Smoking Will Kill You

 

by Pa Rock

Ex-Smoker

If she had not be a heavy smoker her entire adult life, my mother, Ruby "Florine" Sreaves Macy, could have very possibly been enjoying her one-hundred-and-first birthday today.   Instead she passed away over thirty-five years ago at the very young age of sixty-five.

Mom was a wiry little woman.  She told me once that the most she ever weighed in her entire life was one-hundred-and-twenty-nine pounds - that was the day before I was born, and I was a nine-pound baby!

I have written quite a bit about both of my parents in this space, and last year, on the one-hundredth anniversary of Mom's birth, I did a special "Ancestor Archives" column focusing on her life.

My mother's sixty-five years on earth gave her a chance to know (just barely) all seven of her grandchildren, but she never had the wonder of meeting any of her great-grandchildren who now have numbered thirteen, one of whom is since deceased.

Missing out on so much that she should have been around for was Mom's loss, and it was also a loss for our family.  I remember my daughter, Molly, who was almost nine when Mom died, lamenting that "now there is not going to be anyone to teach me how to sew," and sadly, I don't think she ever learned.   Mom sewed, knitted, crocheted, quilted, and painted.   She was very talented with hand crafts and could have taught her grandchildren many things.

But smoking cut that short.   

My mother grew up in the Great Depression and came of age during World War II.  It was a time when everyone smoked, and the lives of a whole generation were abbreviated by tobacco.  Many in my generation began smoking in high school or soon after, but most of us quit as the knowledge of the health risks started becoming better known.  Mom's generation was already too far gone by that time.

Today there is still a significant subset of the American population who smoke, but that number has decreased markedly over the past few decades.   Now American cigarette manufacturers have basically redirected their evil carnage into the world's poorer, third-world countries.  Tobacco is, in a sense, like fossil fuel:  it will be with us, polluting the environment and literally killing people until the last dime of profit has been wrung from the hoary old business enterprise.

But - in spite of the lies of tobacco growers, processors, corporations, and lobbyists - smoking will kill you.  It's not some high-browed theory perpetrated by an educated elite, it's a fact of life attested to by cemeteries filled with people who never got the chance to meet their great-grandchildren.

Light 'em up at your own peril!  There are other forms of suicide which are quicker (and some would argue more honorable), but few have the sustained success rate of smoking.  Sooner or later it WILL kill you!