Why Brenda?
[an
unanswerable question]
An open letter,
because I’m sad
By Izzy Ess
of Uncertain-ness
Brenda died this week.
I talked to her last week. She was
buying cigarettes and scratch cards, dressed in her pajamas, not wearing
shoes. I asked if I could take her
picture. Quickly, she said, “No! I’m not dressed and I have no make-up on.” I smiled and quipped, “You look just fine to
me. I like to take a photo when a person
is acting natural and you look naturally pretty.” She nodded but did not agree. I went outside David’s convenience store and
got my cameral ready to snap a photo of her getting in her car, thinking I
could snap it when she wasn’t looking.
She surprised me and appeared outside the store and stood and said, “Please
take my picture, Izzy. I’ll come back
next week and wear some pretty clothes for you to show you how I really can
look pretty.” I snapped the camera
quickly. She looked serious, a bit
depressed, I thought. Then, her
cigarettes and scratch cards in her hand, she quickly walked to climb into her
car and drove away. My feeling was, she
realized that I was not a danger to her.
My friendly overtures to her when I’d seen her frequently at David’s
store. She was involved in taking
courses to learn how to do CPR. She had
smiled when I had offered her some practice doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I’d guessed that she was probably half my age
and thought I really had no chance to spend some time with her. I know I had romantic fantasies about
her. She was truly beautiful and had a
clever way about her. I sensed that we
would have some witty conversations, by the intelligence and charm that she
exuded. It’s too late now. Davy said she’d been in hospital last year
but he didn’t know the diagnosis. I had
guessed it was depression. Perhaps, it
was. Young people with some lung cancers
become depressed because of pessimism and the unavailability of curative
treatment. And, depression has been
speculated as the cause of some malignancies, based on evidence that depression
causes impaired immune reactions and immune reactions are what seems to guard
against malignancies. There’s an
investigator who had an inoperable cancer; he claimed he made it disappear by
watching Three Stooges Movies, all day long.
He published his paper in reputable scientific journals but it hasn’t
been accepted by most of the medical and non-medical communities. Chemotherapy and surgery remain the main
treatments for cancer despite the fact that both of these difficult to tolerate
modalities also suppress immune systems and reactions. A fairly, universally accepted theory of
cancer mechanisms is that cancer cells are a frequent occurrence by whatever
mechanism and that most people fight it off with normally aggressive immune
reactions. Another common theory is that
viruses and perhaps radiation, including cosmic rays, are injurious to normal
cells and cause them to overgrow, sometimes.
The actual cause of most cancers is not exactly known. Most blame carcinogens like tobacco smoke and
chemical contamination with such things as nitrites, nitrates and asbestos.
Of course, if you believe in God, then you are going to say
that Brenda must have been punished for sinning, or that someone in her
immediate family did the sinning. This “logic”
is what mostly convinced me that God is either unfair or he is the most punitive
of all the Deities available. This “dogma”
is the most unfair of all. I pretty well
have accepted that the errors I have made will be the death of me. However, it is agonizingly unfair to have to
answer for the sins of my father and my grandfather, my children and my
grandchildren. Perhaps it is unfair to
others that I have made it to 75. And,
that’s despite the sins of others and the predictions by doctors, whom I have
generally outlived.
I felt myself crying, knowing that I’d never see the
beautiful and witty Brenda again. It
feels unfair, to me, that she should die at such a young age. I left a note for David. It read, “Good-bye, Brenda. Life is truly unfair!” I became aware that I missed several young
people who were my friends when they died prematurely, in my view. The Bible promises a life of 120 years, if we
follow God’s directions. To my
knowledge, only the Nation of Georgia has longevity solved. Unless a Russian kills him, or her, a
Georgian typically lives to 120 with no heart disease, no strokes and no
cancer. Despite what Dannon Yoghurt
claimed, it is definitely not the Yoghurt.
And, it is definitely not the rules laid down by the American College of
Cardiology. The Georgians are
hard-working farmers who have large families.
At noon, all work stops and they eat heartily, including fat right off
the pig. They all smoke tobacco, unfiltered
and uncorked cigarettes, and they all drink a lot of Vodka. All of them finish off their hearty meals
with a siesta and then go back to the field or house to work the soil or
clean. And yes, they do eat yoghurt made
from goat’s milk. This was all
beautifully documented on a PBS programme more than ten years ago. Perhaps, I was the only one that heeded it or
was able to understand the positive and negative implications, but I doubt
it. I’m sure that it produced no change
in the ACC’s thinking or recommendations for diets, life styles and exercises.
Good-bye and good luck, Brenda. If there is an after-life existence, I hope I get
to see you and talk with you again. I
love you. May you rest in Peace!
THE END
© izzy sommers, md
Welland, Canada
July 21, 2013
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