That's not all that crazy.

If you were exposed to airborne asbestos fibers in 1981, that could indeed cause you to come down with mesothelioma in 2014. Some diseases incubate within the body for that long before they rear their ugly heads and make a person sick. Obviously it's hard to establish a cause and effect link between exposure to airborne asbestos fibers and lung cancer over thirty something years, but that's what scientists are discovering about asbestos exposure.

Regarding the super long incubation time of asbestos related lung diseases, we're finding out that the more we study things like that, the more we find out that our previous assumptions about them were completely wrong. And that's true of a lot of things, not just mesothelioma. If James Brady never really recovered from being shot in 1981, and died in 2014, then there's a direct link between his having been shot in 1981 and his death in 2014. If it's reasonable to say that James Brady would have lived longer had he not been shot, then it's reasonable to attribute his death largely to his having been shot.