Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (29 page)

If you’ve watched our show, you know Bruce is so easygoing, just a really chill guy. He’s so laid-back, he’s practically horizontal. But even the chillest guy in the world might not take this so well. He came home that night, and I waited until the next morning to tell him.

“Well, you want to go see our new house?” I asked him.

“What?” he asked.

“I bought a house.”

“What?!!” he said. Nothing shocks Bruce Jenner. I was a little worried. Then he shifted and said, “Okay,” with a raised eyebrow, surely thinking,
What is she going to do next
?

Maybe he thought I was kidding. Then I showed him the house with the broker. I waited for his response. The house was empty, because the sellers had left already and moved to Seattle. It was beautiful and clean, and it didn’t need one thing done to it. Bruce had brought a video camera with him. I was watching him as we toured the house, trying to read his mood. Was he upset? Or just exhausted from being on the road? When we were done, Bruce turned the video camera on me.

I said into the lens, “Well, what do you think?”

He turned the camera back onto himself.

“I love it!!” he said. He started jumping up and down and acting all silly and happy. It made me cry. I stood there and cried because he was so happy and I was so happy. That is when I knew I had married the absolute greatest guy in the world. I mean, who else would put up with all of my nonsense and move here—no, move
there, do this, repack, move that table, plant those rosebushes? The guy would have done anything for me. He just wants everyone to be happy, and he knew moving from Sherwood into this new house would make me happy.

Things got worse, however, before they got better.

A
round this time, my dad Harry’s health went into a rapid decline. The first signs had come when he and my mom came to stay with me in Sherwood while Bruce was away on
I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!
My mom and I had gone shopping for Shannon & Co., the children’s store she owned in La Jolla. On our way home, we called Dad to tell him we would meet him at the Sherwood clubhouse for dinner, but he didn’t answer the house phone or his cell phone. We didn’t know where he was.

I called one of the guys at the country club and asked him to go to my house and check on my dad. He called me from outside my house and said, “I’m ringing the doorbell and nobody is answering, but your dad’s car is in the driveway.”

I started to panic. “Pound on the door,” I told him. “Walk around the back and look through the windows!”

He could see Dad napping on the couch inside, and the poor guy had to pound on the door for a long time before he finally woke him up. Dad was totally disoriented when he came to the phone. “I was just napping,” he insisted, but it was unlike him to take naps in the afternoon, and I thought it was weird that it was so hard to wake him up. Red flags.

As he had grown older, Harry had started having health issues, specifically with diabetes. He started to get more tired, and we had to start reminding him to eat so his blood sugar would not drop. One day that April, after my parents left my house, I don’t know what happened, but I got up and had the biggest urge to go see my
dad. He had been calling me regularly, saying how much he missed me, which was very powerful for me to hear. I just felt like I needed to go visit him.

I remember thinking back, many, many, many years ago, to when my biological dad passed away in his terrible car accident. Right before he died, he had wanted to get together with me, and I had told him I was too busy. I always felt guilty about that because I never saw him again. I also remembered visiting my mom when she was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer and sitting in the parking lot with Ryan. I had so much guilt for not being there for my mom. This was my chance to make amends for that. My instincts were trying to tell me something: if you feel like you need to go visit your loved one, then go! My instincts would prove to be right.

One day when Dad called, I decided to visit him immediately. I called Kourtney. “I’m going to drive to San Diego today just for the day to go see Papa. He’s not feeling great. Why don’t you go with me?”

She said, “Great.”

So Kourtney and I got in the car and we went down to La Jolla. We stopped by my mom’s store to visit her, and then we drove over to their house in Clairemont and saw my dad. We spent some time with him and we had a great visit with him, then drove back to Los Angeles.

Not forty-eight hours after we left, my mom called me—I remember I was working at my house—and she said, “I don’t want you to be worried, but your dad was in an accident today.”

My heart stopped.

“He went to go see your sister and he must not have eaten lunch,” Mom continued. “He got off the freeway and was coming up to a red light and he kind of had a little blackout and bumped the car in front of him lightly. His air bags went off.”

He was in his brand-new Mercedes, a very safe and heavy car.
Still, the air bags inflated, so he was taken to the hospital for an examination. “We’re here at the hospital and he’s fine, and everything’s good. I’m going to take him home in about an hour,” my mom explained.

I offered to drive down the next day, but she wouldn’t hear of it. “No, we’re fine,” she said. “He’s going to be great.”

About an hour later, she called me to say, “We’re still at the hospital.” Apparently, when they tried to put my dad in the car, he was in excruciating chest pain. X-rays showed he had suffered a broken sternum in the accident.

Eventually Harry went into the intensive care unit. Mom traveled back and forth from her home to the hospital in Palomar, and then later Scripps Hospital in La Jolla. After a few days and the next time I saw my dad, he was in bad shape. We all realized that he wasn’t going to get out of there anytime soon. Now he was having a hard time breathing and they were putting him in an oxygen tent. The news got worse: he was suffering from a staph infection that would literally eat him alive. We always thought he would come home from the hospital. He had been in a minor car accident; it wasn’t a big deal. It was the staph infection that was killing him, not the accident.

While my dad was in the ICU, my mother was at his bedside twenty-four hours a day. She was faced with the decision to shut down her beloved children’s clothing store, Shannon & Co., which she had run for thirty-five years and which was a La Jolla institution, so she could devote all of her time to Dad.

“I’m going to close the store for a while,” she said.

I wouldn’t hear of that. It was her livelihood. She didn’t have any employees; it was just her. I said, “You can’t close your store. You just bought all your stuff for spring and Easter.” This was April, which was the beginning of their biggest season in La Jolla. I said, “I’ll tell you what: I’ll come down and run the store for you while
Dad’s in the hospital, and you can go to the hospital every day. That’s that.”

“I’ll take care of the kids,” said Bruce, ever supportive. “You take care of your mom.”

So, for sixteen weeks, I drove down to La Jolla every week to run my mom’s store. I would spend four or five days in a row there, then come back home for a few hours, then return to La Jolla. I just kept going back and forth from my kids and my husband to my dad and my mom. Sometimes I would come home for five hours and then go back for five days; sometimes I would come home for a day and return to my mom’s for ten days. I just kept going back and forth while my dad and my mom were in this horrible limbo. My dad wasn’t getting any better.

I knew I was losing my dad, and almost more difficult was knowing that my mom, the love of my life, was losing the love of
her
life. Our family was so close, and I was heartbroken for my mother. Mom and Harry had been married for four decades, and she was losing him. She was devastated and didn’t know what to do. I was grief-stricken, too, but I knew I had to rally to help my mom and dad.

Every day for those sixteen weeks, I got up and I made Mom breakfast. We went to the hospital together, and I would say good morning to Dad, who was using an oxygen tent to help him breathe. Watching that staph infection take his life one day at a time was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. After leaving my mom at the hospital, I headed straight to the store, keeping any problems I had at the store to myself. I could tell that my mom was really grieving, so I never, ever wanted to complain or tell her I wanted to go home. I just wanted to be there for her and help get her through this.

Dad was not the only person I worried about during that time period. Earlier that year, I had gone to see my son, Rob, play
in a basketball game at the Buckley School. Robert Kardashian was there, too, and in the middle of the game Robert asked me, “Can I talk to you outside? It’s really important.” Bruce, my kids, and I all exchanged glances that showed we wondered what was up, but I followed him out of the gym and around the side of the building.

Once we were outside, Robert started to cry. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said, “but I have cancer.”

“What?!” I said.
“What?!”

“Yeah,” he said, “I have cancer. I’m sure it is going to be okay, but I am really scared.”

I don’t remember him telling me what kind of cancer. All I knew was that he had said the
C
word, and I felt the whole world spin. We cried and cried, then pulled ourselves together and walked back inside. He said he was going to get a second opinion.

The next week Robert called with the greatest news: “Guess what? I don’t have cancer! It’s a miracle. I am okay. It turned out to be a bad test.”

A few months later, though, Robert called again. I was working in my mother’s store in La Jolla.

“Are you sitting down?”

I sat down. I felt a bombshell coming. Just in case, I got up, put up the
CLOSED
sign, and locked the door.

“I do have cancer,” he said.

He had just returned from a trip to Italy, and he literally couldn’t swallow. His throat had been bothering him for a while. He had seen a doctor again, and he was diagnosed with stage IV esophageal cancer. I stood up and started pacing around the store, which wasn’t easy, because it was a tiny place. I was walking around in tight circles, talking to him and trying to listen to what he was saying, but I really didn’t hear anything. The room was spinning and my ears were ringing. It was a very difficult conversation to
have with someone I loved so much. Still, Robert really didn’t think cancer was going to beat him.

“I’ll get treatment,” he said. He told me about a healer in China whom he was going to fly into L.A. He was so confident he could beat it. That night I told my mother about Robert’s cancer. The next day I got up in the morning and I said, “Mom, I have to go home and do something. I’ll be back tonight, but I just need to go home for the day.”

I drove all the way back to Los Angeles, and I locked myself in my bedroom, and I wrote a letter to Robert. I told him everything I felt about him. I don’t know what possessed me to do that, but I felt like I needed to just talk to him in a way that was tangible, and that he could read in his own time. I needed to tell him how much he meant to me and how sorry I would always be for hurting him.

July 19, 2003

I spent several pages thanking him for everything, reliving the memories we shared, thanking him for the incredible gift of the four children we had together, and thanking him for being the greatest father and friend, ending with my sorrow over his illness.