Today, I lost a fellow classmate from the Prairie Central Class of 1989… Scott Sutton. I will not pretend to tell you that we were close and his untimely death has a strong personal affect on me. Scott and I were acquaintances at best, but I remember always being friendly and sociable towards each other. I graduated from a class of 120 students… And those four years we spent together in High School along with extra-circular sports lay a lot of foundation for the rest of your life. It’s impossible to say his character or personality didn’t stick around somewhere in my head all these years later.
On May 16th of this year, Scott posted on Facebook that he had been diagnosed with Colon Cancer. I, at that time, and even today, have very little knowledge of what that diagnosis meant. I heard some people say that it’s a bad thing… But I really didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. Even yesterday when I got a message from another classmate about his hospitalization for pneumonia… I assumed it was a complication and that he would get past this battle. He’s didn’t.
Again… I didn’t know his life beyond HS. A quick online serarch showed me that he had some children. Those kids left behind are the saddest part for me. Youth is hard enough without this handicap. Battling through school, wrestling with love and an impending adulthood are a lot easier to deal with when you have a Father to look too. I hope Scott’s kids have more family to help guide and love them as they work out the tragedy that has wreaked havoc on their lives.
The further I get into my life and away from those roots back in Fairbury it should be easier to distance myself from emotions over a lost acquaintance. You would think that anyway. It’s not the case. They are troubling feelings. This is not a race… Life is not a competition… But man, if it were… Its gotta be rigged or I certainly don’t understand the rules. If I were putting my money on the “horses” in the beginning of this race called “Life”, I would think the odds for a horse like Scott would have been 1:1 to have a long, full and healthy life. I don’t get it!
Rest In Peace Scott… You got a bum horse… I will be thinking about how unfair this is for a long time.
As I wrote that last bit, I thought “that sounds a little callous and it’s not sensitive to peoples feelings”. F*ck that… He was robbed. I am not ashamed to say it out loud. 47 is too young. Leaving kids to grow up without a Dad sucks. Dying within months of diagnosis is even more insult. He and everyone else who succumbs to crap like this deserve better.
God bless dude. I hope you had the time to sort everything out and come to terms with it. You deserved more of everything.