Re: My mother’s nicotine addiction: she smoked and she smoked and she smoked and then she smoked some more. You knew when she was still awake in bed late at night and you knew when she awoke in the morning: by the stink of her goddamn cigarettes.
To me, the horror of it is that she truly never wanted to stop. She had NO INTENTION of quitting the accursed cigarettes, no matter how sick their sidestream smoke made me. And she never did. Eventually the habit killed her.
“You’re so susceptible!” I remember her whimpering that about my tendency to come down with every virus that floated past on the breeze. For the luvva gawd! Is it even remotely possible that she didn’t see that what made me “so susceptible” was her trashing my lungs with her fucking sidestream smoke?
Much as I hated grade school, junior high, and high school, today I have to say: THANK GOD for public schooling. Those hours on campus got me out of her house and out of her unholy stinking miasma for at least some part of the day.
What incredible evil!
To my mind (what remains of it…), the thing that was so disturbing was that she knew what she was doing. She read widely in popular and middle-brow publications: and those were awash in reports to the effect that smoking causes cancer. Journalistic publications of all kinds ran article after article going on about how smoking causes cancer. It was on the evening TV news reports. It was EVERYPLACE.
But she believed — truly did believe — it was all blather emitted by Big Brother in a campaign to control the thinking and behavior of the general public.
Once, as I recall, she even said so explicitly: used the term “Big Brother.” /eyeroll/ How stupid can you get?
Do you need to be told? She died of tobacco-induced cancer. A pretty damn hideous way to go…