Thought of someone today...

I was talking with someone about a relative of theirs who died recently, and mentioned that as long as the deceased are remembered in some fashion, according to African theologies, the dead aren't really dead.

So today, I took the Mustang to a car shop for pricing on a paint job, etc--and this became important.  Heritage Classic Cars is next to a truck stop in Effingham, and for some reason, that got me thinking about Ken Irion.

Ken was a friend I met during college.  I met him through Jeff Arnold, if I remember right--sometimes with friends, it seems they were always there, always will be....  We became pretty decent friends while he was in Helser Hall at Iowa State.  After his sophomore year, Ken moved out and in to Koinonia, a Christian home owned by the Methodist Church across from Friley.  Church and being active within it was important to Ken.

In any event, I got to thinking of him because of the truck stop.  Ken was from Bettendorf and for a night out, his parents and he would go out to the I-80 Truck Stop restaurant (which IS good food) and seeing a truck stop restaurant triggered my thoughts.

Ken started as a science and engineering major, but changed to English.  It wasn't that he couldn't do the math (failed Engineering students usually become business majors anyways), but there was something missing for him, so he spent his next year studying as an English major,  except he was a semester behind with the English degree requirements.  But that was when things changed, going into the spring of 1989

Ken figured out that he wasn't interested in the degree and he decided to quit school--fifteen credits away from graduating.  Instead, he decided he wanted to help people, so he volunteered to do missionary work abroad.  That volunteering led him to the Ukraine, helping with food and relief after Chernobyl, a nuclear meltdown three years earlier--before the end of the Cold War.

Ken went to Kiev--Ukraine's biggest city.  Some of the stats afterward showed that casualties from Chernobyl (volunteers helping to clean up, etc) afterwards totaled maybe 0.2% of those who helped.  But somehow, the extra radiation in the area four years on, was enough to trigger thyroid cancer--apparently, if you are predisposed to thyroid cancer, the iodine-131, etc released by Chernobyl causes your chance of malignant cancer to skyrocket.

And that's what got Ken.  I figure he ignored it initially--must've been a flu causing a sore throat or just sleeping on it wrong causing neck pain.  But if it's malignant, that gives it time to spread.  Ken died over there in the Ukraine.  He's buried there--likely because of the radiation.  I have no idea if his parents ever got to go visit the site or anything like that.   I sent a sympathy card to his parents, but what more can you do after that?

Ken was a good guy with a good heart.  ...it's funny how sometimes days or even years can fly by and then memories return that are vivid as if you saw the person only minutes ago.