PFAS do not break down but rather persist indefinitely. It is possible that Dad drank carcinogenic water for most of his life.
Editor’s Note: This excerpt is adapted from Loose of Earth: A Memoir with permission from University of Texas Press. The Environmental Protection Agency announced limits on PFAS in drinking water earlier this month. A blade of light glances off my grandparents’ white Lincoln. They park at the curb. A torque of despair turns in my stomach at the way Dad draws his mother into his arms. There’s a tumor in Dad’s colon. That’s all anyone knows.
Looking back now from the distance of twenty-five years, I imagine that once inside the guest room, Grandma downed her glass of water and said something like, “That ought to take the edge off.” Humor, rhetorical shrugs, that was the Blackburn way. She would have then set to work placing her folded slacks in the empty dresser. Perhaps her mind darted as it did when she later talked to me about the last year of her son’s life: He’d looked robust as he strode across the yard to greet her.
My grandmother liked to think she’d also inherited her mother’s resilience. Dorothy Kennedy was born in Racine in 1920. The oldest of five children and the only girl., she used to say. Daughter of a salesman, an Irish immigrant, a drunk. Whenever Dorothy heard of people saying they had depression, she scoffed. Depression was using your four-foot-eleven frame to shelter your mother from your father’s vitriol after he’d spent his earnings on whiskey down at a bar called Nick’s.
Never again. The Navy joined forces with the company 3M to develop a new aqueous film-forming foam that could stop petroleum fires. Over fifty years later, certain PFAAs, including perfluorooctane sulfonate , perfluorooctanoate , and perfluorohexane sulfonate , would constitute three of the six forever chemicals targeted for regulation in drinking water by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2023 because of their hazardous health impacts. But in the 1960s, 3M branded its foam “Light Water,” as though its presence on the planet would be just as ephemeral and life-giving as those elements.
But the PFAS released into the environment couldn’t be sealed up. They became euphemized as “forever chemicals,” a term one can at least pronounce if not comprehend. The ability of PFAS to repel oil and fire is also what endows them with their durability. The chemicals are described as “forever” because they do not break down but rather persist indefinitely, accumulating in water, sand, soil, and blood.
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