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Lery Sievers of Potomac faced the news that he had cancer the same way he handled life: head on
By Kathleen Wheaton
Over dinner in December of 2005, Laurie Singer
glanced at her fiance, Leroy Sievers, and noticed
that his face was drooping. Singer and Sievers were
television news producers with demanding, globetrotting
jobs, but she realized at once that he
was not simply tired. They got up from their
restaurant table and went to the emergency room at nearby Sibley
Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., where a scan revealed that
Sievers had a brain tumor. The colon cancer he thought he'd beaten
four years earlier had metastasized. "It was the face of cancer
looking back at me," Singer says.
Sievers' colon cancer was discovered in the fall of 2001 during a
routine colonoscopy, but surgery appeared to have eradicated the
disease. "I was the poster child for early detection and treatment,"
Sievers said in a commentary that aired on National Public Radio's
Morning Edition on Feb. 16, 2006. His brain tumor was successfully
removed, but tumors were found in his lungs and liver, and his
doctors gave him between three and six months to live. "Funny, the
things you think about," Sievers continued in the commentary. "I'd
been meaning to get my eyes checked. Should I still bother?"
As executive producer of ABC's Nightline, Sievers had traveled
the world with the show's host, Ted Koppel,
reporting on conflicts in places such
as Kosovo, Somalia and Iraq. During 25
years in the television news business,
Sievers had witnessed the deaths of thousands
of people. He had commented for
NPR on the 10th anniversary of the 1994
genocide in Rwanda—an event he had
witnessed and which continued to haunt
him—and on the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina. Now, contemplating his
own death sentence on Morning Edition,
he began, "Death and I are hardly
strangers."
That piece and another in May touched
Sievers' listeners, and dozens wrote to share
stories of their struggles with cancer.
According to his NPR editor, Maeve
McGoran, it was Sievers' honesty that made
the commentaries so effective: "Leroy
reported exactly what he saw, without ever
flinching." His voice, she says, was "deeper
than baritone. Once you heard it, you
could never mistake that voice for anyone
else's." In June, 2006-a month after doctors
had predicted he would die, as Sievers
noted wryly in a third commentary—NPR offered him a contract to produce a
monthly radio piece, along with a weekly
essay for podcast and a daily blog titled,
simply, "My Cancer."
It wasn't the first time that Sievers had
put his life and his thoughts on public view. While at Nightline, he created a listserv
in which he wrote about the evening's
show and reflected on his childhood or
his travels. "The viewers loved it," Singer
says, adding that he also wrote about his
2001 colon cancer diagnosis, which
prompted readers to get tested.
A gregarious man with a booming,
infectious laugh, Sievers was often at the
center of things. The airy house in
Potomac that he shared with Singer (the
high ceilings and deep steps were built
to accommodate Sievers' 6-foot-5-inch
frame and size 13 feet) was the site of
frequent dinner parties, as well as the
couple's legendary Halloween bashes.
One year, Sievers dressed as former Attorney
General Janet Reno. Another year,
when mad cow disease was news, Sievers
attended as a mad cow.
In the trenches
At the beginning of the Iraq War in March
of 2003, Sievers and Koppel were embedded with
the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division.
They covered the first wave of the
invasion known as the Tip of the Spear.
The rumors of poison gas and weapons of
mass destruction, Singer says, made it "the
most worrisome of all of Leroy's wars. Ted's
wife and I called each other every day." But,
Singer says, "I knew a long time ago that
this was our understanding: Leroy wanted
to see the world and know what was
going on in it. He'd say tome, 'This is what
I do.' Sure, I worried. But would I ever say,
'Do not go?' Never."
Singer, who produces
Bob Dotson's American
Stories for NBC's Today
show, began her career
as one of the country's
first female sportscasters.
"I was an athletic
kid, and my parents
were big sports fans,"
says Singer, who grew
up in San Diego. "Sports
were my life." After graduating
from San Diego
State University, Singer
heard that the sports
director at KFMB-TV,
the local CBS affiliate,
was looking for an assistant.
During her job
interview, she was told that she was the
only female applying. She was hired, and
within three years was reporting on television.
Women sports journalists were
so unusual that there was no ladies room
in the press box at New York's Shea Stadium;
in Montreal, she was only allowed
into the press box at all after an argument.
In 1975 she was the first woman
to cover the World Series; in 1979 she was
hired by CBS and moved to New York.
Sievers grew up in the conservative Los
Angeles suburb of San Marino, where, as
a teenager with waist-length hair and a
rebellious streak, he was "a bit of a square
peg in a round hole," Singer says. But he
was also popular and a good student. He
was president of his 1973 graduating class
at San Marino High School, and then
attended Princeton University in Princeton,
N.J. "Not a good fit there, either,"
according to Singer, who says the school's
exclusive eating clubs didn't jibe with
Sievers' egalitarian sensibilities. He transferred
to the University of California,
Berkeley, where he began his journalism
career at college radio station KALX.
He met Singer at CBS in the early fall
of 1980.He was the night news manager,
and she produced sports highlight pieces
that went out to news stations across the
country. "Leroy came down the hall
because he'd heard there was this girl doing
the night sports news," Singer says. "He
always tells the story that I was so nasty
to him, because he came in to chat and I
was there to work, so it was like, 'See ya
later, buddy.'" Sievers got a second chance
with Singer not long after at a Halloween
party he attended as a trash can. "He came
over to say hello, and I thought, this guy
is really interesting," Singer says. "To have
the courage to come dressed as a trash can.
It was a good costume."
Sievers met up with Singer again in
Los Angeles, where he had become the
CBS bureau chief, when she covered the
1984 Summer Olympics there. When she
was offered a job producing news pieces
for the L.A. bureau, she accepted at once.
"It was one of those times when everyone
in an office is magic-we all worked so
well together," she says. Her first "date"
with Sievers was at Disneyland in 1985,
although neither of them recognized it as
such. They'd agreed to meet there after
discovering that they'd both loved Disneyland
as kids, and they arrived in separate
cars. "That evening, when he got into
his car and I got into mine to drive back
to L.A., we both felt at the same time that
something had clicked," Singer says. "But
we didn't say anything about it to each
other." They finally did begin dating soon
afterward, Singer says, and learned that
their co-workers had long assumed they
were a couple. When CBS moved Sievers
to Miami in 1986, the company agreed to
move Singer there as well.
In the summer of 1988, after Singer
left for Seoul, South Korea, to cover the
Olympics, Sievers decided to surprise her
with a diamond ring and a proposal. He
arrived home with a bandaged head after
being clubbed by riot police in Santiago,
Chile, just as she returned from Seoul
with a stomach bug. "Here's the ring,"
she recalls him saying. "Now I gotta go
to sleep." But their constant travels continually
sidetracked efforts to make concrete
wedding plans, and it would be 20
years until they married.
In 1991, Sievers was offered a post as
a producer for Nightline-a plum job,
though he and Singer loved the balmy
Miami climate and their house with a
swimming pool in Coconut Grove. They
were hesitant about moving to the more
staid Washington, D.C. Sievers was traveling
in Somalia when Singer called him
to say she'd found a house in Potomac.
It had good bones, she told him, and the
windows could be enlarged to let in views
of the surrounding woods. His response:
"Might as well go for it."
Sievers retreated to that bright house,
filled with colorful mementos of their
trips, when he became too ill to travel
any more for work. Koppel, who had left
Nightline to work at the Silver Spring-based
Discovery Channel, proposed to Sievers
early in 2006 that they make a documentary
together about the process of living
with cancer. "Leroy liked the idea immediately,"
says Koppel, who lives in Potomac.
In reporting on such a personal story,
Koppel says, "Leroy and I dealt with his
cancer the way we dealt with these disastrous
stories wherever we covered them,
with a sort of gallows humor. I knew he
wouldn't be offended by it, and in fact, I
think it cheered him up a little bit."
In the documentary, as well as in his
NPR blog and radio commentaries, Sievers
often injected humor into a subject
not noted for its comic elements-musing,
for example, on the temptation to
"play the cancer card" in order to get a
table at a popular restaurant. But he also
addressed the fear and grief caused by a
bolt-from-the-blue diagnosis, the dull
misery of chemotherapy, and the pain of
delivering bad news to loved ones.
Over the 2 1/2years that Sievers wrote the
blog, more than 36,000 people responded.
Many cancer patients and their caregivers
wrote daily, saying the site was the
first thing they turned to every morning.
"There was one young man whose father
had cancer," Singer recalls. "One day he
asked his father how he was feeling, and
the father said, 'I don't know. Go read Leroy
and he'll tell you how I'm feeling.'"
"Leroy was all over the world, covering
every important story of his time,"
Koppel says. "And yet the impact he had
while he was dying of cancer on thousands,
tens of thousands of people, was
undoubtedly greater than we had collectively
in the pieces that we did."
"As a journalist, Leroy could guide you
into uncharted territory, because he'd been
there," says producer Rebecca Lipkin, who
was based in London for Nightline. Lipkin
recalls the encouragement she got from
Sievers before she set out for Iraq on assignment:
"He was a giant of a man, and I was
more of a chicken," she says. "But he'd say
it was all right to be scared-that only a
silly person wouldn't be." In June of 2007,
Lipkin was diagnosed with inflammatory
breast cancer, a rare and particularly virulent
form of the disease. Having left Nightline
in 2005, she found herself stranded in
England, her "pre-existing condition" making
it impossible for her to obtain health
insurance in the U.S. Undergoing surgery,
chemotherapy and radiation in London,
she was bolstered by Leroy's blog: "The raw
honesty of that American voice…hearing
the heart that came through," she says.
The blog did more than just provide
comfort to others with cancer. It also
encouraged them to be advocates for themselves.
"Every time we met with another
doctor, Leroy would always end the conversation
with, 'What else have you got?'"
Singer says. "Even the doctors at Hopkins
[the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center
in Baltimore],who are about as aggressive
as they come, realized this would be
something a little different. Leroy interviewed
them," she says. "Normally, doctors
tell their patients, 'this is what we do,'
and the patients would nod their heads.
That's not anything Leroy would ever do."
Early in 2007, Sievers heard about a
relatively new treatment called radiofrequency
ablation, or RFA, in which tumors
in hard-to-operate areas are destroyed
with high frequency electrical currents.
Sievers asked if he could try RFA, even
though the procedure wasn't normally
considered for advanced cancer patients
like him. The RFA worked beyond their
wildest hopes, killing the visible tumors
in his lungs. During the spring of 2007,
a season his doctors had not thought he
would live to see, Sievers was classified
as NED-No Evidence of Disease.
On March 17, 2007, he wrote in the
blog, "Talk to anyone who's been in combat
and it's a pretty good bet they've felt
it. In the immediate rush after the shooting
stops, you can feel more alive than
you ever have before. It's the sheer joy of
having survived. Your senses are sharper;
the air is crystal clear."
Koppel's documentary, Living With Cancer,
was filmed over 15 months and aired
on May 6, 2007. The program cut away to
a live town hall meeting at the Discovery
Channel's Silver Spring headquarters, where
Sievers, along with cancer survivors Elizabeth
Edwards, wife of former U.S. Sen.
John Edwards (D-N.C.), and Tour de
France champion Lance Armstrong took
questions from an audience of cancer
patients and their caregivers. Singer, who
had not appeared earlier in the film, spoke
about her efforts to keep life as normal as
possible for Sievers. "We still argue," she
told the audience, who laughed.
"I hadn't wanted to be in the piece earlier
because I didn't want to be a lurker—it was Leroy's struggle, his story," she
says. "But then Elizabeth Edwards said
that she wished I'd been more a part of
it, because the voice of the partner was
important. And that was right. Leroy and
I did it together. We did it every day."
Long before Sievers' diagnosis, friends
say, he and Singer were a couple who took
care of each other. Sara Just, a senior ABC
news producer who worked with him on
Nightline, recalls how Sievers, after grueling
days of working until midnight, would
then get up at 6 a.m. to drive Singer to the
airport. "I'd tease him and say, 'You know,
Leroy, there's this thing called a taxi.' But
he wanted to see her off, and he wanted to
greet her when she came home safely." Later,
when Sievers was commuting to Baltimore
for chemotherapy, Just says she and
other friends often volunteered to drive
himand give Singer a break. "But she wanted
to be there," Just says."From the moment
Leroy was sick, it was Laurie's mission to
take care of him and get him well."
"Once cancer is in your world, it's there,
and you can't pretend it isn't," Singer says.
"Even when you're not thinking about it,
you're thinking about it. We'd get good
news one day and feel just great, but
there's that little something in the back
of your head saying, 'but it's not going
to be good news tomorrow.'"
In fact, in early June of 2008, Sievers
and Singer got the bad news they had
feared. Later that month, Sievers wrote,
"With My Cancer [the blog] turning 2
years old, I'd expected to write a commentary that would be a celebration. But
life in cancer world doesn't always go the
way we expect." Scans earlier that week
had revealed that Sievers' cancer had
exploded, with new tumors appearing in
his brain, liver, lungs and bones. Further
treatment, he was told, would be futile,
and he and Singer had to confront how
they would use whatever time he had left.
Sievers and Singer finally married in
their home on June 19, 2008, with only
family and close friends in attendance.
Koppel served as best man; Singer's sister,
Joyce Abrams, was matron of honor,
and her nephew, Matthew Abrams, gave
her away. "It was sort of like being a producer
when you have a story for tonight
that you have to put together in three or
four hours," Singer says. "But it was a
lovely evening, and I'm glad we finally
got around to doing it."
Their rings were made by Namu, a
Bethesda jeweler, from a piece of lapis lazuli
that Sievers had brought back from Colombia
and kept for years in their safe deposit
box. "Leroy said, 'What if I'm only able to
wear it for a day or two?' And I said, 'I don't
care if you wear it for one minute. I'll take
it off your hand, and I'll put it on my hand,
and that's where it stays,'" Singer says. "And
that's what happened."
She holds up her hand, where her diamond
engagement ring glitters between
two dark blue bands.
"We all gathered under a chuppah
made of a cloth Laurie had gotten somewhere
on her travels," Sara Just recalls.
"It was the happiest I saw Leroy all summer.
He was in a lot of pain, and at one
point during the ceremony he had to sit
down. But we all talked and laughed, and
everybody cried." During the wedding
dinner, Sievers went to lie down because
his back was hurting. "But he wanted the
party to continue," Just says. "He wanted
to listen to it."
Through the summer, Sievers continued
to write the blog, though his contributions
became shorter. On July 31, he
wrote, "we got rid of my Jeep today. I
hadn't driven it in more than six months.
It was a stick shift, so driving it was out
of the question. I knew it had to go, but
it's still another sign of how the cancer
continues to change my life. Revving the
engine was a lot of fun."
"My biggest stake as a caregiver was that
I wanted him to live in his world until he
couldn't anymore," Singer says. "I'd say to
his friends, 'Come and visit him.' News is
a fun, gossipy place to live, and it was so
important tome that he remain a part of
it. So they came, and they talked about old
trips and old stories, and about whatever
the news was that day, and that kept him
engaged in life."
Sievers and Singer resisted calling hospice,
knowing that the medication he'd be
given to relieve his pain would also disconnect him from the world around him.
"He didn't want to do that, and I didn't
want him to do that," Singer says. "So we
waited a long time." On Aug. 12, Sievers
announced on the blog that they had called
hospice. On Aug. 15, Singer posted for him:
"On any normal day, this would just be a
really bad thunderstorm rumbling its way
across the summer sky. But it's not a normal
day and the rumbling is more like the
growl of a predator stalking its prey. Leroy's
cancer is making its move." That night, at
age 53, he died.
"Afterwards, I basically fell off a cliff,"
Singer says. "Everybody said, 'Well, you
knew that ultimately death was going to
be the outcome. So were you not prepared
for him to die?' No.You put somebody
in front of me who says they were
prepared when their loved one died. I
wasn't living in a naive world. I knew
what was coming—I watched it happen.
But suddenly it ends, and you are left trying
to figure out what happened."
More than 1,000 people posted condolences
on the blog, and four days later,
Singer wrote to express her gratitude
for the outpouring of support. Sievers
had asked her to keep the blog going if
she could. "Leroy said, 'This is another
part of the disease, what happens to you
after I die. How do you feel? What are
you going through? There aren't too many
places where you can go for that kind of
immediate dialogue.'"
Over the weeks and months since Sievers'
death, Singer has chronicled, in spare,
poetic language, her journey into a solitary
life: ridding the house of medical
supplies, attending a dinner party alone,
voting in a much-discussed election, getting
through birthdays and holidays. In
October, she flew to Maui, where the couple
had vacationed often, to scatter Sievers'
ashes. She wrote of the solace of finding
a heart-shaped piece of amber sea
glass, of spotting an orange Jeep like the
one her husband had owned.
"A lot of our friends have thought that
writing about the loss has been therapeutic,
and maybe that's true," she says.
"I've tried to articulate as best I can this
phase of it. But the blog has got to change,
because Leroy's voice isn't there anymore."
Last summer, Sievers humorously imagined
a future job-posting for the blog:
"WANTED: BLOGGER. MUST HAVE
CANCER." Since August, traffic on the
blog has thinned. Many of those who still
post survive loved ones who have died, and
they urge Singer to continue to speak for
cancer's other, perfectly healthy, victims.
"For now, I think I'm in the right place,"
Singer says. "I've moved from living hour
to hour to day to day to even week to week.
But I'm not the person I was. It's a different
life. That's been abundantly clear, from
the minute he left this world."
Kathleen Wheaton lives in Bethesda.
My Cancer
In 2006, longtime television producer Leroy Sievers began writing a blog on NPR's Web site called 'My Cancer.' Leroy chronicled his health and his feelings as he battled the cancer that would eventually take his life. Thousands of other cancer patients and their families also posted comments on the blog. Since his death, Leroy's wife, Laurie Singer, has been posting on the blog. To read the blog, go to www.npr.org/blogs/mycancer/.
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