I do believe that she knew what she was doing.

She knew smoking causes cancer. That revelation was in every print and broadcast medium in the English language.

She knew what dying of cancer was about. She had watched her mother die of it as she attended the woman on her deathbed.

She knew her sidestream smoke was making her little girl sick. And sick. And sicker.

She knew her effing cigarettes infested every air-conditioning system, from the car’s to their apartment’s to her new home’s. She knew the car stank and her home stank to high heaven because of her smoking habit.

If you knew your toxic habit was making your kid sick…if you knew it was stinking up your home and your car…if you knew it was killing you…WHY would you keep on with it?

Seriously: no matter how much your smelly habit pleased you, no matter how much it distracted you from the petty miseries of everyday life, no matter how much you loved the stink of burning tobacco…WHY would you stick with it when you knew it was poisoning your child? The child you wanted so much that you went through three failed pregnancies to get her?

That just mystifies me. She couldn’t NOT have known. And so the only conclusion you can draw is that at some level she was doing it on purpose. She wanted to die.

She smoked herself into the grave because she welcomed the grave. 

She welcomed it so much she didn’t care whether her daughter went there with her. Hey—maybe so much the better, eh? She wouldn’t be lonely there…

Seriously: I was sick all the time I was growing up, living in the stinky houses where she poisoned the air with her stench.

There really is no other explanation than that, at some level, she welcomed death — the death she knew those fukkin’ cancer sticks would bring her. Why she would put her beloved daughter and her fine husband at risk, too: that mystifies me. Suicide is one thing; murder is another.

She did succeed in killing herself. She died of a tobacco-induced cancer.

She seems to have failed at doing me in, too. So far, I haven’t developed a terminal cancer. That we know of…

***

I never could understand the stupidity of it. But I never did well at understanding stupidity in general.

Seriously: she wasn’t a stupid woman. She knew her habit would kill her and, at best, make her child sick. So…why??????

What on earth possessed her?

Yeah, I know: addiction.

But she was amply endowed with psychological resources. She was smart — you can be sure she knew what she was doing to herself. She was capable of making up her mind to accomplish something and then doing that something. She doted on her child and surely didn’t want to make the kid sick on purpose.

She was aware that I was sick all the time with chronic respiratory ailments. The connection between the mom’s cancer sticks and the kid’s constant coughing was obvious.

We live in a society that criminalizes self-harm by addiction to various drugs. Why do we tolerate self-harm by nicotine addiction? Why do deliberately harming children by choking them with toxic smoke?

Oh yeah. Why did I need to ask?

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