St Francis memorial service and Sheri Garmon and RECA

We don't have many special times in our culture where we formally remember people who have died. Often if it is an athletic or public event we have a "moment of silence," thus allowing us all to go into our private spaces to remember or not remember the person. Sometimes if the person who has died is a family member, we talk with brothers and sisters about our memories. But there are few formal occasions where communities of people remember others.

Thus, I was quite taken when I was invited to read the names at the annual memorial service of my congregation (St. Francis of Assisi in Wilsonville, OR) of those who had died and were interred in the church memorial gardens. The thought is that by providing this service for congregants, the congregation celebrates the "communion of the saints" in a very visible way. The congregation of St. Francis only began about 30 years ago, but more than 70 people are now interred in the garden. In yesterday's service three of us read the names, punctuated by the ringing of a bell, to emphasize to us the individuality of the names that were read. As the other two read their list of names, I enjoyed scanning the congregation, resting my gaze especially on people wearing special name tags because they were relatives of a person whose name was read. Sometimes I could read their names, and I immediately had a "face" to put with the deceased person. The person organizing the service had also asked for photos of the deceased persons, so that we could see them in a variety of poses--from the military uniforms of WWII to an informal picture of someone taking a hike or basking in the pleasant summer sun.

Talking to People

So, after the service I decided I would make special acquaintance with some of the people who were wearing name tags. But rather than just "being nice" to them, I would go right for the issue of the morning. I sort of surprised myself because within 15 seconds after meeting a person for the first time, a person with a nametag of a deceased relative, I asked, "tell me how you lost your loved one." I didn't feel like asking them to describe the life of the person or why they loved the person. 'Just tell me,' I asked, 'about how you lost your loved one.' What struck me was that no one was offended by the question but, rather, they seemed eager to talk about the person. One woman told me that her husband was a commercial pilot (and she was a flight attendant), and that they had worked together in the aviation industry for nearly 40 years. In one of his trips when he was near retirement he had become ill, needed emergency surgery, developed an infection in the surgery and didn't make it through. It was so sudden. Another woman told me about the story where her own mother, seemingly in good health, announced to the family at Thanksgiving that she would be gone before Christmas. And she was.

But for me the most moving conversation I had was with a woman I almost wasn't going to talk to. Why? Well, people were leaving, and I was just about ready to leave, too, but then I decided to speak to a lady whom I hadn't met before. I asked her if she was remembering someone today, and she said that her deceased sister was on her mind. Though her sister wasn't interred in the gardens, she had died recently (2005), and my new friend wanted to tell me about her. I eagerly listened.

A Final Conversation

The woman I was talking to first asked me a question. Did I know of the "Downwinders?" Well, I had heard of the name, especially as it related to the people who lived around the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, but I knew that I was missing her point. So, I said "no." She told me that she and her family, including her younger sister Sheri, were raised just outside Emmett, Idaho, in Gem County. They, like most Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, didn't know of the power and extent of the underground and atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons happening over in Nye County, NV, not far from Las Vegas. Well, over the course of those decades, nearly 925 tests were made, some of which resulted in air charged with such huge quantities of radioactive particles that it led to cancers well above the national average.

Federal legislation, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), was passed in 1990 to include compensation for those who could demonstrate their residence in affected areas and a severe illness, usually a cancer, that they suffered. Compensation was set at $50,000 per affected member, though there were special cases of $100,000 compensation for uranium miners. Thus, the "Downwinders" were born: people who had been in harm's way and had suffered the adverse affects of the supposely 'safe' radiation exposure.

But, as my friend told me, the original people who would receive compensation were those with the most influential senators: Utah, Nevada and Arizona. Studies performed since RECA was passed in 1990, however, have shown that the counties most affected by the radiation, were in Idaho and Montana. Why? Well, as I was told, the government didn't do the tests when the wind was blowing west (toward CA). It tended to do the tests when the previaling winds would take the radiation in a Northeasterly direction--the area of least population.

This makes sense, of course, from the perspective of the federal government. You don't irradiate large cities. If there is a danger, you push it to the places where the least number of people would be affected. But the problem that resulted is that those areas are not covered under the 1990 Bill.

Enter Sheri Garmon

And so, my interlocutor told me how her sister, Sheri Garmon, who actually died at age 54 in 2005 from cancer, was the one who spearheaded the effort to try to get Congress to expand the reach of RECA to include affected counties in Montana and Idaho. Senators Mike Crapo (R-ID) and Larry Craig (R-ID) have now introduced legislation to try to get these affected counties and people under the protective reach of the statute. So far there hasn't been a hearing in the appropriate committee--the Senate Judiciary--because, as we all know, there are things in that committee (like the firings of federal prosecutors) that will get a lot more press these days than the claims of a few thousand cancer-stricken people in Idaho and Montana. But I learned about how Sheri, even as she was declining in health, did all she could to highlight this issue and bring it to the attention of the Idaho congressional delegation. Unfortuantely, Idaho has not had a senator of status since the Idahoans threw out Frank Church in a huff 27 years ago. Maybe something will happen soon, but with Democratic control of Senate Judiciary, I think they will be playing for higher political stakes than compensating families from two small Western states. I wish things were different.

Conclusion

Thus, in the space of about an hour, I felt as if I had a sort of personal introduction to the "doctrine" of the communion of the saints. Surely people were brought back to life through the words and memories of loved ones. May we all learn how to do this once in a while. We will be the richer for it.

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