Names of the Dead

Adam Perry was my student. He was a young man who, after years of struggling, had just discovered what he wanted to do with his life. He found that he had a talent for graphic design and worked endlessly to perfect his designs. During the last semester I taught him, I noticed that he would sit in a very odd position while working at the computer. Eventually I found out that he sat that way to ease the pain he was feeling in his back. Because he had no health insurance, he didn't have it checked. Instead, he self-diagnosed it as a back injury due to work. Adam graduated with so much promise in June 2002. Five months after he graduated, one of his classmates came to tell me that he had been diagnosed with stage four liver cancer. All I could think was "No, not Adam. Not Adam, who had just found his path. Not Adam who had worked so hard. Not Adam who had suffered so much already. Life was too, too cruel." I remember my first visit to the hospital. Adam told us, with fear in his eyes, that he was going to beat this. But not many beat stage four cancer, and he knew it. However, he could have beat testicular cancer, the cancer that doctors ultimately determined was the origin of the cancer. I was one of many who visited Adam over the next few months as he went through horrendous suffering. He desperately, desperately wanted to live. I will never forget the agonizing, disbelieving, wrenching pain in this young man's voice when he called to tell me that he had been told he had less than a month to live. He died early one morning in late May, almost exactly a month later. Later that day a huge double rainbow stretched across the sky. All of us who saw it felt that somehow the universe had noted his passing. Less than a year after Adam graduated with so much promise, he was dead. At the time, I kept thinking "How cruel life can be." But it was not life. It was a cruel, cruel country and a cruel, cruel legislature that denies basic health care to everyone, no matter what their income or full-time job status. Early diagnosis could have saved this young man's life. He died NEEDLESSLY at 28 years of age. The irony is that because Adam had no health insurance and no income, the state paid all of his bills. The total must have been well over a million dollars, if not more. Shame on Congress if they do not address the waste of lives and of money created by our lack of public health care.