeks after my friend shared his news, I heard commentator Leroy Sievers on NPR talking about living with cancer. He keeps a blog at NPR.org called My Cancer. I would look in on Leroy's blog occasionally as a way to relate to what my friend might be going through. Leroy's ups and downs seemed to follow my friend's. While the treatment made them nauseous and tired last summer and fall, they did shrink the tumors. I had a few dinners with my friend and his family last spring and summer. He still had his hair and the treatments were keeping the cancer in check. He even went on an Alaskan cruise with his wife last summer. Things were looking up.

But the tumors have spread recently, in both Leroy and my friend. Leroy continues to unsentimentally document his thought and treatment. I get emails from my friend's wife about once a month--it was in January, just a few weeks ago, when she shared the bad news that the tumors had spread to his brain after some promising results before Christmas.

You watch the movies about people with cancer or terminal illness and the characters are either having passionate affairs (Dying Young, A Walk to Remember, Sweet November) or cramming all the things they've always wanted to do into their last days (The Bucket List). So I have always thought that someone who had been given a few months to live would not want to spend that time watching TV.

But I don't think it's as cut and dried. This last fall I visited my friend while he was undergoing chemo (one week in, two weeks out, repeat). When I walked into his room, he was watching the news or some random daytime TV. He had shaved his head because it had started to get patchy and was shirtless because the drugs were messing with his body's ability to regulate his temperature. He said it got lonely during chemo. While his family he been flying into town as much as they could, he didn't have visitors or family around all the time. His kids couldn't visit the ward he was in and his wife had to watch them and frankly, he wouldn't want them seeing him like this anyway. He couldn't read books because one of his drugs made him lose his memory and he would lose his place. I suppose in those circumstances, TV was perfect for his attention span, a non-judgmental companion that could keep him company and distract him from the impending chills and sickness that came every night.

Thinking back on that visit, I shouldn't have been surprised to read in Leroy's blog on Wednesday that even cancer patients could really use some quality television, especially when he woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't sleep. With the writer's strike, he refuses to watch American Gladiators and was totally psyched to watch the mid-season premiere of Lost last night (which I watched online last night).

So I guess this is why I'm not totally giving up on TV shows, even though I'm giving up TV. There are shows that are basically engineered as commercial delivery systems, completely addictive with little nutritional value. But there are also shows where you feel like the writers have something interesting to say, shows that make you forget your worries, get you out of your head, and totally transport you, if only for a while. And everyone needs to take a break from their life now and then, even those that have less of that life to live.