Original Video - More videos at TinyPic
欢迎大家批评指正.
But the greatest test of my resilience wasn’t professional. It was intensely personal.
In 1997 I had a fantastic career, a wonderful, intelligent hu*****and and two healthy daughters who were one and five at the time. I felt happy and complete.
Then, in an instant…everything changed.
In April of that year, Jay Monahan, my hu*****and was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. My life as I imagined it was crumbling before my eyes. But every day during his nine-month battle, I was in awe of his extraordinary courage and grace. And every day I felt like there was a vice around my heart.
On January 24, 1998, Jay collapsed in the bathroom and died on the way to the hospital.
Suddenly, I was a single mom and a member of a club I never in a million years anticipated joining, certainly not at that age. I was a widow. It felt so weird to even say the word.
In the months after Jay’s death I was inundated with books about grief and how to deal with it. But I derived the most strength from a simple quote by none other than Thomas Jefferson, who said, “The earth belongs to the living.” And I had to go on living. I had to for my daughters.
And thankfully, I had a job that enabled me to turn my grief into advocacy.
At the "Today" Show I had a built-in bully pulpit which allowed me to educate the public about colon cancer and try to prevent other families from enduring the heartaches, heartache ours had.
I wanted…no, needed…to share what I had learned…that colorectal cancer is the second leading cancer killer of men and women in this country, but with early detection, it has a better than 90 percent cure rate.
My on air colonoscopy brought whole new meaning to the expression "up close and personal." As a result though, there was a twenty percent increase in the procedure, and that meant, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives saved. Researchers at the University of Michigan called it the Couric Effect. But I call it the Jay Monahan Effect.
Nearly four years after Jay died, I lost my sister Emily to pancreatic cancer. As some of you might know, she was a state senator representing Charlottesville, and many predicted she would one day be the first female governor of Virginia. I can tell you honestly, she was the real star of our family. Emily cared deeply about education, about the underserved, and when she was diagnosed with cancer, she began, in typical fashion, to think of ways she could help other people fighting this disease. The Emily Couric Clinical Cancer Center here at the University is a beautiful and bittersweet tribute to someone else who had so much left to do...and so much more to give.
Life can deal you some crushing blows and we all need a deep reserve of resilience to survive. Losing someone is also a reminder that life is short...and fragile. We're all terminal. And that's why we have to be grateful for the time we have and savor the joy that comes our way.
选择“Disable on www.wenxuecity.com”
选择“don't run on pages on this domain”
