She Did It Her Way

We received word last night (Thursday, 4/30) that our former colleague and friend, Liz Bonis, the medical and health reporter for Sinclair’s WKRC-TV in Cincinnati, had passed away. Frankly, the news hit us hard, because we didn’t know that she had been fighting a battle with colon cancer for the last three years.

In fact, almost no one knew. Because she wanted it that way.

Liz never wanted to be the story, which tells you a lot about the kind of reporter she was. Joining the station, known as “Local 12", in 2002, Liz reported week in and week out about how people were beating the odds and living their best lives via everything from the latest medical breakthroughs to just finding ways to exercise more. She was passionate about telling these stories, but always through the people who were fighting the challenges that life presented, both big and small.

Liz was a caring, hard-working reporter who loved her job.

Aside from earning a Bachelor’s in Dietetics and Nutrition and then a Masters in Public Communications and Journalism from Syracuse University, Liz was also a registered dietician, a personal trainer, and a certified diabetes educator. She was also, in the years we worked together, unfailingly positive and energetic.

(She may have noted, on more than one occasion, that we needed to exercise more.)

We now know that she was initially diagnosed with colon cancer in 2023, and would undergo five different surgeries during the interim, according to the station’s story on her passing. All the while, she continued to report on new treatments and promising therapies, even as her own options dwindled. Her work would air on WKRC-TV, as well as on many other Sinclair stations across the country, until shortly before this last week. Just hours after her colleagues were informed that she would not be returning to work, she passed away peacefully with her husband, Fred Craig, and other members of her family at her bedside.

In one of those odd twists, we had just seen Liz a couple of months ago, while in Cincinnati for the funeral service of James Harrison, her long-time cameraman from the station. James had passed away suddenly just a short time prior. Liz spoke lovingly of the man she called her “work husband,” having regularly worked next to him for many years. She would make the crowd both laugh and cry as she detailed their experiences working together. After the service, as a swarm of well-wishers circled her, we only exchanged a few quick words and a short embrace before others clamored for her attention. Of course, she gave each person who approached her the kind of personal moment that someone who had long been in the public eye knows how to do instinctively.

We could not have known that it would be our last encounter.

But knowing her determination in pretty much every interaction we had during the time we worked together, we know that if she had revealed the terrible disease she was quietly battling, she would have likely said that she had found some great doctors and that she was going to beat this thing.

And then she would have said she had to head out and get another story done.

Since hearing the news, we keep mentally replaying one very poignant scene from the TV series “M*A*S*H.” In the episode titled “Sometimes You Hear The Bullet” during the show’s first season, Lt. Colonel Henry Blake (played by the late McLean Stevenson) tries to console a grieving Captain Hawkeye Pierce (played by Alan Alda) after he loses a patient on the operating table.

Blake says, “Look, all I know is what they taught us in command school. There are certain rules about a war. Rule number one is that young men die. And rule number two is…doctors can’t change rule number one.”

To that, Liz Bonis would have told you that doctors are changing the rules all the time.

We so wish they could have done so for her.

Rest In Peace, Elizabeth. You did it your way.

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