Y’know… It’s one thing to poison yourself.
But another thing altogether to poison your child.
How on earth could she have done that? Why would she have done such a thing? Year in and year out?
My mother smoked. She didn’t just smoke a little. She smoked constantly. She was never awake when she didn’t have a cancer stick in her mouth. Not even in the shower! You knew when she awoke in the middle of the night by the stink emanating from her bedroom.
And I was sick all the time I was growing up in her household. Constant, unending respiratory illness. Never stopping. Not until I got out of her house.
She smoked herself to death. And she damn near smoked me to death. Maybe she imagined it would be fitting and lovely for us to share a grave?
Yeah, I understand: it was an addiction.
But you know, a person can beat addiction. Apply some knowledge and some will power, and you can take it down.
She know exactly what she was doing. The word came down in the late 1950s: tobacco smoking causes cancer. And it makes the people around you sick.
Oh, yeah. She knew what she was doing. She did it anyway.
It killed her.
What a waste.