Things are not well in the town I grew up in. Too many of us
are sick, disabled, or dead. Now I know that these things happen in every town,
but the people I am talking about are still quite young. The numbers are
shocking. In my class for example, the class of 1995, six of us are already
dead, and three permanently disabled. This might not seem like a lot of people,
but there were only 30 of us to begin with. Many of us are still in touch, but
some have dropped away, so the numbers could be even higher.
I don’t know what the average loss rate is by age 35, maybe
it is normal for 20% to be dead already. Maybe not. I do know that 1 in 5 of us
feels like too many. Maybe I just feel the losses more acutely because as one
of the three who are disabled I have been forced to confront my own mortality.
Unfortunately, although my class has lost many members, it
is not extraordinary. Twenty percent is probably average for the classes just
before and after mine. We began dying young and continue to die at an alarming
rate. Cancers, car accidents, suicides, drug overdoses, gun accidents, we have
seen it all in our tiny town.
This topic is on my mind again because we have lost two more
people about my age in the past month, two have had major surgery to remove
cancerous tumors, and one more has stopped working because her disability has
gotten worse. And this is counting only people within a few years of my age who
are still in touch. If you count people even younger four have died this year
and one sits with a brain injury at Primary Children’s Hospital right now. The
fourteen year old son of my sister’s best friend burst an aneurysm in his
brain.
It makes me wonder-Is this little town cursed? Has our strip
mining for gold pissed off the universe?
Those numbers seem atrocious to me. I have never known someone my own age to die, and the mere image of this is horrific. As for the "curse" idea, I would venture into more scientific based ideas. Is there perhaps something in the water or chemicals in the air due to the constant mining?
ReplyDeleteI am sure there is. Not all the deaths and illnesses can be traced to the mines, but at least some are suspect. In my class Several have died from accidents and suicides and one from cancer. Of those of us who are ill (again just from my class) I have two orphan diseases, Microvascular Disease and Cyclic Neutropenia, one classmate has Multiple Sclerosis, one Crohn's Disease, a couple severe psychiatric conditions.
ReplyDeleteIt is easy to blame the mining for the cancers, maybe the MS, maybe my neutropenia, and less likely for my Microvascular Disease. But the accidents, suicides, Crohn's, and psychiatric problems clearly have another cause. It just seems strange to me that so many of us have been affected at so young an age.