It’s a ridiculous thing to say in hindsight, of course:
My mother should not have had to die from the effects of her smoking habit.
She was in her 40s when the word came down that smoking would kill you. But…by then she’d been smoking since she was in her early 20s — maybe longer than that. She was massively addicted to nicotine.
I understate not:
The poor woman couldn’t pass an hour without a cigarette. In fact, hardly 15 conscious minutes passed that she didn’t have a goddamn cancer stick in her mouth.
The word came down…when? in the late 1950s? early 1960s? that tobacco smoking causes cancer. But by then, she just fukkin’ didn’t care.
First, I think she didn’t believe it: anything Big Brother said must have some manipulative motive, right?
But then, even if she did believe it, I seriously don’t think she cared.
By the late 1950s, early 1960s, she was so firmly addicted to nicotine that she might not have been able to shake the habit if she’d wanted to.
And she didn’t. She’d made up her mind that she liked smoking. That it was part of her daily life (ohhh literally: from before she lifted her head off the pillow until she mashed out that last cancer stick of the day, along about 10 or 11 p.m.). And she was just flat NOT GONNA quit.
And she didn’t.
Nothing would stop her habit from killing her. Least of all her effin’ doctors.
Women in this country, being women and therefore natural-born hypochondriacs, are ignored when they claim to be sick. There, there, dear…it’s all in your pretty little head. And that’s exactly what she got.
If there ever was a time between the time her cancer symptoms surfaced and the moment a quack allowed as to how she was very, very sick indeed — terminally so — it was long past by the time she encountered the first quack who bestirred himself to listen to her.
Cigarettes and other tobacco products should have been taken off the market the moment their carcinogenic effect had been proven.
Yes: then, as today, a poisonous product still would have been peddled on the black market. But my parents, like a surprising number of other humans, wouldn’t have purchased an illegal product even though they were addicted to it.
My father managed to shake that devil from his back.
My mother: not so much. The goddamn cigarettes killed her…in a spectacularly ugly way. And blighted my father’s life, when he had to care for the love of his life as she died hideously in their bedroom in Sun City.
She never saw her grandson (by then I was pregnant with him). Her addiction mattered more.
She never cared how much her husband suffered, taking care of her. Her addiction mattered more.
She never seemed to care that she was dying. Her addiction mattered more.
A tobacco-induced death is not just an ugly way to die. It’s a GAWDAWFUL way to die. And the people who get rich inducing it are not just murderers: they’re torturers.
They tortured her. And they tortured him.
