My dad looked like John Wayne. He was tall, about 6-foot-1, with shoulders so broad he had trouble finding shirts that fit. He was an Army man and had the rigid bearing of a man in uniform, even when he wasn't wearing it. When I was a little girl, I'd run out to greet him when he came home from work. He looked so strong and sure in his uniform as he strode up the walk that I thought nothing could ever get the better of him.

My father was a smoker, as was my mom. Growing up, I thought everyone smoked -- all my parents' friends did. In their circle of friends, Christmas gifts were often a carton of cigarettes tied up with a big, red bow. My parents sometimes hosted huge parties where the smoke would get so thick that you could see waves of it drifting in the living room.

After one such party, my dad was having a last cigarette in bed when he fell asleep. I slept through it all, but the next day my sister told me how the mattress had burst into flames and been ruined by the time the fire could be extinguished. We were living in Germany at the time, and in order to avoid getting on the bad side of either the German authorities or the Army, my parents avoided calling the fire department. They enlisted some friends to help them smuggle the mattress to a field outside the military base and dump it. That was the first time, but not the last, that I heard anyone say to my dad that he was lucky to be alive.

Several years later, dad went to the doctor with a bad cough. The examination revealed a spot on his lung, which the doctor first thought was tuberculosis. The entire family was brought in for chest x-rays to make sure we didn't have it, too. We didn't. And neither, as it turned out, did my father. The spot continued to grow, and exploratory surgery finally revealed the cancer that was growing in my father's lungs and lining his chest wall. The doctors removed most of one lung, but there wasn't much they could do about the rest of the cancer. They told him he had about two years to live.

Dad lived for eleven more years. Each time he went to the doctor, he'd hear again how he was lucky to still be alive -- that the cancer should have killed him by then. He quit smoking cigarettes and started smoking a pipe. He thought that might be a little healthier. My mom made sure he ate steak once a week because she thought that might build his strength up, but he continued to weaken, and his broad shoulders gradually caved in over his sunken chest. He never complained about the pain, or the oxygen tank that was tethered to him those last months, or how he had to sleep sitting up so he could breathe. He was 59 when he died.

Less than a year after my father died, my mother, whose chronic cough turned out to be emphysema, died of a heart attack. She had tried several times to quit smoking, but could never stick with it. Like my father, she died at age 59.

Both of my parents were strong individuals. They were children of the Depression, and grew up learning how to weather hard times. My father fought in World War II while my mother was an Army nurse who patched up soldiers in a MASH unit overseas. They kept the family together through many moves and through lonely times when my father was on assignment in some remote part of the world. But cigarettes were an enemy they couldn't defeat.

At my mother's funeral, the Army chaplain who presided at the service said something I've always remembered: The best way to honor a loved one who has died is to take something you admired about that person and incorporate it into your own life. I remembered how my mother loved gardening, and how each spring she looked forward to the first flowers blooming. Any place I've lived, I've always tried to plant a garden, or at least a pot of flowers, with her in mind. And each spring, I take note of all the blossoming trees and flowers that she isn't here to see. I wonder how many more springs she would have enjoyed if she hadn't smoked.

-- Nancy Montgomery is an associate editor at Consumer Health Interactive.

Last updated October 23, 2009
Copyright © 2001 Consumer Health Interactive

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