Diagnosis: Love
(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 41)
approach life is going to determine how
we all manage aging, whether we have
debilitating conditions or not.”
avoid lashing out at others. It wasn’t
always that way. Particularly during
recuperation from cancer surgery in
2000, Cohen’s temper threatened to
break the family apart. “He began to
isolate himself,” Vieira told Charlie
Rose in a 2004 interview. “One minute
he would be quiet, and the next min-
ute he would blow up.” She decided
to call Cohen on his behavior. “After
cutting him a lot of slack, I thought,
‘Now you are going after everything
that I care about, and I’m going to
fight back. [I told him] you’re not in
this alone. We’re all in this boat, and
it’s really scary, and you are rocking it
even more.’… As selfish as I felt at the
moment of saying it—because he is the
one that’s suffering—I think it was the
right thing to do in order to help heal
us as a family.”
Even as MS limits him, Cohen leav-
ens his anger with humor. Says Vieira:
“He has very bad days. He’s so funny;
he’ll say, ‘I’m in control. I hate my life,
but I’m in control.’ It’s good that he
vents. He’s having a shitty day, and
what is he going to do, pretend that
he’s not? But then he’ll soldier on.”
Friend Doucette says Cohen han-
dles his illness the way he handles the
rest of his life. “He focuses on what
he can control, and that’s where he
puts his attention,” she says. Medi-
cally, that means trying every prom-
ising treatment, even though none
have been shown to help his form of
MS. Along with interferon and other
mainstream drugs, Cohen has tried
experimental treatments such as
chemotherapy, as well as alternative
treatments including low-intensity
laser therapy. “I don’t believe in any of
this stuff,” he says. “But I do it because
I don’t want to ever look back and
regret that I didn’t try something. Or
try everything.”
Doucette adds that Cohen’s atti-
tude will stand him in good stead as
he ages. “I’m Richard’s age, and all
of our friends are having something
to deal with,” she says. “How we
Last June wasn’t the first time
Meredith Vieira gave up a plum job to
make time for her family. In 1991 her
career became an early flashpoint in
the mommy wars when she left her
reporting gig at
60 Minutes rather than
work full-time after Gabe’s birth. Some
feminists accused Vieira of setting
back the cause of working mothers.
necessary, is key to her plan. Admitting the need for help can be difficult
for some caregivers, Vieira says: “They
are embarrassed. They don’t want to
put people out.” But she doesn’t mind
asking. Sometimes when Cohen falls
down at home, he can’t get up by himself—nor, at 5 foot 3 1/2, can Vieira lift
him. “We had this game where I would
drag him, sort of like [our dog] Jasper
drags the cat. We’d laugh, because
what are you going to do?” When there
were teenage children at home, Vieira
“People feel oddly responsible
for their illnesses,” says
Cohen. “I sometimes blame
myself because I’m sick.”
At one party, she recalls, “this woman
cornered me and said, ‘How can you do
that? You are the face of having it all.’ ”
Sitting curled in a barber’s chair
in her modest Millionaire dressing
room, Vieira has the casual poise of a
cat. She has just finished a day’s worth
of taping—a week’s worth of quiz
shows—and has swapped her purple
skirt suit and black spike-heeled
pumps for blue jeans, brown buckle
clogs, and a Harvard hoodie so ratty
it’s about to disintegrate: her signature
look, friends say.
For Vieira, the decision to leave
60
Minutes was never about trailblazing,
but about prioritizing. “It was about
our particular family and our needs,”
she says. “The rest kind of happened
around me.” Still, her choice is now
largely seen as a step forward for
working mothers, not a step back: It
helped highlight the need for more
flexible, parent-friendly workplaces.
And today, with her departure from
daily news to a less hectic schedule,
Vieira may once again be unwittingly
blazing a trail for modern families,
more and more of whom are struggling
to incorporate chronic illness into
happy family lives.
Calling in reinforcements, when
had helpers on hand, but now she’ll
call on friends, she says. “People want
to help, so when we’ve needed friends
in times of any crisis, we ask. And I
think it’s really important for care-
givers not to feel that it’s all on you at
any given time, because it’s not.”
Friends and coworkers say Vieira
fosters a sense of teamwork that
makes you want to help her. “Meredith
likes to be part of an ensemble. She
rises to her best in that setting,”
says Matt Lauer, who was her Today
cohost. “I can’t tell you the number
of times I’d go out to an interview,
come back to my BlackBerry, and
the first message would be a text
from Meredith saying, ‘Fabulous job
today.’ It’s very easy in this job to de-
velop tunnel vision: ‘What do I have
to do today?’ Meredith opened up that
frame of reference to, ‘What are we
doing?’ That’s contagious.”
And Vieira’s sense of connection ex-
tends outward into the world. “She will
kiss all her fans,” says comedian Joy
Behar, a friend since their days on ABC’s
The View, where Vieira acted as mod-
erator for nine years. “She kisses every-
body, kisses strangers,” Behar says. “I
always say that the germs are going to
go all over the (CONTINUED ON PAGE 58)
