Angst

It’s hard to understand, for me, how my mother could have failed to grasp that she was killing herself with her incessant cigarette-puffing habit.

Matter of fact…I think she did know it, and that she quite deliberately killed herself. Yeah. With tobacco.

She’d had a difficult life, although my father doted on her. But…before he came along, her upbringing as an unwanted child was less than an ideal way to establish residence on this earth. Her grandmother’s dying of diabetes couldn’t have helped — this was the mother of her useless father, the one who, like the useless mother, made it sterling clear that he didn’t want a brat around to crimp his style. The first 12 years or so of her life were spent out in the middle of nowhere, on her paternal grandparents’ dirt farm in upstate New York — today it would be about the equivalent of growing up in the most remote boondocks of Nevada or New Mexico.

{jeez????!!! Did I post this thang without finishing it?????}

{Let’s start over here, where I intended to go next!}

Ay vai! So there she is, a young teenager in the poverty-stricken remoteness of Upstate New York.

Her poverty-stricken farmer grandparents — the paternal set — glommed her [WHAT IS THE WORD?] mostly because they lived in upstate New York and the (far more affluent, far better educated) maternal grandparents lived in California, thereby proving themselves, before a local judge, to be worthless wastrels. Hm?

So the poor little girl grew up in the backwoods of upstate New York until her paternal grandmother finally died of diabetes. This gave her grandfather an excuse to get rid of her: he shipped her off to the maternal grandparents in the San Francisco Bay Area.

There her fortunes changed. The California relatives were moderately affluent (not wealthy, by any means; but neither were they dirt-poor, in the mode of the New York relatives). She got a halfway decent high-school education and ended up with a job that would put a roof over her head and food on her table.

But…uhhhh…

What did stylish, even moderately “loose” women of those times do?

They smoked, that’s what they did.

Result: she developed a virtually inescapable addiction to nicotine. Even if she’d wanted to quit smoking (she certainly did not!), she probably could not have done so.

And the resulting result: She was murdered by the tobacco manufacturers. Eventually she died of tobacco-induced cancer.

A real fine way to go. Yeah.

Some time before she actually got sick from the habit, the word came down that smoking tobacco could kill you. By then, though, she’d learned that anything she didn’t want to hear was BS emanated by Big Brother.

And you be sure that “quit smoking” was NOT something she wanted to hear.

So she puffed her way into the grave.

DID she commit suicide?

I kinda doubt it. I think she just refused to differentiate between bullshit, propaganda, and accurate science. And because she couldn’t or wouldn’t make that distinction…well…she died.

On the other hand…. You could argue that willful ignorance of the facts is a form of suicide.

Yep.