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by Denis Hammill
On May 2, Jerry Gorman sat aboard the Norwegian Dawn cruise ship on Pier 59 with his wife, Kathy, and five grown kids and their spouses and his five grandchildren, ready to set sail for a seven-day cruise to the Bahamas.
His brother Tommy was also on board with his brood, and now Jerry, who was suffering from multiple myeloma, or bone marrow cancer, saw his older brother Danny rushing down the dock with his wife, Theresa, and daughter Megan.
Danny waited until the last minute to make his reservation.
"But I knew it might be Jerry's last cruise," Danny said. "He'd been fighting cancer for 10 years. And this was maybe a last chance for a bunch of us to be together."
Danny called another brother, Charlie, in Florida and told him there was one more reservation left. After the ship sailed, Jerry looked up and saw Charlie strolling nonchalantly onto the deck.
"Jerry just lost it," says Danny, a retired firefighter. "My tough kid brother who'd won medals for bravery in a 32-year career as a fireman just broke down and cried. And then we all hugged and laughed and broke each other's chops for a solid week."
Over that week they told stories of growing up dirt-poor, a family of 11 in a chilly Park Slope tenement before Park Slope became Brooklyn's upper East Side. They talked of neighborhood characters, old brawls, vanished girlfriends and the early days at the FDNY, including how Gorman graduated from the fire academy the same day he got married in 1969 and was sworn in wearing a tuxedo.
"There were about 40 Gormans on board," Danny recalls. "I'll remember that trip for the rest of my life because I will remember Jerry smiling and filled with life, surrounded by family - which meant everything to him."
Then, Thursday, after returning from treatment at the Mayo clinic in Minneapolis, Gorman, an FDNY battalion chief, lost his 10-year battle with cancer in his Staten Island home, surrounded by wife and family.
He was 58.
Pinned to his uniform in his coffin in McCollum and Rice funeral home on Staten Island was the FDNY Brooklyn Medal, the second-highest honor on the job, won many years ago for saving the life of a 6-year-old girl in a blaze at Dean St. and Fifth Ave.
In 1985, when Danny Gorman served as a technical adviser for a movie called "Turk-182!" he borrowed Jerry's medal for actor Robert Urich to wear in the film in his role as a firefighter.
"What's so odd is that Bobby Urich died from the same cancer as Jerry," Danny says.
Jerry Gorman's was the death of a true American hero, a man who served his city and his country with pure personal courage and compassion. His three sons - Brian, Patrick and Brendan - followed him into the Fire Department.
Gorman's twin daughters, Margaret and Mary, are registered nurses at St. Vincent's Medical Center on Staten Island who became their father's primary caregivers in his long battle to live after he was diagnosed with hepatitis C, which doctors say he probably contracted by coming into contact with contaminated blood on the job, and which developed into diabetes and then liver cancer.
"Jerry's twins kept their father alive years longer than doctors predicted," Danny said.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, on interferon for the liver cancer, Gorman awakened his three sons, and together they rushed from Staten Island to Ground Zero dressed in fire gear to report for duty. His daughters were there working in a triage unit. The Gorman family toiled in the dust of the dead for seven days. Jerry even caught one of the first ghoulish looters.
Seven months later, Gorman received a liver transplant at a Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla.
"I walk 2 miles by the sea every day now, looking out at the waves and up at the birds in the blue sky," Gorman told me after the transplant. "I'm walking on cloud nine. I can't wait to get back home to Staten Island, to be near my kids. Now I lie awake at night, smiling, thinking of all the living I have ahead."
Gorman stole two more years from the reaper before the cancer reappeared in his bones, and he cherished every day of it as if it were a gift. He died Thursday, three days before Father's Day.
"I was blessed," said Kathy, with a heartbroken smile. "My Jerry was just a great, great, great guy."
As pipers played, Chief Jerry Gorman was carried from St. Clare's Church on Staten Island yesterday morning and buried in Resurrection Cemetery.
His big brother Danny said, "The way I'll remember Jerry is laughing and surrounded by family on that final cruise ..."
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