Life way too short for some people

My belated condolences to Illinois Senate Minority Leader Christine Radogno, R-Lemont, who this week lost her daughter, Lisa – who suffered a massive pulmonary embolism.

RADOGNO: Our condolences

What makes her death particularly tragic was not because of who her mother was. Or even her boss – she worked on the D.C.-based staff of Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill. It was her own age, or lack thereof.

SHE WAS ONLY 31. Lisa should have had a full life ahead of her.

Although the real question is to wonder what exactly constitutes a full life. It can be so short, or so long, or anywhere in the middle. And nobody knows exactly when their “end” will come. We truly have to appreciate every single minute.

Personally, I’m a little more sensitive to this issue these days on account of my brother, Chris. My younger brother has actually spent this week in an area hospital (we think he might wind up being released on Friday).

I had my own scare this week thinking there was a chance I could lose my little brother (he’s barely 44), even though every time I’ve seen and spoken with him this week, he’s claimed he felt fine – not at all out of the ordinary.

YET WHEN, BY pure chance, he had his blood pressure taken at a clinic on Monday (he was hoping to get some sort of medication for a sty that had developed on his eyelid), it registered way up around 240-something.

That’s hypertensive crisis territory. That’s where someone calls the ambulance and insists you go to the Emergency Room because they’re afraid you can’t drive yourself to the hospital.

He wound up spending a day in intensive care, and has since been put in a regular hospital room where he spends his days watching trashy television programs and reading the newspapers to keep up on happenings of the world.

While also complaining about how out-of-his-skull bored he has become, yet can’t go anywhere.

NOW DON’T GET the impression that I’m comparing my brother’s situation to that of Lisa Radogno. She died suddenly, while it seems my brother’s potential for a life-threatening situation was caught right at the exact moment before it became a stroke or a heart attack or something that could have caused me a lot more grief.

In fact, when I happened to be visiting him at the hospital on Thursday, I was present when a nurse took his blood pressure yet again, and it came out at a level that almost constitutes normal and healthy by American Heart Association standards.

 

Not ready to lose my brother yet

I’m fortunate. I’m likely getting my brother back – and suspect I have to be on call Friday to pick him up from the hospital when he’s finally discharged.

But if I think about it too closely, it becomes a near-miss. My brother isn’t ready to depart this realm of existence at age 44. Actually, I don’t think anybody is.

THEN AGAIN, LIFE isn’t fair. I know people I went to high school with who died at ages 19 and 22 – the former when his car was struck by a drunken driver and he went flying through the windshield because of the impact, and the latter because police said he was impaired while driving from having smoked too much marijuana.

It makes me think how they had too much still to do in life, just as my brother is in need of many more years of life to ensure he accomplishes all he wants to do.

Just as we’re going to wonder how much more Lisa Radogno would have accomplished with the extra 40 to 50 years that statistics indicate she might have had a chance to experience.

  -30-

Are we chasing people away from neighborhoods, or eliminating them?

I'm trying to figure which story I stumbled across this weekend is the most tragic.

I think it is the subject material for the Chicago Sun-Times' columnist Mark Brown, who wrote this weekend about 46th Ward Alderman James Cappleman.

HE REPRESENTS THE Uptown neighborhood in the City Council, which historically had developed a reputation as a place where the down-and-out of our society wound up living because they didn't have any other options.

That image bothers Cappleman, who appararently would prefer it if his north lakefront ward had something more along the line of a youthful or hip reputation such as something like Lake View, if not quite Lincoln Park.

To that end, Cappleman has informed the Salvation Army -- which often sends outreach trucks into the neighborhood to help distribute food to the needy -- that they're no longer welcome in Uptown.

Cappleman seems to think homeless people are deliberately making a special trip to Uptown just to take advantage of the trucks; whose purpose is to let people know of the wide range of services they can find if they visit a Salvation Army facility. Although he tries to tone down his rhetoric a bit in response.

AS THE SUN-TIMES reported, Cappleman is giving the Salvation Army one month to find another location to send their trucks. He doesn't seem to care where they send them, so long as they're not within the 46th Ward.

Salvation Army officials say they will comply. They're not looking to pick a fight.

But I'm not sure what will be accomplished by this move, other than some homeless individuals getting even less than they already have. Because I don't see them leaving the area, just because Cappleman thinks they're a blemish on his home neighborhood.

If anything, Cappleman may well be giving us a perfect example of why people are suspicious of efforts to revitalize urban neighborhoods. The "dreaded" (to some people) concept of "gentrification.

ALL TOO OFTEN, it comes across as an effort to chase people out of a neighborhood so that someone else can come in and enjoy its benefits.

And Uptown does have its benefits -- most particularly that eastern boundary also known as the Lake Michigan shoreline. Get the kind of people who pay significant types of money to live in places like Lake View or Rogers Park.

As for the individuals who get chased out, there are too many political people who seem to take the attitude that it just doesn't matter. Where they wind up is somebody else's problem -- as in they will then have to figure out a way to chase those individuals away to someplace even further out-of-sight.

Which is what too many of us think of someone like William Strickland, a 72-year-old resident of the Brainerd neighborhood (that's South Side, to those of you whose knowledge of Chicago doesn't stretch south of Soldier Field) who died early Saturday.

STRICKLAND WAS A man being kept alive by kidney dialysis treatments -- which keep his blood clean of the toxins that the rest of us dispose of through our functioning kidneys.

On Saturday, he was shot to death outside his home. Police told the Chicago Tribune they suspect someone was trying to rob him.

Not only did Strickland's family hear the gunfire, so did the driver of the shuttle bus that was waiting for him to come outside so he could be taken to his dialysis treatment.

This one hits home for me because my mother was kept alive by dialysis treatments, and she used to have a similar transport pick her up early three times a week so she could live a little longer.

SHE USED TO worry about taking a slip on the ice in the early morning hours. Being shot was something that would have gone beyond her imagination.

Yet it happened, most likely because someone thought he could get a couple of bucks from an old man.

There are those of us who get all worked up over criminal acts where the body count extends into the dozens. Yet to me, it is those who single out the most vulnerable who are truly venal.

Perhaps even more so than the current activity taking place in Uptown!

-30-