She has blond hair, blue eyes, a tiny nose, high cheekbones, flawless tanned skin, and a slim build with broad shoulders that flare down in a V-shape to her waist, where long legs stretch to the ground. Her physicality isn’t what comes to mind when I envision an oracle. But I have come to visit her in the hope that she is one.
So while most people spotting a tank-top-clad Brittany Daniel walking in flip-flops across her condominium courtyard in Marina del Rey might see a genetically blessed actress, I see something less obvious. In Brittany, I see a vision of death—and that’s why I have come to see her.
“Hey!” she says, greeting me with a hug, holding on extra long. When she lets go, I hold her by the outside of her arms and scan her.
“You look great!” I say.
“Thank you,” Brittany replies, looking shyly down at the ground.
I’m not handing her a hollow Hollywood compliment. Given what she has endured, the fact that she is alive, let alone looking so tan and healthy, is a miracle.
A former teen star from her days as a cheerleader (with her twin sister) on the mid-1990s TV show Sweet Valley High, Brittany had gone on to a successful acting career as an adult, something not very easy to do. I’ve seen so many young stars struggle to make the transition, but she did. Brittany starred in the show Dawson’s Creek, famously played David Spade’s girlfriend in the two Joe Dirt movies, made Stuff magazine’s list of the “Hottest Women in the World” and hilariously nailed her role with the Wayans brothers in White Chicks.
By the time I met her in 2007, Brittany had joined the cast of the popular sitcom The Game. A reporter who worked with me at Us Weekly had introduced us because Brittany, as much an athlete as an actress, was putting together a team to compete in a celebrity triathlon in Malibu. Brittany invited me to join. At the time, my hockey-injured hip had not yet grown too stiff and I could run four days a week, so I agreed to do the race. We were never super-close friends, but we trained together a few times with the team and got along really well.
Most actors tend to be typecast, a product of casting directors who look at actors sort of like a cup of Starbucks coffee: They want to know exactly what they’re gonna taste every time. In Brittany’s case, her type had become the sexy, sassy blonde.
But in real life Brittany was thoughtful, introverted, and far from a little sassy pants. She was always interested in my brain tumor, how I overcame it, and expressed a lot of support for me overcoming it and being so open about my experience. She even appeared at some events I held to raise money for a charity I had started for brain-tumor survivors. I went on to work at E! News and ran into Brittany a few times at some charity events and parties, where she was always kind and genuine, but otherwise I didn’t see her very often. Yet such is the Hollywood lifestyle. I liken it to riding an elevator and at each floor some people get on and off, but you stay on. You might work with someone on a project for a few months and be close friends, but then never see them again after it wraps. The fact that I have had the same daily workplace at E! for almost ten years is quite rare. Most performers and media professionals operate in a series of temporary work situations akin to one-night stands.
In 2011, Brittany got a blood test done hoping to find out why she had constant flu-like symptoms, night sweats, and why her lower back hurt so bad she couldn’t sit for any extended period of time without coming to tears in pain. She assumed she had a virus and could get some medicine and move on with it. Instead, the tests came back positive for cancer. Brittany, at age thirty-four, found out she had stage IV non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Malignant tumors filled her abdominal cavity and had already spread throughout her body into her lymph nodes.
When I heard the bad news from our mutual friend, Heather, I called and texted Brittany several times for weeks. She never replied.
“Why won’t Brittany return my calls?” I finally asked Heather.
“She’s probably just overwhelmed,” Heather said. “She just needs time to process everything.”
Or maybe, I feared, she was just afraid I would want to report the news, which she had been keeping private. It’s a job hazard when you’re a journalist in this town, where many times I have thought I was a “friend” of a celebrity only to find out they always saw me more as a reporter.
I kept track of her progress through Heather. She had surgery last week…another round of chemo…she’s cancer-free. But Britt and I hadn’t talked since her diagnosis. Here was a survivor, someone who had endured a life-threatening illness. In my experience, people who stare death in the face and live to tell about it come back with spiritual insights and perspectives others don’t have. They are gifts to the rest of us; they are living resources.
So, nearly five years after her diagnosis, I have reached out to Brittany at a time when I am not letting my fears keep me from reaching out to people.
“Let’s walk up to my place,” Brittany tells me, closing the courtyard gate. “I ordered some food for us.”
I follow her up the stairs to her two-bedroom condo overlooking the marina. It’s a sunny spring afternoon and the sea air blows in through the sliding glass windows from her balcony. I settle down on the couch as she makes tea in the kitchen, updating me on how she has been working on a reality-show idea and spending time just chilling with her new boyfriend and is hoping to get engaged. After spending the last few years fighting for her life, now she’s able to enjoy it.
“So how’ve you been, Mr. Baker?” she asks.
“Honestly, I’ve had a lot of anxiety. I mean, a lot. I just feel, like, totally unanchored and stressed.”
Britt’s forehead furrows with concern. “I’m sorry, Ken. What’s stressing you out?”
“Lately? Seems like everything. I worry nonstop. About the kids, about work stuff, about my marriage, about my health.”
“Have you seen a doctor?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, uncomfortable that this interview has turned on to me. “Just had a physical and everything checks out fine.”
“So it’s a mental thing?”
“Sort of, yeah. I guess so.” I sigh. “But I think it’s deeper than that. I’ve gone to a therapist and we talk about all sorts of stuff. It helps. But what I’ve realized is that the source of my problem is much deeper, it’s much more on a spiritual level. You know?”
Britt nods supportively. “They say anxiety is an emotion that comes from fear,” she says. “So what most scares you?”
I shake my head.
“Why are you shaking your head?” she asks.
“Because I feel so silly talking about being scared to someone who had cancer.”
“But facing your fears helps you overcome them,” she says. “I was very scared of cancer. But I faced it. Now I am not. So tell me, Ken, what scares you the most?”
“I’m scared of dying, being alone, getting sick.” I look up at heaven and nothing at the same time. “The unknown, in general.” I shrug. “Those are the biggies.”
“I’m really sorry you have all that hanging on you, Ken.” Britt sits up straight on the couch. “Almost dying made me a better person, took me outside of myself. Becoming more curious is one of the gifts from my cancer.”
“Honestly, that is why I wanted to meet with you,” I say. “I am trying to figure out what I believe. And I was hoping to…”
Brittany laughs. “Go ahead,” she says, sipping her tea. “Ask me anything.”
“Well, I feel like all those things I am afraid of, you have dealt with in a big way.”
“Jeesh!” She sighs. “I’m not dead yet, Ken!”
“Oh my God, I am so sorry, but—”
“I’m just kidding.” She smiles. “I know what you mean. The doctors said that if they hadn’t found the cancer when they did, I would have died within two months. So, yes, you’ve come to the right girl.”
“Then can I ask you: How did having cancer change your relationship with God? Like, I don’t know, did it make you feel more spiritually connected?”
Britt casts a blank stare out past the balcony. I fear I have asked a question that is hard for her.
I nervously add, “I mean, do you even believe in God?”
“I do,” she says sharply. “I was raised Catholic mostly. We would go as a family back in Florida every so often. I did First Communion, but not my Confirmation.”
“Same with me,” I say.
“Yeah, it wasn’t really connecting with me,” she recalls. “I remember at some point when I was little someone telling me that being Catholic meant you couldn’t have sex before marriage and that God would punish you if you did something wrong, and also God didn’t believe in gay marriages and I didn’t like that idea. That seemed so judgmental, and I have always been extremely open-minded. Even though I say all that, I still believed in God. Always did. I just didn’t know the best way to practice that faith.”
“That’s also kind of where I am at right now,” I say.
“You and probably a lot of people,” she says. “It’s funny. I remember moving out to L.A. when I was eighteen. I feel that because I am a Pisces I was really hungry to have a deeper connection with God. And getting into show business I felt I really needed that. If you don’t have faith, it is very hard to survive in this business. There is so much that challenges you.”
“In what way?” I ask. I think I know what you mean, but…”
“First of all, this business can be really hard on your self-esteem. Success can seem completely out of your control all the time, so it helps to believe that somebody else is in ultimate control. For me, it is nice to believe that some higher power has got me covered no matter what. So I had started to really pray and read books and talk to people and basically connect with God, or at least what I knew God to be. And one day a friend gave me a book called Manifest Your Destiny by Wayne Dyer.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s a good book,” I say. “I read that a while ago.”
“Oh my God, yes,” she says. “You should definitely reread it, because it would help you with this journey you are on.”
“I’ve read so many books, Britt,” I say. “I’ve decided that now I need to take more action, to get out of my head and into the world and find my spiritual self through experience.”
“Smart. I just mention that Wayne Dyer book because it was life-changing for me for some reason—the idea that you can manifest things that you want or desire. I felt something shift for me spiritually. That was a couple years after Sweet Valley High. I was, like, twenty-one or twenty-two. At that point, I would say I was not religious, but spiritual. And I would still describe myself that way.”
Brittany stands up and walks toward her balcony. “You wanna get some fresh air?”
“Sure,” I say, following her outside.
We lean on the railing of her balcony, watching a flock of seagulls soaring inland as the sun is starting to drop toward the ocean horizon. Brittany’s attention is fixed out in the Pacific. She seems much more peaceful than when I had last seen her. The girl I remember then was always running around exercising, hustling, driving around L.A. with her busy life.
“You’re different,” I say. “It’s obvious.”
She laughs. “You mean, not as crazy?”
“You’re calmer.”
Brittany smiles and asks, “Do you meditate, Ken?”
“I have but never too seriously,” I reply. “I mean, I’ve used breathing to calm myself and stuff like that. But I never have been able to stick with it. But I’ve started doing yoga again recently, mostly to help calm me and get myself to focus on breathing. That is meditation technically, right?”
“Definitely,” she says.
“Why did you ask me if I am meditating?”
“Because when I read that book I started to do a little bit of meditating. I did that for a little while and I remember that being really helpful for me. I wasn’t taught by a teacher, but learned how to do it in that book. I remember closing my eyes and trying to rest my mind. I was trying to still my thoughts and feelings. Your thoughts and feelings become your reality, and meditation helps you turn off the noise and get in touch with your true self. It helped me and helped my career a lot too.”
“Do you still meditate?” I ask.
“Are you kidding?” Brittany arches her eyebrows and stares at me as if I am nuts. “Every day, usually twice a day. Twenty minutes in the morning and twenty in the evening. It is about quieting the mind and releasing a lot of stress. Honestly, I don’t think I would be here with you right now if I didn’t meditate. It has saved me.”
There’s a knock on the front door; it’s the food-delivery guy.
I head back inside to the couch as Brittany gets the goods and unpacks the veggies and rice she’s ordered. She brings me a plate and joins me on the couch.
“So were you meditating when you were diagnosed?” I ask between bites.
“Actually, no,” she says. “I was at a place where I was kind of neglecting myself. And maybe that is why it happened.”
“Why, what happened?”
“The cancer,” Britt answers. “I was so busy with working and feeling like just in a whirlwind. That was my life. With the cancer I felt kind of smacked upside the head. I was spiritually disconnected at that time. I didn’t have a real spiritual practice. I wasn’t going to a church, wasn’t doing yoga or meditating. I would read spiritual books from time to time, but I didn’t have a spiritual practice. I was in a relationship and focused more on the guy than on myself. In fact, I was focused on everything outside of myself. I wasn’t nourishing my spirit.”
“So you feel like God gave you cancer as a sort of…”
“A wake-up call,” she answers matter-of-factly. “I think I was on a train track and I was rushing really fast in one direction, but I needed to be derailed and put on another train. I feel like God was like, ‘You need to slow down and sit down for two years and look at your life.’ I needed stillness for a while.”
“But didn’t you ever have that ‘Why me?’ kind of moment? Like, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ ”
Britt pauses. After a few seconds of looking down at the floor in thought, she looks at me and says, “Not really. I didn’t go, ‘Why is this happening?’ I was like, ‘OK, I know this is happening for a reason.’ On a spiritual level, I was like, I just need to know why, I wanted the lesson to come through to me. I feel like everything happens for a reason and the whole time I just wanted to know what I needed to learn from it.”
“So what did you learn?” I ask.
She puts her plate down on the coffee table and settles back cross-legged on the couch. “Oh, gosh, Ken—so many things. First of all, it really showed me the importance of my family and really made clear to me that I definitely want a family. And, um, I think it really showed me how much I need other people, the importance of having connection. I know it might sound so simple, but when you get something like cancer you don’t realize how connected we all are. I didn’t share my story for so long with people and then I realized I have to reach out to people and needed to connect with other people and reach out. It just made me realize how much I need people. I am sorry I didn’t tell you or call you back when I was going through it, but that was part of me being closed off. It might not sound like such a big deal, but I am always like, ‘Oh, I can do this on my own.’ But you know what I realized? You can’t do it on your own. When something like this happens, you need everybody.”
She begins to cry. “The cancer was very fast-moving, Ken. I got the MRI results and that very day, the doctors were telling me I had to start chemo the next day. They said that within a couple months, I would die. I needed to treat it right away.”
“Wow, I can’t imagine what that’s like,” I say. “You realize you basically lived everyone’s worst nightmare.”
“But you know what?” she says. “It brought me closer to God.”
“How so?” I ask.
“Going through that chemo, knowing that I could die. I went through the darkest, most physical, emotional pain of my life, and that was like the one constant that was with me always: God. You know what I mean?”
“You never felt alone.”
“Yeah,” she says wiping her tears with a napkin. “I had been stripped of everything. My job, my home, my hair. I moved into my sister’s guesthouse and just hunkered down. I was like 130 pounds and dropped to below 100 pounds. Being stripped of everything, of my looks, my health…it just…brings you closer to the truth. And I feel like that truth is God.”
Tears are streaming down her cheeks. I lean over and rub her back. “I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be,” she sniffles. “This is good for me.”
I hand her a napkin; she blows her nose. “You know, Britt, what you’re sharing with me is so beautiful. You are reminding me of that famous Audrey Hepburn quote right now.”
“Which one?” Britt asks.
“Uh, let me Google it,” I laugh. I quickly thumb through my iPhone and find the quote I once read attributed to her in a biography about the Breakfast at Tiffany’s actress, one of Hollywood’s most elegant and beautiful stars of all time. I find the alleged Audrey Hepburn quote and read it aloud: “The beauty of a woman is not in a facial mole, but the true beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul.”
Britt dabs her eyes. Still crying, she continues, “I know it sounds weird, but, yeah, it was kind of beautiful. There is something about feeling ugly, feeling stripped of that outer shell, that brings everything into focus. Some people would be like, ‘Fuck you, God! Why are you doing this to me?’ But I didn’t feel that way. I wasn’t angry at God at all. I just wanted Him to show me what I was supposed to learn. I can deal with all the pain and all the emotional pain. I just needed to know why I was going through this. I would have these conversations with God and say, ‘Please just show me what I am supposed to learn here to make this easier,’ because that is what was so hard for me.”
“I am sorry if this sounds kind of morbid, but did you ever feel like you were going to die, that you weren’t going to survive?”
“I definitely had instances when I was going through chemo when I was really sick and thought I would be kicking it out that day. I kept getting really bad infections—in my brain and stuff. My immune system and white blood count got so low that if I got any kind of infection I could just get sick. You can’t touch soil and can’t be around animals. So it was just during those times that I felt like I could die.”
“Were you scared?”
“Not really,” she says. “I feel like our souls live on. So I was not scared, but I didn’t want to die because I didn’t want my twin sister to go through pain and loss, but I just believed that my soul would live on. That is how I feel. I am not afraid of dying. I don’t have that fear. I don’t have all the answers, but I don’t think my soul dies. I think my body dies, but I live on. I don’t know what exactly happens, but I am OK with the mystery.”
“I’m not,” I tell her. “It all freaks me out.”
“Aw, Ken. That is your brain freaking out, not your soul. Your soul has all the answers. You just got to turn your brain off.”
“So I need to meditate, is what you are saying.”
“Yes, because what I learned through the cancer was when everything else—all the noise in my life—was taken away from me, I got closer to God. I started taking Transcendental Meditation classes and doing yoga. In the silence, I not only found great comfort, but it brought me closer to God. That’s how it saved me. It got me through the darkest days.”
“So did you meditate today?” I ask.
“Yes, I did actually.”
“Where?”
“On my floor, sitting against the wall.”
“What does it entail?”
“It’s hard to explain how it works, but I get comfortable, close my eyes, and slow my breath. Then I go through a whole series of exercises to relax my mind and then I recite my own personal mantra given to me by a guru.”
“What’s your mantra?” I ask.
Brit laughs. “I can’t tell you! It’s not supposed to be shared. I repeat it to myself silently.”
“OK, sorry,” I say, feeling like a total noob.
“It’s OK,” she says. “You can learn how to do it yourself.”
“I’ve always wanted to get into meditation, but, I don’t know, it’s hard for me to sit that still for that long, to be honest.”
“Meditation will help you still your mind,” she says. “It just takes practice.”
“But what I am curious about is that, OK, it might relax my mind and center me, but I am trying to find God. How does meditating connect you with God?”
“Look, Ken. I don’t pretend to know everything, or have all the answers. All I can say is that I just feel that the more I can still my mind and not use my mind so much and be present with people and practice that and do it twice a day my mind is less active. And I can just be with you. I feel like God is in all of us. So I am able to be more within myself and not in my mind all the time. When I am meditating it gives me a moment to be open to God. So instead of praying, or talking to God, by meditating I am quieting everything and available to hear things. I feel like I am closer to God because I am quiet and still and able to listen.”
The closest person to me who has ever died is my father. It happened on a very cold day in February 1995. Dad had been diagnosed with lung cancer a year earlier at the age of fifty. A few months after he stopped doing chemo while I was working at a newspaper in Virginia, I got the call from my little brother, Kris, who told me, “You better get the fuck home. Dad is unconscious, they rushed him to the hospital.”
He died while I was midflight on my way home. That evening, I landed in Buffalo and rushed home to hear what happened from Kris:
“It all happened so quick, Kenny. I woke up around nine and went upstairs to take a shower and he was sitting in the living room sticking the oxygen tube into his mouth and freaking out. His eyes were popped open real wide. He was all disoriented and didn’t know what was going on. He was trying to say things, but it was like he was too out of breath to get the words out. He was speaking like he had just run a mile. I don’t know if he was hallucinating or what, but he didn’t even know who I was. He kept turning his head and, like, he was seeing people walk by that weren’t there, he would say stuff like, ‘Kenny, what are you doing here?’ Then it was just gibberish. Nothing made sense. He was done, man. He was on his way out. It was like his organs were shutting down.
“I called the hospice nurse, then I called Kevin and Keith. That’s when I called you too, and said, ‘You better fly home fast.’
“While I was calling everyone, he got up and walked to the bathroom, still holding the oxygen tube in his mouth, and he sat down to take a shit. He kept moaning and saying he had to take a shit real bad, so I told him to just do it and then go lay down. But he kept saying, ‘I can’t go, I can’t go,’ and all of a sudden he stood up and walked back to the living room with his pants around his ankles. I don’t even think he realized his pants were down, man. He was just totally out of it.
“It was snowing, and it seemed like it took forever for everyone to get there. He didn’t want to go to the hospital. We were trying to talk him into it, but he would just say no. When the ambulance came, they gave him a shot of something and it settled him down. They put him on the stretcher and carried him outside. But it was so cold that they couldn’t get the legs on the fucking stretcher to collapse. They had frozen stiff. Keith was yelling at the ambulance guy to put a blanket on Dad because he was trembling. Finally they got the stretcher to fold up and started pushing him into the ambulance. The last thing Dad said was ‘Nooo!’
“He didn’t want to go, Kenny. And I didn’t want him to go. But the nurse lady kept saying, ‘He has to go. There’s no choice.’
“We followed the ambulance to the hospital. We all sat there in his room with him for like an hour. His eyes were opened real wide, but he was barely breathing. His chest would just rise a little. He could hear us, though. When I would talk to him, tell him to hang in there and stuff, he would move his eyes from side to side. He knew what was going on. We agreed with the doctors to let him lay there without any machines, no oxygen mask or anything. It was no use.
“The priest came in a little while later and started reciting some prayers to him. The priest said something like, ‘You are forgiven for all your sins, Larry,’ and Keith was like, ‘What sins? That’s bullshit!’ The priest calmed Keith down and told us, ‘Tell him to go. He is holding on for you. He is waiting for you to tell him to go.’ So we told him to go, and he went.”
Recalling the day my dad died to Brittany, I still feel the same dread, sadness, and anxiety knowing that my father died in such an inglorious, chaotic way—his bodily functions shutting down, his brain misfiring, and him being so scared to die that he didn’t want to go to the hospital, only letting go when he was told to after a fruitless struggle. It was and remains the most tragic day in my life.
Twenty-one years later, three thousand miles away in Marina del Rey, I sit beside my friend Brittany, who faced death with grace, peace, spiritual insight, and acceptance.
“In five years, I will be the same age as my father when he died,” I tell her. “I don’t want to die like he did. Before I die, I want to know God.”