say, Cohen has a hair-raising habit of crossing the street by
forging straight into traffic.
But that bravado has sometimes had a downside for
Cohen’s family, especially early on, he admits. Their eldest
child, son Ben, is now 22, but once when he was 3 years old,
Cohen’s creeping lack of coordination led to a terrifying
moment when he accidentally bumped Ben into the gap
between a standing commuter train and the station plat-
form, sending the boy tumbling onto the tracks. Though
Cohen was able to rescue the child, the chill of fear stayed
with him, he wrote in Blindsided: “I do not travel anywhere
in the city with a youngster in tow without replaying the
videotape of that moment.”
Jerome Groopman, M.D., a professor at Harvard Medi-
cal School and writer for The New Yorker, says his friend
Cohen’s work has value even for those not affected by
chronic illness…yet. “All of us, one day, will be patients,”
says Groopman. “These stories tell us that, yes, there is a
potential for loss and difficulty, but on the other hand,
there’s also the potential to prevail.”
Cohen prizes and nourishes a few close friendships, say
those who know him well. “Of all my friends, more so than
I, he’s the one who puts the time and effort into friendship,”
says Katie Doucette, an executive coach who first met
Cohen when they worked together on a 1970 New York
congressional campaign. “He is the one I can count on for
a call on Saturday morning to check in.” Cohen’s friends,
in return, prize his cracked sense of humor. CBS radio and
TV news host Charles Osgood recalls Cohen’s reaction
when a viewer threatened to kill Osgood if the newsman
and amateur poet continued to recite his own homey verse
on the air. CBS hired a guard for Osgood; Cohen was less
concerned. “Rich said that if, indeed, someone like that did
shoot me, he would never be convicted,” Osgood recalls
merrily, “because it’d be a justifiable homicide.”
Goodbye, Hello
Vieira bids farewell to audience
members during her last Today show
this past June, above, and greets
Cohen in New York City in 2006.
Cohen’s condition with their children
at all until Ben was about 7, Gabriel
was 5, and Lily was 3. “We figured, oh,
they’re so small, they don’t need to
know this,” Vieira says. But then one
night all three children saw their father
plummet backward down the stairs and land on his head.
They were terrified. Later that night, Ben asked his mother
for answers, and she gave them. “I realized kids are intui-
tive; they are sensitive,” she says. “He didn’t know what it
was, but he knew something wasn’t right.” From then on,
MS was something the family discussed openly, though
not obsessively. The parents made sure that conversation
around their dinner table centered on everybody’s every-
day activities: Ben’s soccer, Gabe’s baseball, Lily’s drama,
and the spirited debates that naturally arose in a household
of proudly stubborn individualists. Their baseball fandom
tells the tale: Vieira roots for the Red Sox; Cohen, the
Yankees; Ben, the Orioles; and Gabe, the Mets. Lily, now
18—and agnostic on baseball—recalls her childhood as
“completely normal.” Multiple sclero-
sis “definitely affects everybody in the
family; it affects what you are able to
do, how quickly you can do something,”
she adds. “But everybody has some-
thing in their family that’s unique.”
Adapting to a chronic illness doesn’t
To take a peek at our cover
photo shoot on Cape Cod,
visit
Adapting to a chronic illness is a lifelong
process, experts say. First, patients and families must deal
with the shock and logistics of a new diagnosis, whether
that means diet changes and medication for someone with
diabetes or driving restrictions for someone with epilepsy.
Then, after an initial adjustment period, families facing
chronic illness must learn to function without the disease’s
monopolizing everyone’s attention. “Chronic illness has a
tendency to have an insidious effect on all family dynam-
ics,” says Barry J. Jacobs, Psy.D., author of The Emotional
Survival Guide for Caregivers. “If a family isn’t careful, the
disease becomes their central organizing force.”
At first Cohen and Vieira may have taken this caution
to an extreme: They didn’t discuss
BEHIND-THE-SCENES
AARP.ORG/VIEIRA.
