Tragically, my beloved daughter Katherine did not live to see her golden birthday – twelve on the twelfth of February. Tragically, I have lived to see her golden death date – twenty-two years since she died on June 22, 2002. She has missed all the years of her life, which would have been so much of joy.
I wish everything could be different. And in fact, though I cannot do it alone, I am willing to commit every available moment of my remaining life to the cause of making everything different, to preventing other families being destroyed the way ours was, to the health of other individuals who will suffer if industry is able to proceed unfettered by ethics, as they have so far.
Who will judge their actions? I rarely engage with their lies – they are not worthy opponents in debate. They do not share basic ethical assumptions. But the harm they have done to me – to us – is so great as to generate a Fury-like rage, a rage that should be shared by many others, except that industry has palliated the populace with their pablum of doubt and money. Most do not see it, but the evidence is all there. In many cases, people are angry about all the wrong things, distracted by trivialities, entertained by self-important clowns. So many of these illnesses and deaths are preventable.
Some might think that despite the brutal injustice visited upon fenceline and Environmental Justice (EJ) communities – children and adults with cancer, teens with asthma, school-age children with auto-immune disease, babies born with debilitating birth defects – that their own children, secured behind the walls of gated communities and wealthy suburbs, are safe. Nothing could be further from the truth. My daughter is among those children, possessed of every advantage, who nevertheless, despite all her parents’ efforts, lost the lottery that is chemical exposures, a deadly lottery nobody wins and everyone in the United States is subject to with or without their consent. That is, nobody wins except the bloody-handed titans of the petrochemical industry.
In my dreams, my mind is always grasping at an unanswerable, devastating question: “where did she go?” Why haven’t I talked with her in so long? Why aren’t I with her? I awake in tears, wishing for one more day, one more conversation, even one more touch or glance of my Katherine. Most of all, I wish that she had had all of the life she has missed so far. I am and always will be inconsolable. I wake up desperate to find her. But she is – nowhere – perhaps in the small square of earth where soon I will be.
