From khowell's diary at Daily Kos:
As a historian, I don’t think in counterfactuals very well, but for the past two days I’ve found myself thinking “what if?”
What if the state of South Carolina hadn’t cut funding to extraneous things like museums and an archivist hadn’t lost his job?
What if we had universal health care and our young (so young – only 38 years old) archivist could’ve afforded to stay on his anti-seizure and anti-depressant medication?
What if there wasn’t a stigma associated with being poor, with losing your job, with needing help? What if a proud man who’d lost his job had felt welcomed enough by his community to seek help?
Most importantly, what if Dave Condon, my friend, my fellow student, my fellow lover of history and books and good music… what if Dave had found somewhere inside himself the ability to fight a little bit more – a little bit longer?
I found out yesterday morning that my friend Dave Condon was found dead in a tent in South Carolina. He died, at 38, of malnutrition and pneumonia. Dave was kind and funny, of dry wit and few words. A loner. A singularly talented loner, of the variety that often looks at the world from below and finds themselves wanting. He saved up his couch change to drive from Anderson, SC to Hattiesburg, MS in October of 2003 so that he could join us for our wedding. He stood up for my husband, as one of three of our fellow graduate students to anchor his side of the ceremony. He and the others hammed it up throughout the rehearsal, keeping all of us in stitches.
Dave went out with all of us the night before the ceremony and did the same schtick as always. History jokes, mostly; in a room full of historians nothing gets a laugh quite like a line about Tito’s dyspepsia or Lee’s verbal tic. We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, and the next morning we all got up and went to a wedding. It was short and sweet, as Dave said, “hardly worth driving 12 hours for, but for y’all it’s okay. I guess.” Next morning, we packed him in his Saturn with leftover food and a big hunk of the wedding cake he loved and all drove off toward the North Carolina mountains together. The little train of three cars rolling up I-59 didn’t split until somewhere around Knoxville, as I remember. I’d fallen asleep and woke up to realize that I’d not even waved goodbye.
Like many college friends in the age of 24 hour connectivity, we all kept in touch, badly, on holidays and momentous occasions; sometime in November was the last time we even talked. None of us did what we should have. And tonight, as I sit and listen to the President’s speech, I can’t help but think about what might’ve been. What if people in precarious financial situations always had access to free healthcare? What if that health coverage included mental health benefits? But my frustration, my anger, goes so far beyond the question of health care; it’s just the first thing that comes to mind because of the current debate. And, let’s face it, Dave Condon would’ve been just another statistic, just another diary about someone who could’ve done so much more if we afforded people the basic right of health just like we require drivers to have auto insurance.
No. What makes me so incredibly angry, and what has me sitting here in tears at my desk right now, is the fact that some people are so full of hatred that their first response is that he “should’ve gone to get a burrito.” Where’s basic civility? Do the people who write these horrible things not realize that his family is reading them? They obviously never knew Dave, otherwise such cruel comments wouldn't even occur to them! Where is the sense of community that was so shockingly absent in this small southern town? Why is it that residents in the condos that ringed the lake where he pitched his tent were warned not to talk to the man who went into the woods in the afternoons? Why is it no one called the authorities about some guy living in a tent near a well-off community until a group of people in a boat put in near the pup tent and found his body? Why is it that we’re so afraid of mental illness that we can’t even have compassion – not sympathy but a sense of devotion and care – for those who suffer from it in all its forms?
All I can do is keep asking myself one question: “What could I have done?” I know there had to be something. I live eight hours away. He didn’t have a phone or anything when he disappeared in early August. But surely there was something I could have done. My friend Dave was brilliant and proud; he loved history and students and books. He valued the things that most of us in our digital age think of as old, dusty, and outmoded. My friend Dave was kind and giving; he drove twelve hours and did us the honor of standing in our wedding. The single image I’m left with is that my friend Dave died Saturday, hungry and alone, depressed and scared, with his boxers and socks spread out on a rock to dry; there was a pouch of Chick-fil-A sauce ground into the mud by an EMT’s shoe just outside the tent.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/9/9/779481/-A-good-man-gone:-David-Scott-Condon1970-2009A remembrance from his uncle:
http://mdabbles.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/a-memorial-for-david-scott-condon/Unbearably sad.......... There but for the grace of God go we all.
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