Reporter Survives War, Now Faces Cancer From A Place Of Love

You can find Rod Nordland’s book “Waiting For The Monsoon” here. You can learn more about Leila Segal and her book “Breathe: Stories From Cuba” here.

TRANSCRIPT

Life Interrupted

In the summer of 2019 Rod Nordland, author of the just released memoir “Waiting for the Monsoon,” was reporting in India when something traumatic happened that would change his life forever. On the morning of July 5th he went out for a jog.

ROD: All I remember is I was jogging in the park and then suddenly I was in the hospital. I had no idea why.

He had what appeared to be a seizure. A good samaritan found him thrashing on the ground and got him into an ambulance.

His partner Leila Segal received a phone call from the hospital.

LEILA: And it was one of his colleagues at the bureau. And she said to me that Rod had an accident and he was in the ICU in a coma and I couldn't really take it in. It was so shocking because he was absolutely invincible. Nothing ever happened to Rod no matter what danger he was in. It was something I'd come to trust even though he was often abroad in quite perilous settings.

ROD: She got there just in time. I was trying to escape my hospital bed. And she helped the nurses restrain me. Leila had to tell me five times that I had a brain tumor because the hospital there insisted on family members telling their loved ones that. The doctors didn't. And every time she told me, I promptly fell asleep and forgot it until the next time. LEILA: And I had to tell him again. ROD: That must’ve been so horrendous for you.

Eventually he was flown to a hospital in New York, where they scheduled surgery on his 70th birthday. His doctor told Rod he had glioblastoma, a malignant, incurable grade 4 cancer. He’d extracted a mass the size of a lime from Rod’s brain. 

ROD: I woke up at some point to see all of my children and most of my loved ones, my closest friends, all gathered around my bed and a lot of them crying. And it was so moving. It was so moving. I felt like I'd been given a great gift to know that I was so deeply loved, especially my children who had been alienated from me.

LEILA: We all came together, didn't we, as a family? ROD: Yeah. LEILA: I mean people say these kind of things can bring out the worst and the best in people and I think it brought out the best in all of us.

Rod was told he had 15 months to live. That was almost five years ago. He called the day of his surgery the first day of his second life – one that he chose to live from a place of love. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

Survived Childhood 

From a young age New York Times war correspondent Rod Nordland learned how to survive the darkest of times. 

His father physically abused his mother. And as the oldest of six, Rod felt defensive of her.

ROD: My mother and I were extremely close…We had a very, I guess, intimate relationship. We would stay up late at night together, talking until like two, three in the morning, and she pretty much shared everything with me from a very early age.

Rod’s parents eventually divorced. His father neglected to pay child support and was later convicted of sexual abuse towards other children.

ROD: I think it was more growing up in a middle class, upper middle class suburb full of kids who compared to me were kind of rich. I just felt very keenly the injustice of that… We didn't have a father in our lives, so that reduced our mother to extreme poverty. And it was just unjust. 

Going After The Bullies

Rod grew up feeling invincible. In middle school he matured faster than the other boys and used his size to his advantage. He became a street fighter, hustling pool and beating up bullies. One time he knocked a kid out by punching him in the throat.

ROD: I learned to my horror a bit later from a friend who's an MD that that punch actually can be fatal to the victim. And I could have killed that kid. And that really was a wake up call for me. I certainly didn't like the guy, but I didn't wish him dead.

In high school Rod was full of rage at his father, at his mother’s poverty, and at privilege. A high school English teacher praised his writing and eventually Rod decided to channel his rage and fight injustice with his words.

ROD: I think it fueled me in the sense that it made me feel that I had no other mission in life than to settle that score and to right that wrong to the extent that I could. 

He landed his first reporting job at the Philadelphia Inquirer. After Rod covered the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant meltdown, his editor sent him to report on the death of the pope. Rod fell in love with his work as a foreign correspondent and over four decades he lived in 150 different countries covering wars in Cambodia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. 

In East Timor Rod had heard reports of famine on the island that was trying to break away and establish independence from Indonesia. A general stopped Rod from going to report on it. That is until Rod helped the general with his golf game.

ROD: I gave this general some lessons in putting and chipping. And he felt that he did so well that we were like...asshole buddies or something. And he said, ‘is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all?’ I said, ‘yeah, you can give me a helicopter and send me into East Timor.’ He said, ‘done.’ And that’s what happened. And so I had a list of towns from the aid agencies that were particularly badly hit by the famine and then I would pick out a couple of them to interview. 

The escort who was assigned to Rod tried to censor the farmers he interviewed.

ROD: I would say, ‘how's the food situation?’ And the colonel would say, ‘tell them it's fine, you’re a little bit short this year, but by next year the harvest will be better.’ So that's what he told me. It was unbelievable. And that's what I reported. I think I made fools of the whole lot of them. 

Rod says he gravitated toward stories about the vulnerable – whether it was the mistreatment of boys at a juvenile detention center, or the abuse of women soldiers. When he worked for the New York Times, he convinced the news organization to hire an Afghan woman reporter, who Rod mentored.

He became the bureau chief  in six different war zones for Newsweek and the Times.

ROD: …which meant I had the responsibility for the people in that bureau. And it was a responsibility I took very seriously. I had learned some important lessons as a war reporter over the years. And one of them was to stay away from the fucking front line…Your first responsibility is to live long enough to write the story. 

Somewhere between Lebanon and Bosnia, Rod met and married Sheila. Together they had three children before separating in 2006. He managed to be home for the birth of each one. They later divorced.

PTSD

In 2007 Rod was assigned to cover the war in Iraq. He and a photographer were working on a story about soldier post traumatic stress disorder, when someone suggested they take the test to see if they had PTSD.

ROD: They suggest that we take the test because we had spent our lives covering wars. And so we did. And we both scored moderate to severe on their screening scale.

The protocol then was to go to counseling, so he did.

ROD: After a week of therapy, the therapist kind of threw her hands up and said, ‘I don't see any sign that you've been traumatized by war. You're used to it, you spent a lot of time with it, and I just don't think that's your issue. Your issue is in your childhood, and you should get therapy for what happened to you in your childhood.’

But it wasn’t until years later, when his sister died of alcohol abuse, that Rod decided to get help.

ROD: It was a horrible death because she had just qualified for a liver transplant and she got a new liver, which is really hard to get, especially if you're a former alcoholic. And she did. So she was one year with her new liver, which is, you know the make or break point. She started drinking again… It was so tragic, really tragic. That kind of saved my life. It made me realize that I had some of the same habits that she did. 

Rod stopped cold turkey and went to counseling. 

Meeting Leila

In 2016 Rod was promoting his book “The Lovers: Afghanistan’s Romeo And Juliet, The True Story Of How They Defied Their Families And Escaped An Honor Killing.” He was in London at Reuters TV waiting to be interviewed, when he noticed a tall woman. She was there to promote her book of short stories about Cuba called “Breathe.” 

LEILA: We met in the green room. 

ROD: (Laughs)

LEILA: Yeah, and he started talking to me... 

ROD: And my opening line was, I'm sick and tired of green rooms that aren't green. 

LEILA: We became inseparable very quickly. Yeah.

LAUREL: You knew right away.

LEILA: Yeah, we did. On our first date actually he announced his intentions over dinner.

Rod says they both felt seen and understood in a way they hadn’t before.

ROD: I think when we met there was an almost instant attraction, and it was based on our realization of each other's hurt and pain. 

LEILA: I was so drawn towards his strength you know and his strength had come from surviving. He had this incredible resilience and yet he needed me and I think it was that combination that was…finally I felt sheltered. I felt safe, I felt sheltered, which is the most healing thing anyone can do for you.

They got an apartment in London, where they lived when Rod wasn’t on assignment. His children had blamed him for the breakup of the marriage. Now they resented his new relationship and refused to visit. 

ROD: It was heartbreaking.

‘Second Life’

Rod and Leila had been together three years when Rod discovered he had brain cancer.

During treatment he set about writing his memoir “After the Monsoon,” revisiting his life, and repairing his relationships with his children. He could see how the things that made him a great reporter – being decisive and intimidating – kept him from close connections with his ex-wife and kids. Now he visits with his children frequently.

ROD: I do feel like I've kind of been given a second chance in life. 

One day during recovery he went for a walk, when he was knocked down by an electric bike. His spine was fractured in three places.

ROD: And I was in such terrible agony for a long time, for like months, and I sought out other kinds of treatment because my doctors wouldn't give me Percocet, because I had told them early on, ‘whatever you do, don't give me any opioids because I'm a highly addictive personality.’ 

Instead he and Leila took a mindfulness-based stress reduction course and learned to meditate.

LEILA: His favorite meditation is loving kindness, which is amazing and his children just couldn't believe it he was like tough guy. 

‘Fredney’

On top of Rod’s new outlook on life, Leila says the cancer and the treatments have changed him in so many other ways.

LEILA: The treatment for this cancer creates cognitive changes. Frontal lobe damage has made Rod a lot more emotionally labile and vulnerable, disinhibited. And he's talking in ways he never would have talked to me before. His openness, his willingness to confront his feelings. And I think that's led him to this kind of richness of life that didn't exist before. I mean maybe it's rebuilt your trust in the world.

ROD: I think learning to love and express love was a very important part of my second life. And that's why I so often say that I'm grateful for the tumor, because it gave that back to me.

LEILA: I mean, although it's been terrible, I wouldn't change it back. Even though I was in love with him and I loved him before, I would never have got the relationship I now have with this man unless this had happened, not only to him, to me too, because of course I've had to change. 

LAUREL: I just wonder if that, if you were afraid to get close with people.

ROD: Yeah, I think I was. Before Leila I had maybe five loves. And each of them in turn, for different reasons, dumped me and I kinda came to expect that. But with Leila, I soon realized that would just never happen. She is the most true blue person I know.

LAUREL: What do you think it was about Leila that made you feel safe and like you could trust her?

ROD: Well, her absolute and total honesty and...And she just gave so much. And I felt that I'd never been loved so well. 

Throughout Rod’s recovery, he’d meet new people. So as a good reporter does, he’d interview them. There was one particular question he sought the answer to.

ROD: They would say, ‘is there anything else we can do for you?’ And I'd say, ‘yeah, you can tell me the meaning of life.’ And the best answer I had was this lady who, in a very heavy Texas drawl, said, ‘honey, you think if I knew the answer to that, I'd be working for 15 dollars an hour in a call center?’ (laughs) And then I made the mistake of asking one of my nurses, and she came right back at me, ‘okay, so what's your answer?’ And I couldn't think of an answer. I said, ‘I'm going to have to punt. I'm sorry. I'm just going to quote this poem by Raymond Carver, which is kind of my answer.’

Carver wrote this poem when he was dying of lung cancer:

“And did you get what 

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself 

beloved on this earth.” 

Rod remembers the day his publisher called to tell him his manuscript had been accepted. His editor took Rod and Leila to lunch to celebrate and to ask some questions, specifically about the dedication.

ROD: He said the copy editors were trying to find the spelling for Fredney. They either want to find it in a dictionary or find it in a published use…You can't find any example of it because there isn't one. Leila and I, that's a neologism that we made up …It comes from my full first name, Rodney, and her nickname, which is Freddie. So that's kind of the first time that we, that became publicly a name that described our couplehood, I guess you could say. And that was a real kind of turning point for us. It's like our safe word. If we're having a fight, one of us will say, ‘are we Fredney?’ And the other one will usually say, ‘yes, we're Fredney.’

LEILA: I can't even imagine how he has found strength, emotional energy to have the relationship with me because honestly, I've been distraught and beside myself. So he's somehow inspired in me, the belief in myself…I don't think I'd have resources to encourage another person with their own struggle. I really wouldn't… And remember that's why we fell in love because he understood my vulnerability and my need, which I had never met, had met that in any relationship before. I'd never, no one had ever understood or seen that part of me before. And he still sees it.

ROD: I think if you've made the decision that you love somebody, it's a huge decision. And if you express it to them, then it becomes kind of on one level, official. And I think you just need to hold on to that. And when things go belly up, just find your way back to it.

LEILA: No matter what happens to you, you can return to the place where you found love if you want to. I think it's about wanting to. Because both of us want to. You know we've come close to breaking up, we've had terrible, terrible sort of meltdowns and arguments but neither of us ever wanted to break up. So isn't that what it is? What loving is about an active choice. 

Rod coined this phrase, ‘chit chat and chuckles.’ So we always used to relax just before we went to sleep…because there's an element of adopting these roles, you know, like I'm, I've adopted a role where I'm sorting things out and I'm helping him and I'm like, oh, I'm doing all the paperwork and I'm going to fight for this particular coverage with insurance or this drug…And then you just realize when you go to bed and you lie down and suddenly you're just, you're being silly, you're joking, you find that part where you're back to who you have always been. And it's like Fredney, you know, you have a thing that you hold onto. It's almost like a talisman and you come back to that thing. 

Leila says Rod is so imaginative he creates by dreaming things into reality.

LEILA: So he did the same thing after he was diagnosed with illness. He kept talking about our future. You know, he believed that we would go to live in Capri where we've had the most, our most precious holiday and time. We climbed an enormous mountain that he always had wanted to climb. He kept talking about it to me. And in the beginning I was cynical and I remember I thought oh he's in denial and he has to be real …and I was annoyed and frustrated. And now I've come to understand that life, that's everything in life, you know you wake up every morning and you imagine reality. You just imagine it and whatever you imagine, actually you will create it. 

“You Came Back”

LAUREL: I can't help but think that it's almost like you've fallen in love with two versions of this man.

LEILA:I mean, honestly, that is what my book's about. My book's called, ‘You Came Back.’ My book's about a consideration of love in the face of terminal illness. And I really had to really had to fall in love with him again because he changed so radically and our life changed so radically. ROD: Well, the drugs had a huge impact on my personality and behavior. LEILA: It's hard to sort of tease apart. I mean, we both went through a huge trauma. It's a very, this type of illness, any family who goes through it will say that the trauma, it's a very sudden overnight trauma…But then I mean I did. We fell in love with each other again. And so this is the story that I'm interested in for myself is this process of how the kind of constancy of a human being, despite the change of even parts of their brain and their personality. There's an essence that remains, which is why it's called, ‘You Came Back,’ because actually that's what he said to me when I arrived in Delhi, when he was in the ICU and he woke up, he said to me, ‘you came back,’ but also for me, he came back.

Leila and Rod agree that this struggle in a way is similar to war reporting.

Rod approaches this job – the job of surviving – with the same amount of tenacity, even signing up for clinical trials.

LEILA: People who participate in clinical trials do better than those who don't. Even if the trial is ineffective there's something about the amount of attention that the person gets from doctors and also something about the hopeful, optimistic act…We want to live and those who want to live, their bodies respond accordingly and they solve, they somehow mysteriously on a cellular level find ways to beat invaders and solve problems. 

ROD: Yeah, this one particular study talked to people like me who had a terminal incurable cancer or other disease, but didn't believe they would die of it. I don't think I'm gonna die of this cancer. 

LEILA: Once you come to terms with your death being on the horizon, you put aside the persona of the world and it's almost a relief it's like taking off a coat that you've had to be forced to wear all your life.

LAUREL: Instead of the armor. 

LEILA: The illness gradually removes layers of the worldly clothing and we come closer and closer to some kind of source. And I feel Rod has done that, which is why he said to me last night as we were going to sleep I feel that I'm on an adventure of love.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.