I’d guess she cut at least 10 to 15 years off her life with the incessant smoking, and the bootleg booze couldn’t have helped. (Alcohol was illegal in Arabia, a Moslem country…so we Americans in camp made our own. My parents had a still in our storage closet and and a lash-up on our kitchen stove.) Between the accursed tobacco habit and the backyard swilling, she shortened her life by decades.
My father? Well, as I recall, he didn’t smoke as much as she did. She was hardly ever conscious when she didn’t have a cancer stick in her mouth — I knew when she was awake in the wee hours, because from the instant she awoke I could smell her stink in my bedroom. He didn’t do that. Yes: he smoked. But not every living, breathing goddamn conscious moment.
DAMN the people who manufacture those murderous products!
She never saw her grandson. Apparently she didn’t care: by the time I got pregnant, she was dying of her cancer habit. When I told her I was going to have a baby — three or four months before she died — she shrugged and said “meh!”
Did she know she wouldn’t live long enough to see her grandson? Or did she just not care? I dunno. And…well…maybe I just don’t care anymore, either.
Sometimes I wonder, though . If she knew she was gonna die at 65 — when other women in the family lived to 85 or 95 — would she have knocked it off? It didn’t cut ten years off her life. It cut twenty years off her life: at least! Maybe even thirty.
But no. I think she knew exactly what she was doing.
Why in Hell would she do such a hideous thing to everyone who loved her?
Goddamn it! If you’re gonna kill yourself, get a gun and blow your brains out. Take a flying leap off the Golden Gate Bridge. But forgodsake, don’t use your suicide as an excuse to inflict torture on everyone around you.