Stories

I’m quite familiar with the world of cancer in the Otsego and Plainwell area. If there’s any hope or ability to help anyone not go through what I had to go through, that would be my end goal.  

I was born in Plainwell and both of my parents’ families came from Otsego. I was raised in Cooper Township, attended Plainwell schools, and graduated in 1989. I do remember substances being spread on the fields near Plainwell High School. If there was a field in Gun Plain or Otsego Township, paper sludge was spread there. They also used to spread stuff on a lot of the dirt roads around here, the same stuff from the paper mills.  

We never really cared because back then you never thought you'd get cancer because of what was going on in a field or on a road. But I had friends that lived around those fields as well as some family in the Otsego Township-Gun Plain Township area. We never drank their water when we were spending the night or visiting them because everybody's well seemed to smell and their water wasn't good. Folks had a feeling it was because of what the paper mills were spreading. I just think that no one really knew. They figured the wells needed to be deeper, and they just didn’t have the money to make that happen. Now, I do not doubt that all this is related to either the junk they put on the field, or what was in our water, or what we were exposed to in the air, or a combination of everything. I want to see the data on a similar town in rural America, where there was no paper industry or Kalamazoo River.  

Still, I lived my whole life there, left for a few years, and came back to the area in 1997 to raise my family, my son and two daughters. I was a law enforcement officer for 29 years before I retired. Now, I work part-time in corporate security.  

In December 2000, my only son was diagnosed with advanced-stage Wilms tumor cancer, which attacks the kidneys, at the age of six. He was given six months to live. He went into remission eventually, and his first remission was five years long, but it just kept coming back. And we did everything. We did vaccine therapy, we did immune therapy, we did stem cell rescue. We did all types of radiation. He fought it for years, five different times, before he finally passed away in 2017. My first wife has also fought cancer twice. It was extremely stressful for me to have both a wife and a son fighting cancer back then.

I don’t blame anyone or anything for my first marriage dissolving but myself. Cancer can be very hard on relationships and beat you up. I self-medicated myself through a couple years of it by unhealthy behaviors and unhealthy alcohol consumption. Failing at marriage was hard and embarrassing at the time, but being honest about it today, years later, keeps me alcohol free and in a much healthier state. Both of us survived the awful divorce. We both eventually remarried and became grandparents.  

In the famous movie Forrest Gump, there was a line, “Life‘s like a box of chocolates…”  I think of life like it’s a box we carry full of different pieces that make up our world. We carry that box around. Every once in a while, we trip and drop that box. Sometimes someone smacks that box out of our hands. The pieces in that box scatter all over the ground. We are stopped in our tracks now spending our time picking up pieces again and putting them back in our box/life and trying to live again. I spent a lot of seasons of life picking up those pieces that had been scattered to the ground.

If cancer hadn’t come into my life, would I have been in a different world than I am right now? Possibly. To know the innocence I once had before cancer came into my world makes my heart ache. Obviously, cancer had other plans for me. I can’t put a price tag on that world I once knew before cancer turned my world upside down.  

It took me about five years to get back on track after my first marriage ended. I no longer own the home where my son was diagnosed with cancer or where my first wife was diagnosed with cancer the first time.

Some of these other families that lost children to cancer in this area, I don't know if they survived the damage, the mental trauma, because it's not just a physical illness. I can remember a nurse on the bone marrow transplant floor at U of M saying to me, “It's harder to be a caregiver sometimes.” It consumed my life to where if I went to the store, if I walked down the street, if I went to a school event, my job: “Oh, you're the guy whose son died from cancer, whose wife had cancer.”

When I was growing up in the Plainwell and Otsego area, you never heard of the number of cancers that people were getting, let alone pediatric cancer. When my son got cancer, I really got into researching the data and everything pertaining to pediatric cancer, specifically Wilms tumor cancer. While my son was in elementary school, at least three or four kids at his school got terminal cancer and passed away. There were a few high schoolers that got cancer. Why is there so much cancer in young people in these towns on the Kalamazoo River that were known for the paper business? 

My grandparents on my mom's side lived on Wilmott Street in Otsego. My grandpa was born in that house and so was his father. They talked about the river, how it used to be so polluted that you could walk across it in one solid state because of the stuff coming from the paper mills. I can remember standing there by the river with my grandpa telling me, “Oh, you don't understand how bad it was.” Everybody worked some type of job that had something to do with the mills.  

I truly think what has occurred in the past has now caught up, and we're reaping what our ancestors didn't do or did do or didn't care to do back then. And I truly believe that the artery of it is the Kalamazoo River. Otsego is downriver from Parchment, Michigan, which had to literally shut down their water system because it was so polluted with PFAS and forever chemicals because of the paper mills.

The neighborhood where my son was originally diagnosed, where I was living my dream, raising my children, it has always kind of bugged me that the CDC never contacted me or chose to do a cancer cluster study for that neighborhood. 

We were surrounded by one of the biggest corporate farms in the county. At that time, I owned a couple acres, and it bordered a huge mega farm. Any farm around this area for years has taken advantage of whatever local fertilizer they have. We are talking about thousands of acres. A lot of folks who got cancer lived by the fields and drank the water. It was one of the biggest corporate farms in the area for generations.

That neighborhood is still flourishing, and people still live there. I drive by my old house. There's a new family there with kids, the pool and everything. And I just hope that they don't ever have to deal with what I have to deal with or dealt with, you know?

What would justice for Otsego look like to you? 

Justice for me as a father who's lost his only son, that was married to a woman that had cancer?  I mean, my life was that box that was smacked so hard, and those pieces were all over. There's not an amount of money, there's not enough that could change anything for me. Those that are dead and gone, they're not coming back. There's no amount of money, there's no prison sentence that's ever going to replace them.

The only thing I can think of when you talk about justice for that is that the future generations don't deal with it, and they learn from our mistakes. Everybody wants immediate gratification, validation, and they want to swipe their phone, Grubhub it, have it delivered right now, not cook it, not make it, not grow it, not have to kill it, not have to butcher it, not have to do anything, and have it prepared for them. They want it packaged, delivered, whatever plastic, whatever Styrofoam, you name it.

Justice for me is that people realize we can't continue to make and expose ourselves to the chemicals and junk that we have now for three or four generations without paying the price of the innocence being robbed from us. That's a six-year-old kid who has a world ahead of him. He's not expecting to have to face a death sentence. That shouldn't have to happen for the future generations.

You can have all the farmers markets in the world, you can say you're a green city. But you’ve got to live a healthy life. You can't smoke five packs a day and expect not to have trouble. You can't throw waste and forever chemicals in the water supply, and you can't spread it on fields  where we grow the corn that feeds the cows and expect not to have issues. You can't drink a fifth of booze every day and expect not to be an alcoholic or have cirrhosis or liver disease and heart trouble later on, you know? You can't have gobs of sugar all day long and not expect to have diabetes later on. That's the justice right there, the awareness.