My mother smoked for as long as I can remember.
As a young child, I never worried about getting lost if I wandered away from her in a supermarket. I could always hear her cough, a byproduct of a pack-a-day habit, and find my way back to her. She taught me to read while holding me on her lap, her Lucky Strike in an ashtray nearby, trailing a tiny plume of smoke.Like many women who came of age during World War II, my mother started smoking when she moved from the family farm to the city - Los Angeles, in her case - and went to work. She smoked to seem less "country," more sophisticated, and because she wanted to stay slim.
In the 1950s, we had not heard of the hazards of secondhand smoke. Congress had not yet forced the tobacco companies to acknowledge that smoking might damage the health of smokers themselves, let alone their children. And so my mother, who was so careful of my brother and me in every other respect, smoked around us.
Smoking seemed to relax her, especially when the strain of working full time and maintaining a tense, sometimes violent marriage with my father got to her. She would unwind late at night in the kitchen at the end of her 18-hour days. As she ironed or waxed the floor, there was always a cigarette nearby. And I would be sitting at the kitchen table, finishing my homework, as Mom quietly but expertly got me talking about things I had never intended to tell her.
Only once did I complain to her about her smoking. When my first child was born in 1973, Mom rushed across the country to take care of me and the baby. She knocked herself out, scrubbing every surface in our little apartment, washing Joe's diapers, teaching me to bathe him - and smoking all the while. The third day she was there, I screwed up my courage and said: "Mom, I don't think you should smoke around Joe. Secondhand smoke causes asthma and all sorts of respiratory problems."
Mom switched her smoking to the bathroom, with the window open. And when I remarked that the bathroom had begun to smell like the girls' bathroom at my old junior high, Mom took her cigarettes outside, though it was the middle of the winter. Through the windows, I would watch her shivering, in her thin California raincoat, as she marched around the garden, trying to keep warm. She went home two days early.
After that, wherever my husband and I lived, Mom and I understood the ground rules: she didn't smoke at all in my house, and when the kids and I visited her, she smoked only on the patio.
Although it seems strange now, I never worried about my mother's health. In her early 60s, she was trim and fit, working as a computer systems analyst at an aerospace company. She had regular chest X-rays. She cleaned her own house and, after my parents divorced, mowed her own lawn. As she approached retirement in 1990, she talked about building her dream house in California's high desert. I assumed that my mother would live into her 90s, like the other women in our family, and that she and I would grow old together, since she was only 20 when I was born.
Then, one spring night, I got a call from my grandmother, then 83, who was worried about my mother. "She's had a splitting headache all weekend and doesn't sound like herself," Grandma reported. When I called Mom, she said it was "only a migraine" but scared me because she couldn't remember her doctor's name or phone number. The doctor, after talking to her, declared her "disoriented" and sent an ambulance.
I met the ambulance at the hospital, and within an hour, the problem was diagnosed: Mom had a brain tumor the size of a peach. It took another week of tests to determine that she also had lung cancer, two tiny spots in one lobe that the doctors said were probably where the cancer had begun. The neurosurgeon we consulted recommended radiation to reduce the tumor and make her more comfortable, but he held out little hope. "Take her home and love her," he said. "She's got a year, maybe 18 months if she's lucky."
Mom was a conscientious patient. While she underwent radiation and chemotherapy, she quit smoking to give herself "an edge," she said, and because her sister Nadine, who drove Mom to her appointments, had insisted. The tumors shrank, the nausea stopped, and for a while, it looked like Mom might beat the odds.
And then, a year after the diagnosis, I walked into Mom's house for Saturday night supper and smelled smoke. "She's back at it!" I whispered frantically to my husband. There were no ashtrays in evidence, but my nose led me to the kitchen trash can - and a huge collection of cigarette butts. Behind some cereal boxes I found two cartons of cigarettes. "Leave her alone," my husband pleaded.
"I see you've found my stash," Mom said when she returned to the kitchen and read my expression. And then, a little defensively, she said: "I'm not going to last much longer whether I smoke or not. And so I am going to smoke. Besides you and the kids, it's the only pleasure I have left."
My grandmother, my husband, my brother, even my Aunt Nadine accepted Mom's decision. But I was mad, madder than I had ever been at her. I thought she was willing herself to die. I couldn't understand why she would undergo months of treatment and then surrender. And I felt, deep down, that by abandoning hope, by no longer trying, Mom was somehow abandoning me, too.
After that night, we never talked about her smoking, though Mom must have guessed how I felt. I found all kinds of ways to justify my silence: If someone you love is facing death, even a premature death she brought on herself, it's inexcusably childish and self-absorbed to tell her you're heartbroken. And, I told myself, there was no guarantee that quitting would extend her life even one day; she had smoked for 45 years.
By the summer of 1991, my mother was in agony with back pains - arthritis, one doctor thought. She checked back into the hospital and discovered that the cancer had returned, in force, and had spread to her spine. She spent the last month of her life in a nursing home.
When the morphine was not enough to quiet her, she would wave her hands and, eyes shut, re-enact the routines of her life. She would hallucinate that she was frying chicken. She would imagine that she was reading a book to me and that I was 5 years old again. And she would sometimes pull a nonexistent cigarette out of her sleeve and pretend to light up.
After Mom died, my brother, his wife and I cleared out her house. In a bedside chest, I found my mother's "stop smoking" collection, nicotine patches and nicotine gum, brochures from anti-smoking classes and even tape cassettes designed to cure smoking through hypnosis. I was astonished. Over the years, she had tried them all, without telling any of us. From the receipt for the tape cassettes I could tell she had bought them only two months before checking into the nursing home. She had never stopped smoking. She had never stopped trying to quit, either.
My mother left me many things - her house, her desert land, some jewelry that I have saved for my daughter. But what I treasure most is the purse that she took to the nursing home in those final weeks. I still keep it in my closet and open it up when I really miss her. It smells of lipstick, of her spearmint chewing gum, of the tiny bottle of Joy perfume she took everywhere, and of a half-smoked pack of cigarettes.