Caitlin, a down-winder,
lay dying in the hospital.
Who thought of it first?
Let’s do the wedding now!
Scott was there, license
in hand. Witnesses?
Here’s Jan, visiting from our office,
and Caitlin’s oncologist makes two.
I have my Universal Life minister
certificate. Afterward we cried,
but then Scott went out
for a six-pack and we toasted
the newlyweds. No beer for
Caitlin, but she beamed, raised
her hand, and pressed the button
of her morphine
drip.

(No. 68 in a series of responses to Han-shan’s Songs of Cold Mountain)

I worked with Caitlin for several years, and she became a dear friend. What a lady! She regularly took breaks from our busy government office to work as a cocktail waitress in Cannon Beach, Oregon. Caitlin had grown up in southeastern Washington, down wind from the toxic plume that (unknowingly, at the time) exposed many people to radiation poisoning. The source was the plutonium facility in the Tri-cities area of Washington, which supplied fissionable material for our nation’s first atomic bombs. The most common illness of the “down-winders”, as they have come to be known, is thyroid cancer. Caitlin’s thyroid cancer metastasized, and at 38, she was dead within 16 months of diagnosis.

I learned a great deal about dying from Caitlin. Including the sense, as Steven Levine put it, that there is ultimately no safer act we will ever confront.

(Numeric reference to Han-shan’s poem reflects the order of presentation in Burton Watson’s translation, presented as Cold Mountain, Columbia University Press, 1970.)