Peter Jennings' Candor

The Boston Herald

The news that Peter Jennings has cancer shouldn't come as a shock. Cancer is our number two killer, second only to heart disease. It's everywhere. Babies get it. Old people get it. It doesn't discriminate.

But Jennings - lean, ageless, impeccable, a fixture - seemed untouchable.

The Johnny Carson of broadcasters, someone once called him. The king of nightly news.

Now the king is sick.

I wish he weren't. But I love that despite his beginning chemotherapy next week, he isn't slinking off to do his fighting behind closed doors, that he didn't say the other night when he announced that he has lung cancer, “This is it. So long. It's been a good run.’' Because so many sick people do just that. ``I don't want them to see me this way. I want them to remember me on top of my game.’’

So they go away.

We segregate our sick, our old and our infirm in this country, not just physically in buildings, but emotionally. We tip-toe around illness and death.  “You're doing so well. You look great. Hang in there.'' Denying mortality. Denying the fact of all of our lives.

On television it's eternal health and youth, even when health is compromised and youth is gone. Both can be reinvented, for a while anyway.

In movies and magazines it's the same thing, perfection in every shot, on every page.

And when there isn't perfection? We camouflage. By all the things that reflect our lives - by all the mirrors we hold up and look into - an alien visiting this planet would think that human beings lived fit and healthy forever.

The struggle to live is something we don't see much of outside of hospitals. Most of television, except for the occasional documentary, deals in invention or docudrama, the sick and the dying made up to look sick, but health emanating.

We'll see Jennings live, struggling, in real time, for who knows for how long. ``I will continue to do the broadcast on good days. My voice will not always be like this.'' Who knows how much cancer will change him?

But it seems it already has. At the end of his announcement Tuesday, Jennings mused, “I wonder if other men and women ask their doctors right away, `OK, Doc, when does the hair go?' ‘'

See, I'm just like you, he was saying. I'm vain and I'm scared but here I am and here I'll remain for as long as I can. There is more than a good work ethic and good looks and dignity to this man.

There is courage, too.

“Almost 10 million Americans are already living with cancer and I have a lot to learn from them,'' Jennings said.

And we have a lot to learn from him:

Don't hide. Don't pretend. Continue to stay in our lives and let us stay in yours.