Friday, December 17, 2010

Loss

I got a phone call from my cousin Betsy who lives in Ohio a few weeks ago. We are not close, although we are far more friendly than I am with her sister who lives about 15 minutes away from me here in Baltimore. Her mother is my mother’s sister. I grew up with our families spending Thanksgiving together. And every other year my mother would make a huge batch of fruitcake and ship off half of it to their family. We knew each other well. We have not kept in touch over the years. Her mother is occasionally in Baltimore and I never make a point of going to see he. When I didn’t see her after her knee surgery my mother had a little fit (“she’s your family!”) and that’s when I realized I had stopped thinking about them as family.

Bob, the middle child of the three, died 25 years ago of leukemia. It was a terrible blow to us all. I had spent quite a lot of that summer training back and forth to Utica where he lived to spend time with him. I can still recall the feeling of raw shock I had for my young cousin dying. He’d been a marine and was driven by that caretaker gene that good marines develop. He was his sisters’ and mother’s protector. Bob was the member of that family I was closest to. When he was originally diagnosed he kept it from his family for as long as he could, telling them he was having some stomach problems. He finally had to come clean when he was on the oncology ward. That was in the spring of 1985. By the early fall he was dead.

When I answered the phone that day and heard Betsy’s voice I was surprised to hear from her, but somehow also soothed that this blast from my past would probably not be presenting a problem for me. I don’t know why I felt like this would be a safe phone call, but somehow I did. The call would not ask me to do anything, feel anything in particular, join with it in some sort of family escapade. Usually when a hardly-spoken-to family member calls it’s with some request, but I felt safe with Betsy – we speak a same language even though we do not stay in touch.

She and her mother had discovered that Bob’s cancer had been caused by exposure to benzene while he was in the marines. They’d just returned from a conference in Pittsburgh detailing large cancer clusters at Camp Lejeune. We talked for over an hour and a half, often just repeating things we’d already said. I felt as though I’d been hit in the chest with a log, that feeling amplified by my incredulousness at feeling like that. After a quarter century how could it suddenly feel so raw again? We both engaged in the dramatic – but somehow it felt not dramatic but real. He should have been here having Thanksgiving with us for the last 25 years, but instead he’s dead. Learning why he died brought his death back into hyperfocus, and it was like it happened yesterday. They were preparing to sue and, although more often than not I feel that that avenue is just a road to more pain, I said I supported them. I wanted not to feel an intense investment in the discovery, I wanted to have the revelation, feel and embrace the sorrow anew and move on. But I was unable to resist the vortex of Bob’s life reopened. My old grief was polished and shining again. His death had been….unnecessary.

The part of the phone call that shook my world the most was when I said, almost off-handedly at first, that Bob had always thought that the marines had killed him. Slowly it became apparent to me that she didn’t know this. And neither did her mother. Bob had said to me several times that he felt that he’d been exposed to something while he was in the marines that had given him this cancer. I asked him what and he had no idea, it was just a suspicion on his part. He couldn’t have known then what we know now. He couldn’t have known the connection between benzene and leukemia. He couldn’t have known that his barracks were a stone’s throw from where old fuel was dumped, containers rusted and leaking. He simply couldn’t have known. But in his gut he knew. He knew the marines had killed him.

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