James Arthur Hughes

Jim Hughes grew up on a farm in Fairfield County, Ohio. His parents came from Gallia County, Ohio. He did a stint in the Navy, married Kay Yvonne Wagner in 1960, and went to night school at Ohio State University. Soon he became an actuary for the Blue Cross health insurance organization. He and Kay built a home in Columbus Ohio, and had two sons, James J. Hughes and Thad Hughes. They divorced in 1975, and Jim soon married his high school sweetheart, Rosemary Leist. He was working for the Blue Cross of Western Pennsylvania when he developed cancer and died.

Jim became an atheist in his early twenties, and he maintained a consistently sceptical and humanistic outlook throughout his life. He was active in movements for dignity in dying, national health insurance, and a non-imperialist U.S. foreign policy. He was an occasional member of the Unitarian-Universalist Church.

Jim's two favorite authors were Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad. These two quotes give some of the flavor of Jim's outlook on life in his last year. After all, Jim's career was the calculation of the statistical incidence of disease, death and disability as it afflicted Midwesterners...

Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself - that comes too late - a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire for victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.

- Joseph Conrad

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The human being is a machine. An automatic machine. It is composed of thousands of complex and delicate mechanisms which perform their functions harmoniously and perfectly, in accordance with laws derived for their governance, and over which the man himself has no authority, no mastership, no control. For each one of these thousands of mechanisms the Creator has planned an enemy, whose office is to harass it, pester it, persecute it, damage it, afflict it with pains, and miseries, and ultimate destruction. Not one has been overlooked.

From cradle to grave these enemies are always at work; they know no rest, night or day. They are an army; an organized army; a besieging army; an army that is alert, watchful, eager, merciless; an army that never relents, never grants a truce...It is the Creator's Grand Army, and he is the Commander-in-Chief. Along its battlefront its grisly banners wave their legends in the face of the sun: Disaster, Disease and the rest.

Disease! That is the main force, the diligent force, the devastating force! It attacks the infant the moment it is born; it furnishes it one malady after another; croup, measles, mumps, bowel troubles, teething pains, scarlet fever, and other childhood specialties.

With these facts before you will you now try to guess man's chiefest pet name for this ferocious Commander-in-Chief? I will save you the trouble - but you must promise not to laugh. It is Our Father in Heaven!
 

- Mark Twain, Letters From  the Earth