Tom Burkle’s Story

Tom Burkle loved to work with his hands. In the age of automation, he said it was “a dying thing.”

He didn’t know it would lead to his own death.

From 1966 to 1969, he was an Army mechanic, repairing trucks in West Germany. After
his honorable discharge, he returned to his hometown of Indianapolis, becoming a pipe tter. He helped build schools, hospitals and the Hoosier Dome football stadium. When he retired in 2006, he started a handyman business called “Mr. Fix-It,” taking on small projects for his friends, family and the elderly in his community.

In 2014, his wife Joan retired from her nursing career so she and Burkle could travel the world together. But they were only able to take one trip to Italy before, in March 2015, while lifting weights, Tom felt a sharp pain in his back.

“At rst we thought he’d just pulled a muscle,” said Joan, who was married to Burkle for 43 years. “But then the pain in his back moved around to the front, and he couldn’t lie on

one side. It was such a surprise, because he’d always been so healthy. The July after that, he started having shortness of breath, so we went to the doctor.”

An X-ray showed he had uid on his right lung, but an initial biopsy of the uid found no cancer cells. After surgery to drain more than a gallon of uid, doctors found what Joan described as “innumerable” tumors on his lung, sternum and ribs. They diagnosed pleural mesothelioma, a rare and incurable cancer caused by inhalation of asbestos bers. Burkle could have been exposed through truck brakes or pipes, two common uses of asbestos until its deadly nature became widely known in the mid-1980s.

Doctors said Burkle might survive two years. Despite multiple radiation and chemotherapy treatments, and intense pain, he lived ve months.

Burkle died Jan. 13, 2016, at age 69. Four hundred people, many of them Burkle’s customers whom Joan didn’t even know, came to his funeral.

Less than a month later, Joan learned about the so-called FACT Act, a proposed federal law that would make it harder
for asbestos victims and their families to collect compensation from companies that made and used asbestos. She travelled to Washington, D.C., to urge her senators to oppose the bill.

“I’m not an angry type of person, but it’s a horrible injustice that these companies kept making and using asbestos products when they knew it could kill people,” Joan said. “Because mesothelioma was so rare, they valued the pro t motive above the loss of life.”

Recently, Joan sold and moved out of the house she and Burkle called home.

“I would look in the corner and all I could see was the hospice bed where he suffered so much,” she said. “I just kept thinking that this could not be true, it’s got to be a dream. It was a nightmare.”