Executive coaching and development has been outstanding (even with commuting to California regularly) until this July when it slowed and remains slow. Traditionally, the summer has not been a slow period for me. Difficult to know if I should relax and enjoy the much-needed downtime or stay awake every night contemplating which bridge I should jump off. Throgs Neck and Tappan Zee are the leading contenders. They are the most scenic.
Not long after—exhausted by a weather-plagued journey that resulted in “three days in the air going nowhere,” for a client who didn’t show up once Michelle had reached her destination, “Idaho freaking Falls”—she made the decision to eliminate travel from her schedule. She was tired of the chase and sick of pushing back on the jerks who reclined in front of her in coach class. But in downsizing her business, she more or less sealed its fate. Traveling was as essential to Michelle’s work as it was to mine. Clients began to drift away; relationships dried up. Without ever formally announcing her retirement, she began transitioning into the next phase of her life. She handled it not without any wistfulness, or worry, but mostly with the same pragmatism that she had handled every other situation she’d been faced with. With the time and freedom to do what she pleased, she gradually replaced professional hours with personal interests. Before too long, she was thinking, Isn’t this wonderful?
Almost fifteen years after her last company report was filed, she still claimed never to have been bored a day in her life. And even without ownership of Knicks tickets, there still were games, always the games—the Knicks or whatever else the NBA served up on its partner networks—to get her through dark winter nights.
Like anyone else, she experienced bouts of frustration, of sorrow. I remained convinced that her brief depression during the 2017–18 holidays was the residual effect of no longer going regularly to the Garden. But she clearly had moved on from that emotional rut and was back to embracing the belief that having a clean daily slate was the upside of aging, the comforting freedom to take life one day at a time, while trying not to dwell on what was too far ahead.
Who at a certain age, she asked when I expressed fears about not being able to read or write in the future, is guaranteed anything more than what they are doing in the moment? Which got me to thinking: Who more than the young athletes I had been covering for decades was at the mercy of limited time, of their bodies being one ligament tear from career limbo, or worse?
Just weeks before Bruni’s column appeared, Michelle’s newest favorite Knick, Kristaps Porzingis, had landed with a thud and fallen awkwardly to the Garden floor, curled up in the fetal position. Had she been in her courtside seat that night, she would have had a perfect view of the crash—Porzingis cutting down the lane, taking a bounce pass, dunking in the basket nearest the Knicks’ bench over Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, another of the league’s rising young international stars. But she was on her living room sofa, watching the heartbreaking replays of Porzingis’s left knee tearing to shreds. Even at home, there was no escaping the Knicks’ rotten luck and no missing the sad irony—along with the one tiny measure of wicked satisfaction—of the injury occurring practically at the feet of James Dolan.
I was in South Florida visiting a friend and was alerted to Porzingis’s injury on Twitter soon after it happened. On cue, an email arrived the next morning from Michelle: “BERNARD KING ALL OVER AGAIN.” Yes, and no. Advances in surgical technique had greatly improved the odds of complete recovery after what typically was a year of recovery and rehab for a torn ACL. But questions loomed—would Porzingis return with the same uncommon athleticism for a man seven foot three? Would he run and jump with carefree abandon? Who knew? But Bruni’s column, lovingly shared by Michelle, offered needed perspective. A filmmaker whose documentary had chronicled his vision loss from glaucoma told Bruni, “You cannot spend your life preparing for future losses.” Bruni himself concluded, “It disrespects the blessings of the here and now.”
Michelle’s email about the Bruni column was part of her ongoing campaign to impress upon me the state of uncertainty in which we all lived. Bruni, a decade younger, clearly agonized over the possibility of losing his career. For me, at a later stage, uncertainty about my physical condition influenced my thoughts about when the right time would be to discontinue my full-time journalist’s life.
I had relished my many years of covering sports—the unmatched drama, the possibility every night of witnessing something special. As a Times columnist, I had especially grown to appreciate the power of sports to address social and cultural issues, far more than using my forum for screeds to fire the coach.
The upscale readership I had once feared would reject me as not smart or informed enough had—for the most part—accepted me as part of its daily consumption of sports commentary. Yet working in a world of mind-numbingly rich young people who were less and less receptive to the idea of reporters nosing around required a growing, gnawing suspension of reality. They and their handlers, more and more mainly interested in speaking in clichés for the television cameras, dictated the terms. I was tiring of those terms and of airports—security lines, delays, cancellations, leg room for Lilliputians. When the Times offered buyouts from late spring into the summer of 2016, only months after my eye diagnosis and weeks after my first injection, the deal was too tempting to pass up.
Would I have reached the same conclusion had I
