THETFORD MINES, Canada — Light floods in the unadorned windows of Madame Marie-Anne Vachon’s kitchen and living room.She fidgets with her hands as she speaks, holding one cheek, then the other. She laces and unlaces her fingers, folds her arms, and releases to pat down frazzled curls. Long nails bear no polish. Blue eyes are ablaze.
She brushes invisible crumbs from the table and gets up to wipe down the stove.
Vachon is trying to stay composed. She doesn’t want to break down in tears. She doesn’t want to reveal the extent of her rage.
Twelve years ago, she watched her husband – a mineworker – die a horrible death.
For years after, his diagnoses and the cancer’s true cause was hidden from her.
Jean-Paul Giguere worked 20 years at the Flintoke mine, first in bagging and then as the supervisor of bagging.
He was diagnosed with cancer, but no one ever explained what kind.
When he became sick, two surgeons at different hospitals cut Giguere open and said they could do nothing for him. The second time his chest was opened, the wound didn’t heal. It seeped and smelled of death. Vachon had to call an ambulance to take her husband back to the hospital.
He received chemotherapy treatments, which didn’t work.
At the hospital, his wife heard him crying from the pain.
“It hurt him very much,” she said. “He had all the treatment that a man could take.”
He lost so much weight that when she bathed him she felt her hand slip between bones underneath his arm.
“It was ugly to see,” she said. “He didn’t have anything on his bones.”
He died a frail shadow of the man she married.
It was five years after her husband’s death when Vachon bumped into an acquaintance she hadn’t seen in years. The woman asked Vachon how her husband was, and she explained that he had died. Perhaps, the woman suggested, it had been from the asbestos.
Vachon had never considered that before. She wrote to the hospitals that had treated her husband, asking for his medical records. Eventually she received a piece of paper that said her husband had mesothelioma.
She learned that mesothelioma – a rare cancer that attacks the lining of the chest and abdomen – has only one known cause: asbestos.
She was mad.
After a few years of letters and phone calls, she was awarded $100,000 from the government. At first, no one responded. It wasn’t until she contacted a supervisor with the agency whom she knew, a man who had grown up in the area, that her claim received any attention.
Today, Vachon wishes she could go back in time. She would choose to live in a town far away, where asbestos couldn’t touch her.
She says her husband would never have worked there had he known asbestos was dangerous.
Instead, he was one of the men fighting to have a job at the mine because the salaries were so good.
Everyone in this region of asbestos breathes asbestos, she says. Everyone is touched by it, and no one will condemn it.
“They love asbestos,” Vachon says of two of her sisters. “They love what money can bring for them. They ignore what asbestos can do to health.
“In this region, the people, they are not supposed to talk about the mining. They keep that closed. They don’t talk about it. They don’t even think about it.”
