I’ve had eye floaters for as long as I can remember. My paternal grandmother had them. My brothers have them too. They’ve always been part of my vision—little drifting specks, threads, and shadows moving across my sight. Over time, you learn to live with them. Sometimes they swirl around, sometimes they settle toward the bottom of your vision, and most of the time you simply ignore them. Floaters are actually tiny clumps inside the eye that cast shadows on the retina. They’re common as we age, especially after fifty, and usually they’re harmless. Doctors will tell you that most people eventually tune them out. But sometimes they change. On Wednesday, while we were driving home from an overnight trip, something felt different. It was my left eye. The floaters suddenly looked darker, heavier, and there were flashes of light along the edge of my vision—almost like a bright crescent moon flickering on and off. At first, I tried to ignore it. After everything I’ve already been through w...
The Price of Ignorance: A Lesson from 1883 In a quiet Minnesota cemetery, there is a weathered, joint headstone for Ida Mathilde and Fritjof Bernard Dunham. They were my ancestors, and they died four days apart in 1883. For years, the inscription was a blur of degraded stone—a literal erasure of two lives. I’ve always been intrigued about those young ancestors of mine. Recently I scoured cemeteries in Otter Tail County in Minnesota. I called several cemeteries especially ones designated for Norway. Luckily, a very nice woman researched the graves for me. She also detailed the cause of their deaths. The mystery is solved in a heartbreaking way. It was a death sentence called smallpox . In 1883, my great-grandfather watched his siblings die because science hadn't caught up to the cruelty of the natural world. They didn’t have a choice. They didn't have a "personal philosophy" or a "suspicion of big medicine." They just had tiny coffins and a lifetime of g...