Five years: Stuff happens

This weekend marks five years since I was working at my job in the South Pacific territory of American Samoa and had a seizure that announced unequivocally that something was wrong with my brain’s wiring. Ten days later, after an emergency medical evacuation to Auckland, New Zealand (the “nearest center of medical excellence”), I was diagnosed with a tumor on my right frontal lobe.  Emergency brain surgery and a six-week course of radiation soon followed.

By all accounts, I’ve thrived over the intervening years, with no new tumor growth. I am nurtured, supported, and encouraged by family and diverse, ever-widening circles of friends, and I do my best to nurture, support, and encourage them all in turn. I have a job that pays me enough to occasionally buy frivolous things like dahlias at the farmers’ market just because it’s a gloomy day. I snuggle with my cats and read good fiction and watch some clever (and some dumb) TV shows and look at praying mantises in my garden and play Macklemore’s “Downtown” on repeat at high volume. I travel to new distant countries and traipse around museums and ruins every chance I get.

This "anniversary" weekend has been wonderfully full: cheering on my daughter at a martial arts tournament, laughing and drinking beers around a campfire, walking on the beach, getting ice cream and paletas as a reward for a long bike ride. Spotting herons in marshes. This is the life I have with the people I love. Five years out, I rarely envision my dying self hooked up to morphine in a hospice, although that day may well come.

But increasingly, especially at large public gatherings, I envision gun violence. I fear that someone I care about, particularly my daughter, will be in the wrong place at the wrong time, having the gall to go about what should be an everyday routine of attending school, or church, or shopping, and all of a sudden the day, and that life, ceases to be routine forever. 

I let my beloved girl bike alone around our neighborhood but pause when I drop her off at the roller rink to attend a birthday party. It’s a place characterized by squealing children and blaring pop music competing with laser tag and disco lights and the pings and bonks of arcade games. 30,000 square feet with no windows, staffed entirely by teenagers. It’s the kind of venue where, increasingly, I expect an angry man with access to a personal arsenal of firepower will choose to enact his deranged version of vengeance on a bunch of unsuspecting people before anyone even realizes what is happening.

Certainly, I never expected that at 39 I’d be diagnosed with brain cancer. Of course, I never expected that as a citizen of the US, I’d see repeated gun massacres in public spaces. In churches. In malls. In movie theatres. In fucking elementary school classrooms.

Candlelight vigil, Lafayette, LA

Despite how unfortunately common cancer of every type is, we always look upon someone’s diagnosis as a surprise, something that couldn’t have possibly been anticipated, despite a person’s individual risk factors. For far too long, we’ve treated the risk of gun violence the same way: something unexpected. But gun violence and mass shootings have become anything but a surprise. Spend a few minutes looking at this chart from The Guardian and you will probably realize, as I did, that mass shootings – let alone the many instances where fewer than 4 people are killed or injured – are now so sickeningly common that you probably weren’t aware of most of them. Such violence is now a routine, nearly everyday occurrence, as President Obama reminded us after the violence in Oregon.

Candlelight vigil, Roseburg, OR

Cancer has certainly taught me that death is inevitable, whether from bad decisions or fluke accidents or old age or rogue cells that divide and host intruders. Stuff happens. Yet while my brain tumor wasn’t predictable, many cancers ARE considered preventable, and so we tackle cancer risk, by screening, vaccinating, wearing sunscreen. We put mandatory warning labels on packs of cigarettes and aerosol cans and alcoholic beverages. We acknowledge that there is compelling evidence that certain substances and exposures are more likely to increase the chance of getting cancer.  

Cancer exists in nature and is not a strictly human creation, but we recognize it as a public health risk and devote intensive resources to its prevention. Guns don’t occur organically, and are purely designed and used by humans.  And still we fail to identify them as a public health crisis.

Prayer vigil, Charleston, SC

 Several days before I finished my course of radiation in early January 2011, former US Representative Gabrielle Giffords – we are nearly age peers – was shot in the head as part of a mass shooting that took the lives of six and wounded twenty. A couple of weeks later, I remember watching the nightly news with dear friends at their home in Auckland, talking about the shooting, and realizing with irony how fortunate I was. I only had brain cancer, a function of the great, often baffling mystery of the world. A fellow human didn’t decide to shoot me in the head. Brain cancer had thus far spared my speech and motor skills, unlike what Jared Loughner’s gun had done to Gabby’s brain.

Candlelight vigil, Tucson, AZ

I thought hard about my mortality the night before my brain surgery. It’s a terrifyingly deep well, one I am grateful not to have fallen into yet. Too many others suffer and die violently from guns before they even have the privilege of contemplating their lives.

This is not simply a call to carpe diem and tell people you love them. (Although do that too.) Five years ago and at every subsequent MRI and oncology appointment, friends and family across the globe, from many different cultures and faith traditions, have lifted me up in prayer and demonstrated what is good and unifying in the world. I am ever grateful. But right now, I want to ask for a different kind of support, one that requires more than bowing your head or lighting candles, like the grieving people in these photos attending vigils in the wake of gun violence. Those are good and worthy actions, but rather than simply celebrating my 5-year milestone, please, do something to promote gun control in America.

Call your elected officials. Attend rallies in support of reasonable gun control laws. Donate to one of the many organizations fighting the uphill battle against the NRA and its elected puppets at every level of government, including:

Everytown for Gun Safety/Moms Demand Action (http://everytown.org/)

Americans for Responsible Solutions (http://americansforresponsiblesolutions.org/)

Sandy Hook Promise (http://www.sandyhookpromise.org/)  

And if you think I’m way off base, that gun violence isn’t the issue, mental health is, then for God’s sake, take some action on that. Donate to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (https://www.nami.org/) or one of those good organizations in your neck of the woods that serve those with mental health problems.

“Stuff happens,” Jeb Bush told listeners at a campaign event in South Carolina the day after the Oregon shooting. Five years since my diagnosis, and I’ve always shied away from identifying myself as a survivor, perhaps because a good chunk of the tumor still lives in my skull. But I think our collective survival as Americans depends upon reclaiming the narrative about guns.

I am not naïve enough to think that we can eliminate all gun deaths, but I do think we can take reasonable steps – perhaps mandatory background checks and waiting periods for purchasing, a national gun registry, liability insurance for legally purchased guns, and closing purchasing loopholes – to limit angry people from getting and using guns, and in doing so, take our country back from those who have us cowed into submission and inevitable future gun violence. This kind of stuff doesn’t have to happen.

  

[Note: I hadn’t even finished my final draft of this essay – begun on October 1, 2015 after the Umpqua Community College shooting - when I heard the news of yet another mass shooting on October 9, 2015 at another campus, this time Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ.]