Yesterday Funny asked a rather pointless question: Why is life plagued by stupid people?
No answer to that one, I reckon…
But here’s another variation:
WHY did my mother, an overall intelligent and rational woman, commit suicide by smoking herself to death?
Yes, that is what she did.
She knew that tobacco smoking could — probably would — kill her.
She didn’t care.
She knew the unholy horrors that would be inflicted on her loved ones as they watched her die.
She didn’t care.
She knew how much she would suffer, having watched her own mother die of a self-inflicted cancer.
She didn’t care.
She knew how sick her second-hand smoke could make her daughter.
She didn’t care.
She knew how much her daughter loathed the stench of her stinking cigarettes, which permeated their home and poisoned its air.
She didn’t care.
So…WHY, in the name of God, did she NOT care about any of those life-crushing things?
Because she did know all of those matters, I do not believe for one second that she didn’t understand what she was doing. She smoked herself to death: on purpose. And if it made me sick in the process — well, Alhamdulillah. Apparently, she truly didn’t care: not only that she was killing herself (which may have been the whole point of the exercise) but that she was sickening me in the process. Possibly even killing me.
Well, obviously she never reached that final goal. But I was sick all the time I was growing up, with one respiratory ailment after another after another. Basically, to indulge her own craving for nicotine, she deliberately made me sick. And she did so over 16 years, until I got old enough to get into the University of Arizona and leave her home.
Why on earth would you do that to your own child?