when a stranger's death affects me

I turned on my computer this morning at school to find out that Dana Reeve has died only seven months after she announced that she had lung cancer. This just makes me so sad. Her son is only 13. An orphan. Two parents dead in the space of two years.

Of course there's the part of me that feels like Reeve's death will be used to bring more attention to nonsmokers who die of lung cancer, and that's a good thing. Maybe part of what makes me so sad about this is that I've bought into the belief system that says that lung cancer is a preventable disease: quit smoking. Or that those who smoke like chimneys for years and years and then end up with lung cancer somehow deserve it. Nobody deserves cancer, but that logic--the logic that lung cancer in smokers is theoretically preventable--is sometimes hard to counter, no matter how hard we try to look for technicalities in the arguments. I say this because I've been following Bloomington-Normal's public debates about the smoking ban in restaurants. And bar owners have used the teensiest technicalities to argue that there isn't a direct causal link between second-hand smoke and health problems.

But mostly I'm just sad. I'm struck by disbelief in some ways. Lung cancer kills so goddamn fast. August 2005. March 2006. Rest in peace.