Fat kills.

Allan K. talked about fearing a stroke or heart attack as his motivation for finally getting to a healthy weight and saving his life. This inspired me to write something about an old friend, Doobs, who died about 25 years ago.

Doobs was always obese, even as a little kid. So was his sister, and his mother was overweight. His father had been obese, and died young of a heart attack, leaving his mother a young widow with two small children. Doobs was thus pushed into the role of little man while still a kid.

His mother obviously had some sort of ED and stuffed her kids and any of their friends who came over. She was one of those crazy Catholics with pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus hanging around the house--you know the one with thorns around his ex-corporeal heart, dripping with blood, even one hanging in the kitchen. It didn't promote appetite in me, that's for sure.

Here I'm not kidding: a serving of mashed potatoes was a huge soup bowl piled high with about six or seven regular-sized servings in it, and cream poured on top! On the dinner plate was a whole chicken for each person, smothered in gravy. There were no vegetables unless it was something starchy like baked beans or corn served in another soup bowl, but there were several pieces of bread for everyone at each place setting. Binks put away the whole thing, thousands of calories, and that was just for supper. I believe she pushed food as a way of making up for a deprived life and as a means of control. She didn't allow her kids to do anything, and chose all of their friends. Yeah, she was nuts.

As an adult, he and his buddy often came to visit me. I had a set of those 50's chrome-legged table and chairs, and it wasn't meant to hold a 500-lb. guy. When he sat in it, the legs splayed out and the chair cracked in two, sending him to the ground. He didn't even blush, which I found odd, because I would have been humiliated. He was angry I had such cheap furniture. That week, I went out and bought a sturdy, solid-oak chair with upholstered padding, pretty expensive, which I was sure would hold his weight. It was over-sized, but it fit perfectly at the table. When he visited that weekend, I told him he had a new chair. He was insulted, and said he wouldn't sit in it. He sat in one of the set's chairs, and the same thing happened. Now I was down two chairs. I didn't have much money at the time, since I was unemployed and living on savings, but I went out and bought a whole new kitchen set so he wouldn't feel "different" from everyone else, but would stop breaking my furniture. That seemed to settle him and it worked.

Now I believe he had a small stroke when he was 24 or so. He'd been driving down the road and blacked out. When he came to, the car had hit a railing on the road, and while the car wasn't too bad, he'd hit his head against the steering wheel. He began having severe headaches and started missing time--short periods were bleeped out of his memory. He saw no specialist, just a very bad family doctor, who said it was a result of his hitting his head. But what had caused the black-out, I wondered? The doc was an idiot, and never investigated that.

He'd had trouble finding girlfriends, but when he moved to Florida after finding a job as a motel manager, he fell in love and married a lovely woman. They had a baby after they'd been married a year or so. Within  two weeks of his son's birth, he was dead of a heart attack, age 32, almost a duplicate of his father's death. When the autopsy was done, his heart was covered in fat, as were his internal organs, and his coronary arteries were closed due to cholesterol deposits. It had only been a matter of time.

He died of obesity, without experiencing the joy that many years of marriage can bring a man. His son never had a father.

His life was one of emotional deprivation, and his death was unnecessary. I will say this: he never tried to lose weight in all the years I knew him. I believe now that the thought simply terrified him, whether it was the fear of hunger, failure, or losing his protective layer of fat. While I knew on some level it was inevitable, it still took me quite a while to come to terms with his passing.

Make no mistake--obesity kills, and it often kills young. Whether the death is slow or rapid, it still kills. Please, please, get healthy before it's too late. People love you. People will never, ever, get over your death. You're not the only one losing your life. Those who love you lose a piece of their lives, too. Do it now.