Journalist, 'My Cancer' Blogger Leroy Sievers Dies

Journalist Leroy Sievers, who covered wars, genocides and natural disasters in more than a dozen countries — and who chronicled life after his cancer diagnosis for NPR on-air and online — died Friday. He was 53.

For 14 years, Sievers worked at ABC News' Nightline, spending his last four years with the program as its executive producer.

Earlier, he worked for nearly 10 years at CBS News. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, he began his career at KTVU-TV in Oakland, Calif.

In more than 25 years as a working journalist, Sievers covered conflicts in Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia, Kosovo, El Salvador and Nicaragua, among other countries.

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he was embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division alongside Nightline anchor Ted Koppel. And it was Sievers who was responsible for "The Fallen," Nightline's 2004 tribute to those who died in the ongoing Iraq war.

After leaving Nightline, Sievers became a guest lecturer at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, and he returned to Africa for Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group.

For the Discovery Channel, again working with Koppel, he produced Our Children's Children's War, a special report on the long-term implications of the war on terrorism.

In his quarter-century career, Sievers won 12 national news Emmys, two George Foster Peabody Awards and two Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Awards.

A Diagnosis, And A Decision

Sievers was first treated for colon cancer in 2001. Four years later, the cancer returned, this time in his brain and lung. Doctors told him he probably had less than six months to live.

Instead, for 2 1/2 years, he was able to treat the cancer with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.

As he began chemotherapy treatments, Sievers detailed his experiences on NPR's Morning Edition, in a commentary that aired Feb. 16, 2006.

Ellen McDonnell, NPR's morning-programming director, recalls listening to that first commentary, and she remembers how the rawness and transparency of Sievers' words struck a chord with listeners — those battling cancer, and others as well.

Several months after the first commentary came a second, and then a regular series chronicling Sievers' life in what he called "Cancer World."

Eventually, under the title "My Cancer," the project would become a multimedia conversation that included a daily blog, a weekly podcast and — most important to Sievers — a community.

"Leroy gave voice to a topic that we are very uncomfortable with — death and dying," McDonnell said. "My Cancer had a face and a heart and a smile."

In his radio essays, in his podcast commentaries and on the blog, Sievers addressed the polite silences that surround cancer. He described his early internal debates about whether it was worth it to buy new pants and shoes. He spoke frankly about his hope that he would live long enough to read the final installment in the Harry Potter series.

(He did, reporting avidly on the 759-page volume in a blog post written late at night, immediately after he finished the book.)

In the summer of 2008, a week before his 53rd birthday, Sievers learned that the cancer he had kept at bay for so long had "exploded" throughout his body. His doctors told him that they had run out of treatment options.

Courage To Face Horrors, And An Appetite For Small Joys

A towering man at 6 foot 5, Sievers once wrote that he wasn't "particularly graceful." Yet there was a grace in the frankness with which he observed the world.

In 1994, in the final days of the Rwandan genocide, Sievers traveled with a Nightline crew to the sprawling, cholera-plagued refugee camps on Rwanda's border.

There were no roads, no paths — just tens of thousands of people, barely living and already dead, lying "head to toe in a lava field," as Sievers wrote in an article for the Los Angeles Times Magazine. As he and his crew picked their way through, he felt a movement at his feet.

"I looked down and saw a small boy," Sievers wrote. "He looked to be about 5, which meant he was probably 10. Malnutrition will do that."