I did not know until my husband’s feet turned blue, until the tumors conquered his lungs and thwarted his breath, until the morphine drip stilled, and the feeding tube dangled empty of nutrition. Only when no warm place remained to rest my face, to seek his aliveness, only then did I learn that Michael’s father died at 58 of the same aggressive lung cancer.
Only then did I also learn that Dick, his journalist father, witnessed the dawn of the nuclear age. My mother-in-law Katie, the loss of her 36-year-old son merging with her widow’s grief, her white hair neat in its daily braided bun, cast her eyes on her lap, her hands twisting the thinned gold wedding band. She spoke without raising her gaze.
They were handed goggles but no other protection. They were told to turn around.
My father-in-law, dead long before he would have become my father-in-law, returned from WWII to his wife and two children and his career at the Oregon Journal. In 1946 he was invited to attend Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll where journalists witnessed the test atomic bomb explosions aboard the USS Appalachian. Their job: to ease the public’s anxiety about the experiment.
They told him the only hazard was the possibility of sterility. We had two children. We could take the risk.
Later, Dick also witnessed atomic tests in the Nevada desert, where witnesses were kept at least ten miles from the impact sites, except for a 1953 blast, when journalists were trenched two miles away.
Their third child came in early 1947, so Katie must have already been pregnant when Dick left for Bikini Atoll the summer of 1946. In 1948 and 1951 she miscarried twice, something that had not happened during all her previous years of childbearing, before giving birth to her fourth and fifth children. Michael, the baby of the family, arrived in 1953.
You see dear, sterility was not the risk after all.
During the ‘80s, the office of an Oregon senator contacted my mother-in-law as part of an effort to study the cancers of those witnesses and to help them seek compensation. I encouraged her to respond but I don’t believe she followed through. She could not bear the thought of remuneration for her loss.
My daughter’s health remains sturdy at 46, yet for years I wondered if the radiation of witnesses would also damage a third generation, would harm my child who lost her father when she was ten. For a long while I watched studies, although truly understanding them was beyond my scientific abilities. Eventually my vague fear of genetically transmitted irregularities receded into the place where all my other ghosts swarm quietly.
This week, my daughter stunned me with the revelation of her fear.
I didn’t expect to live a long life. That’s why I took so many risks when I was younger.
At Bikini Atoll, artists joined the journalists aboard the USS Appalachian. They documented the bomb’s ability to destroy battleships. They painted the unearthly beauty of an atomic explosion, plumes and puff balls and mushroom clouds in brilliant shades of orange, softer pink, dull gray. They painted Bikini Village after the blast and after the resulting tidal wave. They painted grinning journalists with goggles in place waiting for the blast. They painted the admirals and captains. They painted King Juda of Bikini. They painted battleships waiting, battleships destroyed, the placid sunset that followed, their art intended, like the journalists’ coverage, to ease the public’s anxiety.
My anxiety, eased only by time, resurfaces as President Trump tells the Defense Department to recommence the nuclear testing halted in 1992 at the end of the Cold War, and as the last remaining treaty between the United States and Russia limiting nuclear weapons expires. My roused ghosts murmur, NoNoNo. They paint images behind my eyes.
Shadows of vaporized victims in Hiroshima.
Michael, panicked by morphine hallucinations, gasping for breath.
The long list of cancers that killed downwinders, those who lived or worked downwind of the test blasts.
My ghosts, rustle, sigh, insist I act. We must awaken all the ghosts who will whisper so loudly that you cannot ignore them.
