Dying
To Be Cool
Kathryn
Lynch
©
Copyright 2019 by Kathryn Lynch
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My
peers and
I were in our 30s when summaries of nicotine use studies first
appeared in the daily press. Every one of those examinations
concluded that “smoking cigarettes was bad for you”. You
could get lung cancer and die! By that time, all of my friends had
smoked for around 15 years. Because of these ingrained habits, the
information was ignored. I know no one (except my dad), who changed
behavior because of these warnings. As a result, the losses were
huge and the personal cost extremely high. This is a story about a
silent killer which has ravaged many, wiping out much of an entire
generation. It is the main reason why I am in my eighties, but no
one else in my own family is older than the age of 58.
Both of my
parents smoked.
Dad blended
well with other men of his times—with a hat on his head and a
lighted cigarette between his fingers. Refilling his lighter with
fluid became a weekly ceremony during which he could not be
interrupted. Delay during this endeavor was akin to a man sitting
down on his own hat--unacceptable. There was never any talk or plan
in place to reduce the number of his “smokes”, getting
rid of his “smokes”, or redirecting what later became
known as second hand smoke.
In 1969
Congress passed the US Smoking Act. Cigarette advertising on TV and
on radio was terminated. Packages of cigarettes would carry a
warning that smoking was “dangerous to your health”. Dad
told the story many times. He was driving the family car when the
story came over the radio. He rolled down the driver's window, threw
out his pack of “smokes” and he never smoked again. He
outlived mom and all of his children except one, occupying an
important place in the family until the age of 89.
Mom was a
secretive, closet smoker. She smoked only when she believed she was
alone, harboring the belief that Dad didn't want her to smoke and
that it was not a ladylike endeavor. She was so good at this that it
wasn't until I was 25 years old that my grandfather gave up her
secret. Mom supplied herself with cigarettes taken from Dad's
cartons, so when he quit, she reluctantly quit as well. She lived
into her eighties, outliving four of her five children.
Mom and Dad
had five daughters, two of them biological offspring. The other
three were unrelated orphans from Japan adopted into our family for a
better life. My younger sister was the first to be lost. Maureen
took up smoking with her friends at the age of 14. All considered
smoking as a cool social experience. Even when she married a
nonsmoker and had four children, she continued to smoke at every
opportunity, spending many hours with the phone in one hand and a
cigarette in the other. Mom and Dad pressured her to quit, so when
she visited them, she always took the position that she had quit. The
smell of cigarettes remained on her clothing, but each time she
managed to convince them that smoking was over. The smell of
cigarettes hung heavily in the bathrooms of the house. I never
tattled.
At the age
of 52, Maureen was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was too late to
stop the ravages of passing time. She died at the age of 54, riddled
with cancer—Stage 4. Studies of the last fifty years have
found a likely link between smoking and breast cancer in
premenopausal females.
Cecilia had
a Japanese mother and an American black GI father. Along with a teen
age smoking habit, she acquired a heroin habit which would stay with
her until the end. At the age of 45 she showed me the “hole
in her breast”. It was a shocking sight. The breast tissue had
swollen to the point that it had redesigned the organ, forming a
recess in the center. Ironically she stored her cigarettes in the
hole. Welfare workers arranged a surgical removal of the organ. At
the time she lived more than a thousand miles away, so I called the
hospital to wish her well. The phone was answered by a social
worker who was part of a team searching for the patient who was
missing. Four days later, Cecilia reappeared and crawled back into
her hospital bed. “I ran out of cigarettes”, she
explained. She died at the age of 47.
Julie had a
Japanese mother and an American caucasian GI father. She began to
smoke with her friends as a teenager. By the time she was 20 years
old, her voice had deepened down, almost masculine sounding, a trait
usually found in long term, heavy duty smokers. Smoking was
important to Julie. The presence of others, even small children made
no inroad into curtailing the pleasure she obviously received from
her “smokes”. She married at 49 and four years later
was diagnosed with the Big C. At 54, she was gone.
Christine
was a full blooded Japanese. She loved pickles and her cigarettes. No
one could break either habit. Ironically, she did not smoke until
the age of 21 when she was free of the family home. When she
visited, Mom and Dad put the full pressure of their individual quit
program on her—with no success. She married a nonsmoker who
felt the same way. When she died of lung cancer at 49, she left
behind two minor children.
Smoking was
the “in thing” when I first went to college. Free
cigarettes could be obtained from hostesses hired by tobacco
companies to give out cigarettes to passing pedestrians. (4 packs) The
Student Union cafeteria where students ate was so smoke filled
that it appeared to be drenched in a heavy fog. I tried smoking on
my first visit there and was overcome by a fit of coughing. During
the last two years, I ate in my room.
I'm 81 now. The mixed medical opinion is
that I have had a long life because I
never smoked, but that I am confined to a chair with congestive heart
failure from years and years of breathing in secondary smoke. I am
alone because every one else in my family over the age of 58 is gone.
Don't smoke!
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