The truth was that the sports-media landscape had changed entirely in just a few short years. The smart, nuanced, well-reported column was still for me as a reader the best anchor to a sports section or site—and there remained plenty of damn good ones around the country. But as online metrics raised the profile of the news-breaking, sport-specific insider, the generalist had become a hunted species by editors wielding the ax under never-ending pressure to reduce staff. In the age of social media and the continuous reel of cable network yak-fests, quick takes were the rage. To survive, much less thrive, the conventional newspaper columnist needed to be part journalist, part self-promoter—a brand with a mass following on Twitter and, ideally, multiple platforms. There had been a time during the nineties when opportunities to transition into television presented themselves, but that wasn’t for me. I was on the road too much as it was. When I was home, I preferred to spend nights reading to my young boys, not sitting in a green room waiting to regurgitate what I’d already written in a column.
Now, I had lost the Sports of the Times column, but I had also come unstuck from a state of complacency—and in turn was inspired to the most productive years of my career. With renewed energy, I began teaching journalism classes as an adjunct at Montclair State University. I wrote a book on the championship Knicks teams of the seventies—with Michelle’s name appearing on the dedication page—that became an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary film. An A-1 Times feature story I wrote on the loving intergenerational relationship between the Yankees greats Yogi Berra and Ron Guidry led to a book that became a Times bestseller. A novel I had finished a rough first draft of—a father-son story based on the Daily News strike—was published by a small press after a rigorous reimagining and rewriting. In a fairly accurate measure of her loyalty as well as my proficiency at fiction, Michelle bought enough copies to account for roughly half the sales.
Still, a published novel, regardless of how successful, was a bucket list item for me, one I was hugely proud of. “So what are you going to complain about now?” Michelle cracked while she had me sign copies for her family and friends. I laughed and admitted, if only for the moment, “I got nothing.”
In any honest retrospective, the loss of the column was certainly no reward and no trivial matter in the context of what it had represented to have written it in the first place. But what had occurred in the aftermath and the eventual reversal of fortune was my reward for rejecting both martyrdom and fear. For playing the hand I was dealt, as best I could—and for heeding the advice of the woman who had survived her share of strife, pretty much on her own, with the help of a psychiatrist but without the benefit of a special friend like herself.
What Michelle had learned, and what she routinely reminded me, was: “Complaining is a waste of time—and it gets you nowhere.”
• • • • •
Though she continued to claim that her cognitive skills were eroding and her memory failing, Michelle was still reading, still contemplating, still making connections. On the morning of February 27, 2018, she emailed me.
HI HARVEY . . . BE SURE TO READ, IF YOU ALREADY HAVEN’T, THE SUNDAY REVIEW SECTION—FIRST PAGE. ‘AM I GOING BLIND,’ BY FRANK BRUNI.
I had, in fact, already read Bruni’s column in the Times, in which he disclosed that he suffered from a rare condition that in all likelihood had permanently compromised the vision in his right eye, leaving him feeling, as he wrote, “drunk without being drunk, dizzy but not exactly dizzy.” The headline had leapt off my computer screen and filled me with a familiar dread. Bruni, one of the newspaper’s Op-Ed regulars, was fifty-three when he was diagnosed with nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, which affects one in ten thousand Americans. Without warning, a man whose life was invested in printed and digitized words was calculating the chances—roughly 20 percent—that the condition could eventually afflict his left eye as well. In other words, that he could go blind. As it turned out, I now lived with the same fear.
My condition was the far more common macular degeneration, which attacks the central vision of people typically over fifty in stages—early, intermediate, and advanced. In early 2016, months shy of my sixty-fourth birthday, my optometrist had delivered the frightening news about a sudden slight blurring in my right eye.
“You won’t get that back,” she told me. Over time, she added, because macular degeneration is a progressive disease typically found in both eyes, my vision would likely be further compromised.
“How long?” I asked.
“Impossible to know,” she said.
She promised only that my life would not soon change, but that reassuring prognosis did not last long. Three months later, I was covering the 2016 NBA Finals in Oakland when straight lines on my computer screen began to flutter. Newspaper print appeared to be dancing. At a pre-series press conference, NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s face vanished into a featureless gray canvas when someone blocked my left line of vision to the front of the room.
Terrified, I flew home and learned that my condition had converted from dry macular degeneration—a general atrophying that normally takes years to worsen—to what is known as the wet version. Leaky blood vessels left unattended would cause scarring and accelerated blindness if I wasn’t immediately treated. This meant injections into my eye several times a year for the rest of my life. As if that wasn’t awful enough,
