Life after cancer

Ever since my Near Death Experience I have thought much of Karma. We Americans tend to shorten the definition of Karma to “what goes around, comes around”. Hindus view it as a moral law, Buddhists as a natural law, Jainism as a physical law. Christians have replaced it with God’s law which states that you will get your just deserts in an afterlife. We everyday people tend to think of it as payment for our actions, good for good and bad for evil.

I am not so sure. Let me tell you a tale. There was a couple that lived the Maryville area of Phoenix which in 1969 had no signs in Spanish. That year I lived further west, close to Perryville Road. That was long before the state prison was built there. The couple had a troubled marriage even though they were successful enough with a growing family. I think he was a realtor and she was employed by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office – not as a deputy.

On the other side of the valley (Phoenix and suburbs are in the Valley of the Sun) a couple of teenagers were found dead in a car on Dynamite Road, north and east of Scottsdale. That area, desert at the time, was known for teenagers parking and doing what teens do in parked cars in the boonies.

After some months our realtor (I think he was a realtor, could have been anything) was arrested and then convicted of the murders. The strongest evidence was of a fingerprint found by the investigators that happened to be deputies in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office. The fingerprint had been stored in the location where his wife worked.

The realtor was sent to the state prison at Florence where he reinvented himself and became active in the JCs, especially the JC rodeo. Who knew that they had JCs and rodeos    in the Arizona State prison system.

That could be the end of our story with no connection to Karma. But it’s not. Sometime after the millennium changed a migrant (undocumented) confessed that he murdered the two teens on Dynamite Road! There goes the ex-relator’s gig of running the JC Rodeo. He was released and was invited by his son who now lived in Colorado to stay with him.

Ready for “happily ever after”? Not yet. The ex-con started to be inappropriate with the son’s children. Yes, sexually inappropriate. That ended the living arrangement.

Shortly after the COVID pandemic, I had occasion to drive down the now paved Dynamite Road for several years, I remembered both the beginning and the end of this tale every time.

Any Karma around? I don’t see any. The wife had never replied when asked if she knew anything about how her husband’s fingerprint appeared in place of tee migrant’s. Why the inappropriateness with the son’s children. Why no legal action because of it? Did the migrant have a good life for the (roughly) 30 years of freedom he had?

And me? I just had my third PET scan with no sign of cancer. Maybe it’s just as Kris Kristofferson sang- “What have I ever done to deserve even one of the pleasures I have known?”