My brother in law died recently. He is the only member of my family I gave a shit about. He worked for a few years at a place where they made light poles. I visited him once. It was a toxic nightmare. He left that job to work for Terminix. He worked there for nearly a decade. He died last year of cancer after a years long battle at 60.

I worked in my twenties at chemical plants, power boilers and nuke plants. I didn’t quit even after I noticed how all these people who were twenty to thirty years older than me were dying and how they were dying. I quit when three other men in my age group two of them very healthy and one who was a alcoholic died within months of each other after being doused with chemicals when they cut into a void while wrecking out a storage tank at a 3M plant I had worked at.

Now thirty years later all of the friends I knew who were boilermakers during that time are gone including one who now that I look back on it was a father figure to me.