Jan's Story (4 page)

In Sarajevo one day, the producer, sound man, and I stood outside the TV station where we worked. Fifty yards away, a mortar round made a direct hit on a small plot of spring flowers. I couldn't help but wonder about the person who had planted the flowers. Had they been seeking some kind of normalcy that defied the murderous insanity around them? Screams emanated from an elderly lady with a shopping bag of hard-won food, and her cries of terror went up my spine as she lay sprawled on the ground. Nearby, a man who had been on a bicycle lay on the ground a few feet away. He did not scream.

But through it all in Sarajevo, there was a spirit of civilization that people would not surrender. They were caught in the daily crossfire of war where shells and bullets could hit anywhere at any time. Yet they acted with a defiance that left me amazed at their courage and their refusal to give up their dignity. Some dressed and went to work, even if it meant sitting in offices without jobs to do, or working in stores without goods to sell.

That was not true in another war zone, Mogadishu, Somalia. This was a city ravaged, where buildings were stripped and even the underground electrical wires were ripped out by the desperate who sold the metal for scrap.

Here there was no spirit of civilization. It was too hard just being alive at the end of the day. Much of the chaos came from crazy, dangerous renegades who ate a plant called “khat” all day long. By the time afternoon rolled around, its amphetamine-like euphoria affected the gunmen who, with a glassy-eyed look in their eyes, drove wildly in their “Mad Max” jeeps armed with huge .50-caliber machine guns. They shot at anything that moved and laughed as they did it. Everywhere we went, we drove in our own “Mad Max” jeeps and hired bodyguards, who chewed khat along with the rest. It didn't inspire confidence since these guys were supposedly on our side.

We went out one day to do a standup, which is the part of the story where the reporter talks directly into the camera. We decided we needed to do a retake, so the next day we told the bodyguards we were going back to the same place. They informed us that we most certainly were not and, with nervous voices, told us why. They heard that the faction controlling that area spotted us the day before and gunmen were about to take us out, but we suddenly left. Our bodyguards assured us that going back to the area would give them a second chance to kill us.

We opted for a different location.

Despite all this, Jan never once said don't go. “It's your job and I'm also a journalist and I understand, darling.” But her eyes always showed an almost primal relief when I came back through the door, especially after being gone two or three weeks or more.

She always sent her imaginary friend, a kind of elfin sprite, to watch over me. “He's on my shoulder,” she said with confidence. “But he's going with you, and he will watch over you.” One time as I was leaving she laughed about her protective spirit and I asked why. “He knows you're both going to Sarajevo,” she said giggling, “so he's wearing a uniform.”

Married friends told me that as the years together go by they can lose that spark, the energy that once made them irresistible to each other. That never happened to us. Maybe it was because my job and the stories I covered out of London changed and intensified our relationship. When I returned from a trip, I always called from the airport to tell her I was on the way home, on the way to her.

Whether we were in our flat in London or our apartment in Tokyo, she would hear the elevator coming and was often standing, pacing, waiting with the apartment door open … afraid that maybe I wasn't really coming back, that somehow she had gotten it wrong. “Darling!” she would say. “Is it really you?”

We would hold on to each other … hungry, desperate, eager. The apartment door would close behind us and sometimes our front hallway was as far as we got before we were tearing at each other, driven by equal parts relief and passion.

When it was over … when we could both breathe again … I sometimes felt foolhardy. I realized what I had in this life, how much better I felt being close to her, how I wanted to live forever so we could be together, yes, forever. I was sure we had so many adventures ahead.

Yet by accepting the assignments, by traveling to some of these places, I put myself at grave risk. People were shooting and killing each other, and they didn't much care if I or anyone else got in the way. I went, in large part, because I felt I would be okay. Journalists have this odd belief that it won't happen to them. And I had this other belief that Jan and I would never end. That we had forever.

What could possibly go wrong with the lucky couple, Darling and Darling?

     
Alzheimer's can be diagnosed in some, but not all, individuals with these symptoms.

     
Friends, family or co-workers begin to notice deficiencies. Problems with memory or concentration may be measurable in clinical testing or discernible during a detailed medical interview. Common difficulties include word- or name-finding problems noticeable to family or close associates … reading a passage and retaining little material … losing or misplacing a valuable object … decline in ability to plan or organize. (Seven Stages of Alzheimer's Disease from
www.alz.org
, the Alzheimer's Association)

The symptoms were piling up. And while Jan was changing, I was like a rock … steady and solid in my absolute refusal to hear or see what was going on in front of me. It wasn't as if I lacked for examples.

My daughter Emily tells the story of shopping at the grocery store in Tokyo with Jan. There was some sort of special promotion and Jan won a DVD. Later, when they got back to the house, Jan found the DVD in the shopping bag and said, “Where did this come from?”

“Dad,” Emily told me later, “she couldn't remember what happened half an hour earlier.”

People comfort me now by saying my self-imposed blindness to what was happening wouldn't have mattered in the progression of The Disease. It wasn't as if we delayed treatment for cancer, where delay can kill. They are right, although it brings me no comfort.

And there was the selfish part. I didn't want to face the end of the dream, the end of Darling and Darling, the end of everything around which we had created a life. Jan didn't want to accept that there might be some problem, either. Even the diagnosis didn't change her mood in any noticeable way. It was as if she couldn't, or wouldn't, grasp what it meant, or the horror ahead of us. Quite the opposite, she seemed as much in denial as I was.

Had I accepted or realized; had I been wise enough to see what was ahead, I would have changed the very course of our lives. That is what denial does … it robs us of the moments that might have been.

Can I detail them? The South Seas cruise that we talked about and could have taken after we diligently saved up enough credit card points, but somehow never found the time. The train trip on the Orient Express from Paris to Venice where we would have dressed for dinner and pretended we were back in the 1920s. Or just spending more time at our northern California home, watching the waves and waiting for another sunset.

Had there been some firm timeline or deadline, we would have done these things. Who wouldn't?

But The Disease doesn't work like that. It gnaws at the brain with a pace that differs with every person, and sometimes it surrenders back some of what it has taken, with an evil, unpredictable subtleness that fuels a false hope that time is not running out.

So we went on with the daily routine and put off those special moments because we told ourselves that there was always next year. Believing in a next year is a kind of comfort. It meant we had pushed the problems she was having down the road a bit, maybe even beaten them back, because if we had plans for next year, that must have meant that Jan would be here next year.

Surely, I said to myself, there is clear reasoning in that.

When we moved to Tokyo for the first posting in 1986, she became the radio stringer for CBS News. In Moscow from 1988 until 1990, she had her own contract for doing both radio and TV stories. She was the go-to reporter, always ready to do the quick radio piece on breaking news or the longer, more complex stories for CBS News Weekend News and Sunday Morning.

Then there came a change in the Moscow Bureau. CBS sent out another reporter during our last year there. It didn't really affect Jan because there was more than enough work for all of us. But she got angry at the idea of competition, and although that was understandable, the anger never faded. She never adjusted to the situation, and she reacted in a way very odd for someone who relished taking on a challenge … she withdrew.

She stayed in our apartment, in the same building and a few floors below the office. I accepted her anger and her solitude uneasily. I tried talking her out of it, and in another moment out of character for her, she refused and stayed angry and isolated in the apartment.

Now I look back and wonder … was that the beginning of her own suspicions that something was wrong, the beginning of her avoiding new challenges, so no one would notice the things she would have trouble doing? Was the arrival of a new reporter not a cause, but an excuse, to hide what she felt were faltering writing and reporting skills?

From 1990 to diagnosis in 2005 … fifteen years—within the timeline.

After we moved to London, living there from 1991 to 1995, she did occasional part-time work for CNN. First it was stories for their business unit. The material was hard for her to master because the stories were complicated. She switched to doing some part-time fill-in anchor work and that was better. Much of what she read was written by others. And the news she presented was formulaic and predictable, the usual updates on various stock markets, the same information each day with only the numbers changing.

She was up early—4 a.m. because of the shift she covered—which gave her time to dress beautifully. It was comfortable and familiar for Jan to follow patterns that she knew well, like the dressing up, which she once did for her old job as an anchor in Seattle. Then the job faded away, and she didn't seem to care. In truth, she seemed relieved. She said it was nice not working those early morning hours. But was this another sign of her closing down?

And there was another clue—she spent more and more time at home. This was great for me. I would call from some faraway place on assignment, and she was there. If not, she was there half an hour later having just run to the grocery store.

There were virtually no lunches with friends, no trips to museums, no long walks in Hyde Park next to where we lived, no desire to find a new part time job. I didn't notice it because I was always pleased finding her home when I needed to talk.

I would ask what she was doing in the apartment and she would answer brightly, “I'm filing things for taxes,” or “I'm catching up on reading all the magazines,” or “I'm sorting through the mail.”

Did Jan sense that she was changing? She may have. It may have frightened her or made her feel inadequate. She may have started compensating many years ago. I can offer opinion but not fact, because I didn't see it. Or, more accurately, I didn't want to see it. It was easier that way. And she never talked about it.

After we moved from London back to Tokyo in 1995 for our second go-round there, she worked as a radio stringer for Voice of America—doing only a story or two a week. Because we had a radio setup in the apartment, she could work from home and read her reports from our family room. She never went out to cover a story because she didn't need to—or was it because she was afraid to?

Then she got a one-year contract as the Tokyo reporter for ABC News, which meant every day to the office. But the job was difficult because of a dispute with another Asia reporter. I offered to help her resolve it. We could fly to New York, I said over and over, and meet with the ABC people and get it sorted out. But she wasn't interested. She gutted it out and did what work she could and earned her money. By the end of the year, she was visibly relieved that it was over. “Now my stomach doesn't hurt anymore,” she said.

She was changing, literally in front of me—a vibrant, successful broadcast journalist whose confidence and drive to succeed were ebbing away like a quiet midnight tide.

“There's no use in weeping, though we are condemned to part: There's such a thing as keeping, a remembrance in one's heart.”
~Charlotte Bronte

The mortar round exploded about a hundred yards behind me. It was late afternoon. I ducked instinctively.

“Insurgents,” said Army Capt. Steve Gventer, the officer who was with us. “They probably saw us and were trying for a lucky shot.”

That day the luck was mine. It was summer 2004, with the American presence in Iraq under daily siege across the country. We were doing a standup where I was talking on camera, in Sadr City, Baghdad, the then-heartbeat of the anti-American resistance. Control of Sadr City bounced between the US forces during the day and the insurgents, who almost always took it back at night.

Being away on long assignments that could go a month or more was a reality of Jan's and my life together. But Baghdad was different, one of the hardest for her. I was focused on getting ready for the trip, on making sure I had a good bullet-proof vest and helmet. I also called people who had been there, looking for story ideas and tips on coming home alive. Jan was calm in all of this, until it was time to leave. At breakfast, my sunny and constantly optimistic wife was almost non-talkative. It was so out of character that I told someone later it was like the IRS apologizing for the inconvenience and sending all your taxes back. It just never happens.

I called her from the various airports through the day as I made my way to the Middle East, and that night from Jordan before the next day's flight into Baghdad. Somewhere in there she recovered her breezy disposition, if only to keep me cheered up. Of course nothing would happen to me, she said. Her sheer faith would keep that from happening.

I knew that every night I was in Baghdad she would wonder what I was doing hour by hour. Was I safe in the hotel, or out in the streets on a story? Could she bear to turn on the TV and watch the nightly news on London TV and see what was unfolding that day and … did the news include any American journalists who were killed?

This was a time in Baghdad when journalists were targets for kidnap, shot, or murdered. Some of our people spent their entire time in Baghdad holed up inside the Al Monsour Hotel, where the CBS News office was located. A big part of the budget was our security.

There was outer security—Iraqi guards with AK47s at all entrances including the parking lot—and inner security, the men hired from a British firm who were trained by the British Army in how to save their lives and, hopefully, ours. They were well armed and less obvious about it.

The head of our British security team was nicknamed Smudge. He had a chat with me the first day I arrived and explained that he would be in the front seat of the heavily armored Mercedes whenever we went out on a story. He also taught me how we would handle trouble when we were outside the car. “If one or two people are coming at us, I'll shoot them,” he said in a tone I considered a bit matter-of-fact considering this was my life under discussion. “If it's a big crowd, I'm not going to open fire because they'll overwhelm us anyway, and it'll just make them angrier. We surrender and see what can be done next.” Those were his rules of engagement, and they became mine as well.

For seven weeks I worked the Iraq story, living on cigarettes (I started smoking the second I hit that place) and cookies. No alcohol. I wanted to be alert since we might need to flee the hotel at any hour. Heavily armed men storming hotels at 3 a.m. where journalists or officials stayed was a new tactic then.

And once outside, the fear and no small amount of paranoia crept in. I would see a couple of guys talking at the corner and look up and stare at me. I'd see a car slow down for no reason and feel my body tighten. Are they after me? I would be a big catch for kidnappers—the foreigner, the American, the journalist—so I learned to keep my eyes and ears open.

It was a false sense of security. Other journalists, including Americans, were kidnapped and held for ransom. Other journalists, including two from CBS News, were killed while on assignment long after I left.

Not all my travel was this dangerous. There were the stories in Paris on the latest fashions, or in Wales covering the last remaining community choirs. The one constant was coming and going, sometimes with no more warning than a quick call home while I was hurrying to an airport.

I once joked with Jan that if either of us ever got the seven year itch, it would take fourteen years to develop, because I was gone half of the time.

I went when asked by the Bureau Chief, or the Foreign Editor, or the Executive Producer of this show or another. Jan always said she understood. She accepted what my job demanded, and this was one of the many reasons I could make her my life. I felt blessed, almost saved, when we fell in love, because my life before Jan was often a self-made horror.

I grew up a military brat, in a family always moving to the next assignment until I was in junior high school. My dad retired from the Army—he had been a pilot beginning in the days of World War Two—and we moved to the small town of Sidney in eastern Montana that boasted a population of 5,000 on a busy day. This was the town where my Danish immigrant grandfather had settled and farmed and where my father had grown up. My grandfather moved the family there in the 1920s because it already had a substantial Danish immigrant community and a Lutheran Church with services in Danish. Probably the only town in America where the Petersens, Hansens and Larsens far outnumbered the Smiths in the phone book.

When I was fifteen, I decided to become a journalist. It took two more years before someone paid me. The summer before entering college I got a job at the local weekly newspaper, the Sidney Herald. I quickly learned that the job wasn't about journalism, it was about grunt work. I swept up and helped with small printing jobs by stapling pages together. And to my great honor, once a week I washed the ink off the lead slugs in the flat page molds after the ancient press ran off a few thousand issues, wheezing and clanking all the way. If there is printer's ink in my blood, it seeped in the hard way. It took two or three days of steady washing to get that ink off my hands.

The good part happened when there was a breaking story and I got to cover it. One day it was a prairie fire west of town, and the editor let me race out with a notebook and a camera. I gave him a look so youthfully intense that I'm sure he smiled once I was out the door.

After graduation from the journalism school at Northwestern University, I went from being a newspaper reporter in Miami, Chicago, Omaha, and Milwaukee, to TV reporter in Milwaukee and then Minneapolis. My break was being hired by the Los Angeles Bureau of CBS News in 1978. I was the rookie correspondent, and that meant if a story developed in Portland at four on a Friday afternoon, I was the guy ready and eager to fly up and cover it. I would leave town at a moment's notice, which meant leaving my then-wife behind with shattered weekend plans … again. It didn't take long before she grew convinced that she was always going to be second best to a good feature story that might get on the Evening News.

It takes a combination of blindness and arrogance to destroy a marriage. I had both with my first. We made it through thirteen years, had two wonderful girls along the way, and made several lawyers richer in our angry parting.

This was the state of disrepair I called my life when I met Jan, and I didn't think I had a lot to offer. I was broke and sharing in the raising of two young children with an ex-wife. Not prime material for one's dating profile. But Jan didn't see it that way, and I decided that my best plan would be to prove her right.

In reality, we didn't have that much in common. Jan spoke French (fluently) and Italian (quite well), and I didn't. She studied European art history in college, and I studied journalism, American history and politics. She got good grades, I didn't. She was bubbly and charming and had a raft of friends. I was quiet and distrusted life too much to have many real friends. I think it was these differences that so attracted me to her. I relished taking care of her, and she felt safe in our love, that I would happily devote myself to making her happy.

And when she cared for me, the world melted into the background and I found my solace in her. I got the far better end of this bargain because I was the beneficiary of her enthusiasm for life and her spirit of adventure.

She had other chances. There had been a first marriage, but it ended in disaster. She mentioned once that a rich Seattle lawyer wanted to marry her, but she turned him down. She wanted more, and I was it. I teased her about how she could have had an easier, somewhat more predictable and certainly more comfortable, life if she had married the lawyer. To which, of course, she laughed.

I worked to prove her right, and a way of doing that was creating special surprises for her. One year CBS brought us back from Moscow to New York so I could be the vacation fill-in anchor on the morning show news block. The stint crossed over September 1st, her birthday.

This was my chance to pay her back for all the things she did for me, like just loving me, which always seemed pretty amazing. I relished planning a special night for her because it meant thinking about the things she liked doing with me. This evening was going to be about sharing those things between us, so I arranged for dinner at the Rainbow Room on top of Rockefeller Center. We ate dinner and drank champagne while the city below glistened only for us. The orchestra played while I danced with her (badly) over and over.

When we got back to the hotel, I gave her the room key so she would be the one to open the door and see her next surprise. There in the center of the room was a round, metal statue from India, a Buddha of Many Hands. She had admired it when we were out shopping one day, so I snuck back and bought it for her. It was spiritual and mysterious, just like Jan. She loved it. I have it still, as a remembrance of making a wonderful evening that was a delight for both of us.

Celebrating life. She did it with such ease, and she let me build around her a place where her life could be celebrated across continents with experiences and adventures and where there was always one place of safety … and that place was in my love for her.