Nuclear Families

On May 19, 1953 the United States detonated a 32-kiloton atomic bomb (later nicknamed "Dirty Harry") at its nuclear testing facility in Nevada. With a blast three times the size of the Hiroshima bomb, Harry sent fallout drifting over a wide area, including Southern Utah. This was just one of over 100 bombs detonated above ground at the Nevada facility between 1951 and 1962 and one of five atomic bombs that had a fallout pattern covering Cedar City, Utah.

Isaac Nelson, a resident of Cedar City, describes taking his wife out to see the first explosion. It was dark, he says, just before daylight, "and we were chattering like chipmunks, so excited! Pretty soon, why, the whole sky just flared up in an orange-red flash, and it was so brilliant that you could easily see the trees ten miles across the valley, and if you had a newspaper you could have easily read it, it was so bright. . . ." Later, he says, town residents stood outside to watch the fallout clouds drifting up through Cedar. Isaac's wife died of brain cancer that developed shortly after one of those evenings spent watching the fallout cloud float by.



Grandma, with Aunt Judy and Mother

 In a way, I grew up in the shadow of a nuclear cloud. A native of Cedar City, my mother was five years old when the nuclear testing began, and she tells stories similar to Mr. Nelson's. Thanks to cancer, she later donated both a breast and her thyroid to the American quest for adequate weaponry. My grandmother died of brain cancer just three years after the explosions began, leaving behind her a husband and six children. Though I have no proof that Harry or any of his atomic friends caused her cancer, medical reports of the period show brain tumors among the classes of cancer occurring in excess in the early period after nuclear testing.

My mother developed breast cancer about the time of my earliest memories, and she often spoke of her own mother's death from cancer. As children tend to color the world based on their own limited set of experiences and family stories, I then logically assumed that everyone contracts cancer at some point and saw that eventuality as a simple, if sad, fact of life. I accepted death with similar logic, aided by a religious perspective that emphasizes eternity. I never quite grew out of those assumptions.

Consequently, when my husband's brain tumor returned from vacation with a vengeance, I recognized a pre-established pattern and quietly began planning for the inevitable. I know to some that view rings fatalistic, even regrettably morbid, and I suppose that if I saw death as an end--to self, to relationships, to progress--I would have to agree. As it happens, I see death more as a transition. With that in mind, our little family, each of us in our own time and fashion, began to plan for life on the other side of the approaching metamorphosis. Our son, just a toddler when his father died, absorbed and reflected his insulated world, blithely oblivious to the shock of innocent bystanders when he announced matter-of-factly that his daddy had died and was now in heaven.

I think of these patterns as the crisis unfolds in Japan. My Asian contemporaries grew up in a more striking nuclear shadow than I did. In August 1945, the United States dropped "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two generations later, the nuclear pattern renews unexpectedly in the wake of an earthquake, once again fundamentally altering families with the fallout of power run amok.

Sources include:

* Nuclear Testing and the Downwinders (from Utah History on the Go)
* Fallout Effects: Impacts of Radiation from Aboveground Nuclear Tests on Southern Utah (from the Utah Department of Environmental Quality)
* Cancer Incidence in an Area of Radioactive Fallout Downwind From the Nevada Test Site (from the Journal of American Medicine)
* Compensating Life Downwind of Nevada (from National Geographic)
* A Utah Resident Remembers Atomic Testing in 1950s Nevada (from the American Social History Project)
* Radioactive Fallout to St. George, Utah (from Washington Nuclear Museum and Educational Center)

Milestones at the Middle

Devin

Last month, I passed a milestone. It has now been five years and one month since I was last pregnant, a record amount of non-pregnancy time since I first began the motherhood adventure 21 years ago. I will never breastfeed again, never change my own baby's diaper, watch my own toddler take a shaky first step, or send my child to a first playdate. In a few months, my youngest child begins kindergarten. The young mother phase of my life will officially end. Never one to linger in one stage of life when another beckons, I watch its passing with little reluctance. Still, somehow I envisioned a rather more gradual transition from mommyhood to this pause in the shadow of approaching menopause.



Alec

Life travels on, marked milestone by milestone, and I find the changing landscape around me intriguing. I shuffle reading glasses on and off the bridge of my nose, not yet willing to commit to the bifocals I should wear. A once enviable metabolism disappeared long ago, and despite my unwavering commitment to regular exercise, an unflattering muffin top persists in spilling over the belt of my not quite in fashion jeans. My resume, brimming with promise a decade ago, now sports a gigantic hole that would qualify me more for cleaning the office that once boasted my name on the door. I find myself more often in a mentoring role now, and the children I used to babysit have children in shoulder pads or scout uniforms. My own sister recently posted a picture of her fourth grandchild.



Jared



And yet...I have to agree with the old John Denver song that says "it turns me on to think of growing old." I do shudder at the thought of becoming decrepit, but I certainly have noticed an amount of sweetness in this ripening process brought on by a few years of experience. I suppose the fact that my parents have aged so well helps a great deal.

I realized a while back, to my pleasant surprise, that I no longer feel the need to win every race in life. My companions on the road look less like competition and more like inspiration. Their successes lift me up rather than reminding me of my failings, perhaps because life has made me acquainted with myself. While I still challenge myself, still push my comfort zone and reach for my personal best, I have come to understand my own rhythms and how to let those rhythms propel me forward.



Kristina

As I leave toddler dreams behind, I find myself growing with my children. I love mothering older children, watching their personalities emerge and sharing their excitement as the world expands in front of them. I also love contemplating with my husband the not-so-distant-as-it-used-to-be possibility of an expanding world of our own. While this middle phase of life finds me vaguely adrift, searching for a path and just the right answer to the eternal question of "what shall I be when I grow up," I like the view from here, with my fingers trailing in the water and the stars all around. Life holds promise, and I have time.