When Death Sets a Deadline: Days of Grace : Mortality: What do you do when your life must be measured in months instead of accomplishments? Arthur Ashe, Lee Atwater, Reginald Lewis and Michael Walsh met challenge.

You’ve overcome every obstacle, met every challenge, reached every goal--all before turning 50. You’re a success, a big shot. Then one day a doctor tells you something you cannot change or conquer.

You are sick. You are dying.

What do you do now that your life, always measured by achievements and accomplishments, must be measured instead in months or weeks?

Already in this decade, four of the most successful people in America have had to answer that question, and each found his own deeply personal answer.

For Michael Walsh, it was to vow to keep running his company and fighting his cancer.

Arthur Ashe wrote a farewell letter to his little girl.

Reginald Lewis pulled off a last business deal.

And Lee Atwater--he of the acid tongue and down-and-dirty political tactics--apologized.

Atwater, chairman of the Republican National Committee, developed a brain tumor in 1990 and died a year later.

Ashe, the former tennis star, announced in April, 1992, that he had gotten AIDS from a blood transfusion, and died last February.

Lewis, the nation’s richest black man, was diagnosed with brain cancer last November and died two months later.

Only Walsh, the chairman of Tenneco Inc., survives. Walsh learned he had brain cancer in January, and was told he probably would live no more than five or six years.

For each man, the worst of news came during the best of times.

Atwater had managed George Bush’s winning presidential campaign in 1988. He’d been elected Republican Party chairman. He’d recorded a rhythm ‘n’ blues album with B.B. King sitting in. He was, by his own appraisal, “one cocky guy.”

Ashe had completed the transition from athlete to businessman, author, broadcaster, civil rights activist and, in his phrase, “citizen of the world.”

Lewis, a product of working-class Baltimore, had become the first black on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans. He’d bought a Fifth Avenue apartment for a record $12 million. His company had cut the debt incurred in its landmark takeover of Beatrice International.

And Walsh, having turned around Union Pacific Railroad, had accepted an even greater challenge--the revival of Tenneco, No. 27 on the Fortune 500, as its $1-million-a-year chief executive.

*

Lee Atwater never had to worry how or when to disclose his illness; he collapsed while giving a speech at a fund-raiser in Washington. Soon, the world knew he had a brain tumor the size of an egg.

Atwater himself, however, knew little more than that. Accustomed to demanding straight answers, he began to realize that the worst curse of illness is uncertainty.

“The only thing that was clear was that there were no answers--even to my most nagging question: How long do I have to live?” he recalled. Estimates ranged from 10 years to no more than one.

Atwater didn’t wait to die. He organized friends and colleagues to do “opposition research” on tumors; Mary Matalin, his deputy at the Republican National Committee, checked out an acupuncturist.

“What was so different if my opponent was cancer instead of some wily Democrat?” he wrote in a Life magazine article.

Atwater saw one specialist after another. He tried massage therapy. He followed a healer’s suggestion and traded his black T-shirts for red ones. He heard a tape of waterfall sounds and ordered the entire set. He listened to Guided Imagery tapes that helped him direct white light onto the tumor.

The lean, handsome young man who used to jog with the President had become a ruin. His face was puffed up from steroids, and his senses and reflexes were dulled by pain and pain-killers. Medication made his bones so soft that each step risked an excruciating compression fracture. He could barely raise his arm, let alone play guitar.

Finally, when his doctor told him the tumor had spread to the other side of his brain, the master of political hardball sat there and cried.

Now, he realized, was a time for “coming to terms with the less virtuous acts in my life.”

Ten years earlier, Atwater had mocked Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina Democrat who’d undergone electroshock therapy for adolescent depression, as “someone who was hooked up to jumper cables.” And during the 1988 presidential campaign he promised “to strip the bark off that little bastard”--Michael Dukakis.

He wrote Turnipseed a note of apology, and expressed his regrets to Dukakis in his Life article for his “naked cruelty.”

“Mostly,” he added, “I am sorry for the way I thought of other people.

*

Arthur Ashe did not become a famous AIDS patient voluntarily; his hand was forced by a call from a reporter checking out a rumor. After what he called “my outing,” he tried to make the months that followed the most productive of his life.

He flew off on an average of three speaking or business trips a week, broadcast tennis matches and wrote newspaper columns, founded the African-American Athletic Assn., spoke about AIDS at the United Nations and the Harvard Medical School graduation, got arrested outside the White House protesting U.S. policy on Haitian immigrants, announced creation of the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, and raised funds for a chair in pediatric AIDS at St. Jude’s Hospital in Memphis.

But the greatest of his final accomplishments was a letter to his 6-year-old daughter, Camera, for the day when “I will exist only as a memory already beginning to fade.”

Written two weeks before Ashe’s death and published in his book “Days of Grace,” the letter recites a father’s hopes--and expectations. Ashe tells Camera she must learn at least two languages, and master two sports; she should use money, not let it use her; she cannot let her skin color keep her back or shove her forward.

He closes with a declaration of devotion:

“Don’t be angry with me if I am not there in person, alive and well, when you need me. . . . Do not feel sorry for me if I am gone. When we were together, I loved you deeply and you gave me so much happiness I can never repay you. Camera, wherever I am when you feel sick at heart and weary of life, or when you stumble and fall and don’t know if you can get up again, think of me. I will be watching and smiling and cheering you on.”

*

So guarded was Reginald Lewis that he used to refuse to tell reporters what his company’s initials--TLC--stood for. He treated his illness the same way.

Lewis never told many friends and colleagues he was sick, and continued to lead board meetings as if all was normal. His company first announced his illness Jan. 19, after he fell into a coma.

Lee Archer, a member of the TLC-Beatrice board, said Lewis told him of his illness at the end of November, and never mentioned it again.

“He never shed a tear, to my knowledge. I don’t know how he did it,” said Archer, a retired General Foods executive. “He just faced dying like another business problem. He said, ‘I have a tumor and it doesn’t look good, and in case it isn’t, here’s what has to be done.’ ”

The news shocked friends and employees. They were used to a mentor, a hero, a role model--not a victim.

Charles Clarkson, who joined Lewis as a young lawyer two decades ago, recalls Lewis telling him he was sick but adding, “I’m going to fight it. Charles, you know how strong I am.”

Clarkson knew. In years of high-pressure business--late nights, endless meetings, constant travel, missed vacations--Lewis had never faltered. In fact, “He had a lot more energy than anyone I’d ever met,” Clarkson said.

“Did I think he was going to die?” Clarkson shook his head and forced a rueful smile. “I thought Reg was going to live forever.”

Lewis worked furiously to put his house in order. He groomed his stepbrother, lawyer and former pro football player Jean Fuggett as his successor atop TLC-Beatrice; he arranged a $2-million gift to the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People; and he kept dealing.

“Even in the weeks before his death, he was making plans,” his daughter Leslie recalled at a memorial service. “He was hoping for the best, but he prepared for the worst. He made sure his family was going to be OK. He contracted a currency policy in the last few weeks that brought a little cash in on the side.”

She smiled. “Every little bit counts, right?” Even if you’re worth more than $400 million.

*

Mike Walsh faced cancer like a corporate turnaround artist: He admitted to the world that he had it, and he vowed to beat it.

Walsh immediately called a news conference and, choking back tears, announced his diagnosis and prognosis. Then, without script or prompter, he recorded a video for Tenneco employees. “Is this going to change my life? Is it going to change the way Tenneco approaches things?” he asked. “Hell, no!”

“He did it on the first take,” said his spokesman, Arthur House. “Took 22 minutes.”

In notes and phone calls to friends around the nation, Walsh discounted his relatively pessimistic prognosis by arguing that he had more desire to live than most people.

Over the protests of his wife, he kept going to the office, even while undergoing cancer treatment. “I’m carrying on for one reason,” he explained to a reporter. “Along with my family, my work is what I care about.”

Psychologists accused him of denial, but Walsh was a manager, not a mystic, and he approached his crisis rationally.

If you don’t carry on, he said in an interview with Business Week, “What the hell do you do?”

*

Each man worked to fill his last days with the consolations a normal schedule never allowed.

Ashe, once the king of Wimbledon, saw the movie “Aladdin” with his daughter, played many happy rounds of golf at a suburban country club, and read the Bible.

Atwater, known for his love of Machiavelli and the Chinese martial philosopher Sun Tzu, also discovered the Bible in his last months--and a new perspective.

“My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a little brotherhood,” he wrote. “It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.”

When he died in 1991 at the age of 40, Atwater received some of the forgiveness he had sought. “He had the courage to apologize,” Michael Dukakis said. “That says a lot for the man.” Tom Turnipseed, the Democrat Atwater once ridiculed, attended his funeral.

*

One Saturday in January, Reg Lewis wasn’t feeling well enough for his usual tennis match with his younger stepbrother, Tony Fuggett. Tony wanted to visit, but Reg told him, “I want you to play tennis today. I’ll be your coach.

“I want you to get 60% of your first serves in, and I want you to come in behind that serve like I know you can, and I want you to hit that overhead, and I want you to keep your opponent deep on the court, and I want you to keep that hitch out of your forehand,” he said.

So Tony Fuggett went out and played the game of his life. Afterward, when he reported back, his brother asked two questions: “Did you do your best? Did you have fun?”

Tony said yes to both. “Then,” Lewis said, “that’s all that matters.”

The man who’d always kept score at everything never asked who won. A week later, he was dead.

*

Ashe developed AIDS-related pneumonia Feb. 3 and entered the hospital two days later. He was put on a respirator, and it looked like he’d pull through--he was alert and writing notes, including one that asked who Bill Clinton would nominate as attorney general.

To reassure his doctors, he formed the OK sign with his finger and thumb. He died a few hours later, five months shy of his 50th birthday.

*

And then there is Mike Walsh, the survivor.

After chemotherapy, his hair fell out. Fatigue forced him to cut his 80-hour work week in half. He limped, and his left arm sagged. When he came to New York to brief securities analysts, some were dismayed by his decline.

But Walsh kept working out with a trainer and insisted he would be skiing by Christmas. He refused to dwell on his illness or even acknowledge the limits it imposed. “I’ve put it behind me,” he said.

Business, at least, was good. In October, Tenneco reported that third-quarter net earnings more than doubled over 1992. Its stock was trading around $50 a share, compared to $35 when Walsh took command in 1991.

And on Nov. 1, Walsh’s improbable optimism suddenly was vindicated: Tenneco’s corporate physician reported that tests showed his tumor had stopped growing and was breaking up. Walsh, he said, could expect a normal life span.

What, everyone wanted to know, had sustained the seemingly doomed CEO?

Just saying, “I’m going to do it,” Walsh told the Houston Chronicle. “Not reflecting on did I really want to be an orchestra conductor or write a novel, but sticking with who you are and what you do.”