Jerry Roberts, an award-winning editor at the Chronicle and the Santa Barbara News-Press, is fighting non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He writes in the Santa Barbara Independent: “As cancers go, it’s not a bad one to have. For one thing, the doctors found it at an early stage. … Fortunately, it’s very treatable.”

Roberts, longtime managing editor of the Chronicle, took the top newsroom job at the Santa Barbara paper in 2002. He resigned July 6, 2006, along with several other editors and reporters, in a dispute over newsroom interference by owner Wendy McCaw, who was upset among other things by the publication of actor Rob Lowe’s address in a story about a zoning hearing.

Roberts writes: “Religious reading and reflection offer the view that having a life-threatening illness is a gift — a rare opportunity to ask yourself exactly what you’re doing with your life, what you really want to be doing with it, and, most importantly, how you should spend your time, here and now, to seek and find meaning in it. As one very smart doctor put it, ‘Begin by asking yourself why you needed this illness.'”