The ironies of life are not wasted on me. Some I can hardly avoid. At least one of them haunts me every day when I sit behind the wheel of my car and fasten my seatbelt. As I reach over to place the buckle into the lock, the small, bullet-sized hole in the middle of the passenger seat stares back at me. The mark is not from a shooting, but from a drive-by of a different sort. Husband borrowed my car for a few days while his was in the shop and he returned it to me with the passenger seat hole. It’s a cigarette burn.
Smoking stirs up a myriad of emotions in me, some of them nostalgic. My parents smoked, chain-smoked even, and by the time I was 17, I was also a smoker along with my older brother. Sharing an after dinner cigarette was a family tradition in our lovely home with the yellow drapes that used to be white. The drapes that matched my parents’ fingers. It was our little act of dysfunctional bonding, like a group of alcoholics sharing one for the road. This was back in the seventies before the public smoking ban. Before tobacco companies started getting sued for wrongful death. Before people read food labels and worried about drinking water. Back when we were happy to be ignorant of the fact we were killing ourselves.
My mother required oxygen before the end of her life. My father died of lung cancer. For many years, my brother traded his cigarette habit for a Nicorette habit. Very smart people, all of them. Intelligence is not a factor. Smoking is the Spanish Inquisition of addictions. The one that takes no prisoners while its victims deny they’re in a war or feel powerless to desert. Despite the $10 a pack cost, it’s actually a bargain of self-destruction. It’s two addictions in one. For no extra charge, you get to gamble that you’ll beat the odds and live.
Husband has tried to stop in the ten years we’ve been together. He never lights up in my presence. He knows the primal spark of dread it ignites in me. Even so, there’s the smell on his clothes, the way he guards his kisses to avoid recrimination. I miss him. I always used to smile in the mornings watching him from the window as he walked down the driveway. The day he lit a cigarette before he reached the street I stopped watching. I miss that too, the fond lingering memory of him to carry through the day.
In the midst of chemo and radiation, my father would wait on the bench in front of the hospital as I went to get the car. My heart ached as I drove up to the entrance and watched him try to put out his cigarette before I got there. Husband’s first wife died from the same disease at a young age, another painful irony. The turning point for me came at 26 when I got married to my ex. I’m no monument to willpower, but I wanted children and knew I didn’t want to miss a moment of their lives. It was very hard to stop, miserably hard, but the need to create a healthy environment for those who depended on me was stronger.
I ask Husband how I’m supposed to deal with his smoking. His answer is, “Love me anyway.” It may be the answer for now, but it won’t fill the years I will have to live without him.
Daughter’s Featured Fotos show the work of Younity, the all-female art crew
making magic on the streets of Brooklyn
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aiko
vik
shiro
toofly