I fail to understand how she could have done anything so stupid.
It was as though she deliberately incubated the cancer growing in her gut so as to inflict as much suffering as possible not only on herself but on those around her.
She knew.
She knew because she had been through the same horror with her own mother.
She had watched her wild-assed mother fuck her way into a terminal reproductive cancer. And, half a lifetime later, she drank her way and smoked her way into the same damned thing, calculated so as to cause as much suffering as possible for her husband and for her only child. And for herself, while she was at it.
Because she clearly knew what she was doing. I would suggest that what she did was not stupid. It was calculated. She knew she was gonna kill herself. She knew it would cause as much pain and suffering as possible to those around her. And that was her strategy.
So…well…I have to say that what she did was not stupid. It was malign, maybe. Because it was deliberate. Purposeful: she knew.
My poor father! He attended her through just about every moment of her hideous terminal illness, caring for her, feeding her, washing her, medicating her, dragging her to (useless!) doctors…God help him.
No question in my mind: she knew what she was doing.
We had known since the late 1950s that smoking causes cancer. She died while I was pregnant with my son: in the middle 1970s. A good 20 years after the cause and effect were identified. The more she heard of the science, the more she puffed away. I do think she truly believed those reports were Big Brother trying to control her life.
Why, why, why are people so stupid????
Oh well. Can’t fix stupid, can you? And you sure can’t undo its results.
The horror of it, though, is pretty straightforward: one’s sense is that what she did was not stupid. It was deliberate.
She knew what she was doing would kill her, and she engineered the process to create as much suffering and as much stress as could possibly be inflicted on herself and on those around her.
Just. Plain. Evil.
