Smoking

“Mad Men,” a TV show about a male-dominated Madison Avenue advertising firm in the early 60’s, is true to the era with many of the characters perpetually smoking—in the office, in bed after sex, in restaurants. In modern day this pervasiveness of cigarettes is jarring. But back then it was totally acceptable to smoke pretty much anywhere: in the car, in elevators, in small conference rooms or offices at work, after dinner with your children, on airplanes, even in hospital waiting rooms.

As kids we used to suffer riding in the smoky family station wagon in winter with the windows cracked just a little to “let out the smoke.” Sparks would fly out the front side windows and into the back side windows and our eyes.  My sisters both ended up in the hospital more than once with pneumonia, heart ailments and other complications that were surely exacerbated by secondhand smoke. My parents and practically every other adult we knew in the 50’s and 60’s didn’t know any better. They smoked all their lives. During World War II my Dad, in his early 20’s, smoked to help calm his nerves and garner some measure of comfort in a place where one of his jobs was defusing landmines. After dinner each evening my parents sat out back smoking and talking while the kids did the dishes, the orange glow of their cigarettes all you saw in the darkness on the back porch. It was so much a part of them that today with both of them gone now for many years, the smell of cigarette smoke, while onerous, also makes me remember and miss them.

But I also remember my mother often saying that smoking was “a nasty habit,” one she wished she had never started; she was talked into trying it by her best friend Nell when they were in their early teens, and it hooked her immediately. Right after her retirement Mom found out she had emphysema and quit smoking; the next 7 years before her death she suffered a great deal, struggling more and more for each breath she took, puffing medications from a machine to help clear her bronchial tubes, volunteering her time to educate others on how to quit smoking and why they should. She did not complain, and attributed all her suffering to the terrible mistake of taking that first puff.

My father never did give it up—the addiction was too strong—even though the doctor told him repeatedly it was killing him and that smoking around my mother, whom he loved dearly, was also killing her. He once told me after a failed attempt to quit that resulted in a serious depression that quitting was like losing his best friend.

In February 2001, as Dad sat outside in a wheelchair on the hospital loading dock while we waited for the ambulance to come and take him to the nursing home where he died a few days later, he had a single request: would I give him a smoke. Awkwardly (since I never in my life even touched a cigarette, my mother having taught me well), I pulled a Camel out of the pack, managed to light it, and handed it over so he could take a few puffs. His look of pure relief and gratitude made me feel like we were sharing a moment’s respite in some cold Belgian foxhole in the winter of ‘45, and perhaps in one part of his mind we were.