Photography by Adam Milliron
Jenna Morasca & Ethan Zohn share how love is transforming their lives
I’m following Jenna Morasca as she weaves in and out of line inside La Bella Bean, a café just down the road from where she grew up in Bridgeville. She’s scooting over to the register to check out the flavors of biscotti, and then jumping to the back of the line to see what’s in the display case. Patrons probably think I’m her assistant, because I’m jumping back and forth with her, juggling my wallet, keys, notebook, and pen. “Shoot, I really want a donut,” she says, “They must be out of them by now.”
We end up settling for a chai tea latte with skim milk (hers) and a small coffee with sugar (mine), and the $4 charge for both stops Jenna in her tracks in utter disbelief. “Are you sure?” she asks. Even as we walk back to a two-seater by the window, she is still convinced they made a mistake. “There’s no way,” she tells me, peering over at the counter and double-checking the prices. I come to learn it’s more than a reasonably priced latte that brings Jenna home to Pittsburgh. This year, the holidays are coming at a time where she really needs a breather.
The radiant, tall, dark haired woman who’s sitting in front of me, wearing a red knit Christmas sweater and rocking a sparkling silver manicure, has an even more radiant resume. At age 21, she became the youngest contestant to ever win the reality competition, Survivor, taking home the series’ $1 million prize on Survivor: The Amazon in 2003. That was the beginning of her 15 minutes of fame that has lasted almost a decade, and counting. Jenna went on to compete in Survivor: All Stars, as well as host five seasons of Survivor Live, along with as many as 30 other television hosting jobs, including a gig as a CBS correspondent at Comic Con International and competing on the 19th and most recent season of The Amazing Race.
Right now, she’s finishing her master’s degree in psychology from Columbia University, while filming a web series that could possibly lead to another reality show. She’s also writing a book, maintaining friendships, being the best daughter she can be, and on top of it all, she has assumed the role of caretaker and main support system for her boyfriend of almost nine years, Ethan Zohn, who is undergoing regular treatments due to the return of his Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Jenna tells me that she’s heard it all before, things like, “You can’t juggle all of these things.” But I can tell that she’s the type person always asking, “Why not?” and pushing forward in her endeavors to great reward. The impression I take away from my conversation with Jenna is that this woman defines the term, “Go-getter,” and the guy who’s been watching her go-get-it longer than anyone is her dad, Mike Morasca.
“She’s got tremendous drive,” he tells me on the phone, three days later. “She saw the window of opportunity open, and she threw a block in there to make sure it doesn’t close.”
Mike tells me that to describe his daughter, he could do it “with one word,” he says. “Amazing.”
I first met Jenna when she and Ethan arrived at WHIRL’s photo studio for a very early Valentine’s Day photo shoot this past September. The two had just wrapped up The Amazing Race, and were in the filming stages of a new show called Everyday Health, highlighting stories about people who have been or are currently going through a health crisis and are paying it forward to help others in similar situations.
Our shoot that day was one creative whirl, with Jenna and Ethan actively and excitedly collaborating with all of us — but we were none the wiser of their concerns that Ethan’s cancer may have returned, after being in remission for 20 months following his first bout with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Around the time of their visit to our studio, Ethan noticed the return of a telling and familiar symptom. “I had really itchy skin,” he tells me over the phone the day before I have coffee with Jenna. “Starting in August I started feeling uncomfortable. If you watch episodes of Everyday Health, you’ll see me scratching.” Nine days after the photo shoot, doctors confirmed with the couple that Ethan’s cancer had returned.
In the coffee shop, Jenna’s hands are set on the table in front of her, about eight inches apart, palms facing each other, fingers pointed right at me, and she’s emphatically tapping them on the table the way I imagine a CEO would in a board room. She’s telling me about a decision that she and Ethan made, an act far more impressive than winning a challenge on a million-dollar reality show. Their decision, with the support of their doctor, was to defer Ethan’s treatments until filming for Everyday Health was over, and keep his cancer private.
“It really is true that everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame, but I’m so glad that there are people like that getting that kind of fame,” she says of the people featured on Everyday Health. “We were so encouraged by their stories, and it was so important for us for the people to be able to tell their stories. We didn’t want to cancel on these people who are waiting to have their moment.”
At this point, I’ve noticed a change in the way Jenna’s speaking. It’s speeding up, almost like she wants to tell me as much as she can about this before taking the next breath. Her hands are still in CEO mode, touching down with every emphasized phrase.
What she’s telling me is kind of hard to believe. One doesn’t usually associate the word “defer” with the term “cancer treatment.” Yet, to them, it doesn’t seem like there was any other option. “This is a big moment in their life,” says Ethan of the people featured on Everyday Health. “We would just feel so horrible if we had to move off of that.”
With Jenna and Ethan’s decision to keep his cancer’s return from public knowledge, the couple’s benevolence takes new form. The couple’s schedule involved flying around the country filming episodes of Everyday Health, traveling back to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York on their day off for treatments and appointments, and getting one hour of sleep before the next day of work. If there’s a moment where giving back becomes less of a gift and more of a lifestyle, this is it.
“We both decided that we wanted to try to live our life as normal as possible,” Jenna says. “We don’t really want to talk about cancer or let it seep into our life any more than possible, and we want to remain positive. So, everything we do needs to be to reinforce that lifestyle.”
Jenna’s speaking with passion again, and this time it’s because she’s talking about Ethan. Every little anecdote she tells me about him is accompanied by a smile.
When she met Ethan, she was 21 years old, and says she was nowhere near where he was in his life philanthropically. “He’d been around the world already, he’d lived in Zimbabwe, and the first stamp in my passport was from Survivor,” she says. “I had a lot to learn, and I don’t know how I would have turned out without him, but he’s been a big force of nature in a positive way. He really is as wonderful as he seems … and it’s annoying,” she exclaims sarcastically.
Something else Jenna has gained through the lifestyle she and Ethan choose to live is a real sense of the reward of giving back, and that wasn’t always the case. She’s looking out of the window of the café telling me about a revelation she had while working in a soup kitchen while filming their television show over the summer.
Jenna says she struggled with the idea of serving food because it made her uncomfortable, and I can see that it upsets her that she once felt that way. “What if I started crying?” she says. “Seeing these people in pain seemed so overwhelming.”
It’s a strange thing to hear from someone who has me so engaged in stories of her philanthropic objectives, but this was Jenna’s “a ha” moment, the discovery of her passion in life. It came in that soup kitchen when a woman asked her to help her and her child carry their trays. “I was walking over and she started thanking me, and I saw how thankful she was, and I was just carrying her tray, it wasn’t even that big, and I realized, ‘Wow, I’m missing the picture, I’m missing the boat, I’m being selfish,” she says. “Something clicked for me. All of a sudden I was all over the place. Cameramen were getting mad because they couldn’t keep track of me. I didn’t care about anything except getting people their food.”
On the way home that day, Jenna found herself crying at her moment of enlightenment. “I couldn’t believe I was missing out on that feeling,” she says. “In the past, [giving back] always resonated as an older concept, like writing a check and putting it in the mail, which is fine, but it never struck me as it is with what we’re doing now. I hope we’re able to influence people in that same way.”
To Jenna, what Ethan accomplished in the New York City Marathon in November was a highlight in the lessons she has learned from him. Less than a month after his diagnosis, Ethan captained 70 runners from his organization, Grassroots Soccer, through the 26.2-mile route that passed right by Sloan-Kettering and raised $230,000 for the organization, finishing the race in 4:20:46.
For Jenna, it was the fact that he pushed off of the starting line at all that sparked the most emotion for her. “Watching him cross the finish line was fantastic, but the moment where I saw him passing by Sloan-Kettering was way more emotional and incredible than what I could have ever expected,” she says. “I’m not a sappy person at all, but for some reason what that represented, the sheer act of doing something, just doing something like that under the worst circumstances, and being so excited and happy about it, that to me is what life is about; doing things that you love, and not letting anyone tell you otherwise, and then being happy every second you’re involved in that.”
I’m looking down at my coffee and listening to Jenna’s voice change. When I look up, one of the toughest people I’ve ever met is fighting back tears, and I understand why. See, when Jenna watched Ethan cross the finish line that day, she watched not only as his girlfriend, but his lifeline. “I’m blessed to have her by my side, and I don’t think I could do this without her,” he says.
When Jenna talks about her role, she speaks of it not like a chore or duty, but as if there isn’t any other option. She understands that a caretaker is more than someone who cheers you up when you’re feeling down.
“It’s interesting,” she says. “For one thing, we’re a younger couple. Having to face this when you’re younger is strange because you’re forced to talk about all of these things that you really weren’t planning on talking about — like fertility, hair loss, helping someone do the basic things, power of attorney, wills, and things like that. It’s a lot.”
In December, while referring to what lifts his spirits when he’s feeling down, Ethan told E! Online that, “Keeping Up With The Kardashians is curing cancer.” Jenna laughs when I bring this up. I tell her I had to assume this was her doing. “It’s totally me, but he really does like it, I think,” she tells me. “I always tell him, ‘Never underestimate the power of distraction,’ it’s the simplest thing you can do and it’s so effective.”
Towards the end of the hour I spend with Jenna, I realize the lasting impression that she’s left on me. She walked into La Bella Bean that day and all that I knew about her was what I had read about her successes in reality TV. The most inspiring thing about Jenna Morasca is what she’s done with the celebrity status she’s gained, while not losing sight of who she is. It’s quite incredible to see someone investing her efforts into so many things, at a time when it would be a whole lot easier to take the road less selfless. Of course, her dad is equally impressed.
“What I’m most proud of, is that she’s still the same Jenna she was 10 years ago,” he tells me. “Not a lot of people can go through that notoriety and maintain that.”
As for Jenna, I think she knows she’s been living right. “If I died tomorrow, everyone in my life would know exactly how I feel about them,” she says, “and I feel very satisfied with that.”
In Good Hands
Jenna says with everything going on, she’s extremely thankful for their doctor, Dr. Craig Moskowitz, Clinical Director in the Division of Hematologic Oncology at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Upon the return of Ethan’s Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Dr. Moskowitz suggested an alternative route to the traditional treatments. He introduced Jenna and Ethan to a new drug called SGN-35. SGN-35 is referred to as a smart-targeted therapy, in which only cancerous cells are targeted, rather than the targeting of all cells, good and bad, which is why chemotherapy causes notorious side effects such as hair loss and severe nausea. Two years ago, when Ethan was first diagnosed, SGN-35 was in clinical trials and not available yet. “It’s a miracle that it’s available now,” Ethan says.
Dr. Nancy E. Davidson, Director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, says that though Hodgkin’s lymphoma is referred to as the “poster child for success from chemotherapy,” she’s thankful for people like Ethan who take initiative in new forms of treatment, and have helped cancer research be able to evolve as it has. “People like Ethan who go out and do it not only for themselves, but others, that’s very selfless,” she says.
“Ethan gets wrapped up in the statistics sometimes,” Jenna says. “You hear that 90 percent of patients are doing well and they’ve had great success with SGN-35, but you don’t really know how many patients that’s out of.” Jenna says what is encouraging, though, is Ethan’s status compared to those included in the stats. “They’ve never had a better response in Hodgkins than they’ve had with SGN-35, and most of those people were in more dire situations than Ethan’s,” she says. “Ethan is further along then most.”
Dr. Moskowitz’s goal with Ethan and SGN-35 is to get his cancer to a stage where he can receive an allogeneic stem cell transplant, which will require him to find a match for his stem cells.
