Yeah, I believe she did.
She knew exactly what she did, as she quietly and pleasurably and quite deliberately smoked herself into the grave.
She knew her stinking habit would kill her.
And she knew (quite correctly) that it would make her little girl sick.
The connection between tobacco smoking and lung cancer became known in the 1950s.
Forgodsake, I was born in 1945.
So…yeah: when I was five years old, she knew she was making me sick.
And make me sick, she did: one gawdawful respiratory ailment after another after another.
Yeah. I remember her simpering, one day, “Poor Dee! You’re so susceptible!” (Her nickname for me was Dee Dee. As a toddler, I couldn’t begin to pronounce the wacksh!t name she and my father inflicted on me, so baby-babble became the source of my day-to-day name.)
Gawdlmighty. If you believed your child was “susceptible” to every respiratory infection that came along and then some, WHY in the name of God would you sit there and puff toxic fumes into her face?
Makes her sound stupid as a post, doesn’t it?
She wasn’t, though. She actually was a surprisingly smart woman — if hugely uneducated. What she was? Addicted, that’s what she was.
She was addicted to nicotine.
Even if she’d tried to stop smoking, she probably couldn’t.
Understand: She was never awake when she didn’t have a cigarette in her mouth or her hands.
You knew when she woke up in the night because as you lay in your bedroom, you could smell the f**king stink from her cancer stick: she wouldn’t lift her head from the pillow before lighting up.
She even took the damn things into the shower with her.
And — surprise! — they killed her.
Pretty horribly, we might add. You don’t wanna die that way.
Evil, on an astronomical level: That describes the tobacco industry. No one who is associated with it can be regarded as anything other than evil. It is an entire, huge industry based on murder.
That’s what tobacco products do: they murder you. In pain and agony and stinking horror.
Don’t let the ba*tards do that to you.