I wrote this after my step-mother died from complications created by a life long smoking habit.
Goddamn, I wish I had a cigarette. Just one, is that too much to ask? Then maybe I would be able to relax and go to sleep.
“No Smoking” signs in every public place remind me of how much has changed over the years. I remember when you could smoke anywhere, when it was cool and sophisticated. Doctors lit up on TV., the president smoked in public, my mom and all of her coworkers smoked at their desks while shuffling papers that needed to be filed. I smoked in the hospital while I was nursing my babies, and in restaurants after dinner with a cup of coffee. Now if you light up in public you are treated as though you are committing a crime. This oxygen tube snaking across the bed and into my nose has pretty much clinched the deal for me. I can’t unleash myself from this thing long enough to try and sneak one. Not to mention the fact that I can’t even walk across the room on my own.
I smoked my first cigarette when I was sixteen. I was in the bathroom in the back hallway of my high school. I watched another girl light up, and she offered me one, a Marlboro. She held the red and white pack out to me. I studied the gold slip of cellophane hanging between her fingers as I tried to decide what to do. She seemed so calm and assured in her black leather jacket, long straight hair hanging perfectly over her shoulders. I looked into her black rimmed eyes and nodded. She smiled and skillfully shook the pack so that one brown filter popped out into my waiting fingers. I put it between my lips as she flicked the thumbwheel on her Zippo lighter. I leaned into the flame and sucked on the filter. I coughed and choked on that first puff, embarrassed when she laughed at me. “New at this?” she asked. I told her I had a cold and hadn’t smoked for a couple of weeks.
After a couple of puffs I started to feel light headed, and slid my back down the cold tile wall until I was kneeling, afraid I might keel over and really embarrass myself. How uncool would that have been? I kind of liked the dizzy feeling, like when my dad spun me around till I had enough and screamed for him to stop. I put my head down for a minute until the dizziness passed, then took another puff. I watched the other girl, the way she held her head back and blew smoke toward the ceiling, shook her hair, adjusted her short skirt. I concentrated on not coughing, swallowing a lot to fight the urge. I kept adjusting the way I held the cigarette between my fingers, and tapping the ashes into the toilet. Several other girls came in and they all lit up. A thick fog of smoke hung over our heads, swirling slowly every time someone opened the door into the hallway. My eyes started to burn and I was glad when the bell rang for our next class. I threw the butt into the toilet after the other girls and checked my hair in the mirror before I walked out the door.
I pretty quickly became a fairly heavy smoker, bumming cigarettes from anyone I could, snitching two or three from my mom, or feeding 35¢ into the machine at the local drugstore when I had the cash. Pulling that silver knob and watching the pack fall was the best, I had a whole pack of my own. I felt so cool walking down the street with a cigarette in my hand, so grownup. My boyfriend broke up with me because he didn’t like the way my hair smelled after I started smoking. I really didn’t care, he was kind of boring anyway. I heard that he is an insurance adjuster now, married to someone from my brother’s class.
Before I graduated from high school I was smoking two packs a day. One morning after breakfast I needed a smoke so bad I reached across the table and pulled one out of my mom’s pack, and asked her for a light. She looked at me for one long minute, and handed me her lighter. She told me not to smoke in bed. She taught me how to blow a smoke ring and I practiced until I could do them perfectly.
Burn marks decorate my furniture and carpet, and my fingers are permanently stained an ugly shade of yellow. I switched brands several times; Kools, Salem, Virginia Slims. I tried the “low tar and nicotine” brands when my kids started complaining to me about my smoking, but I just didn’t like the taste of them. It was like drinking diet pop, not worth the trouble.
My daughters won’t let me smoke in their houses or in the car when my grandkids are with me. I always open the car window but they don’t seem to think that is good enough. I think it’s ridiculous but I have to follow their rules. I heard the other day that soon it will be illegal to smoke in the car with anyone under the age of eighteen. Before you know it we won’t be able to smoke anywhere. The bastards won’t be happy until cigarettes are totally outlawed.
I was about forty when the coughing started to wake my husband and he moved into the spare room so that he could get a full night of sleep. My doctor gave me hell every time I went in with another respiratory infection. Ten years ago she diagnosed me with emphysema and sent me home with an oxygen tank. I hardly used it because I couldn’t smoke with the damned thing turned on. I tried patches, gum, acupuncture, hypnosis, and spent a small fortune on gadgets and plans to help me quit. The truth is that I love smoking, I don’t really want to quit. Cigarettes have been with me through every failed relationship, disappointment, and celebration. They have been my closest companion for over fifty years. All of my friends quit years ago. They tell me how much better they feel and how good food tastes to them. I’m afraid if I quit I will just gain weight. That would be worse for me than the smoking, wouldn’t it?
Last Monday I couldn’t seem to breathe and I started to panic. I turned up my oxygen machine but it didn’t help. I felt like I was suffocating. My husband called 911 and I was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. Evidently I had some blood clots in my lungs. The doctors put me on blood thinners and increased my oxygen, but I still feel out of breath just laying here in bed. Then on Friday a nurse noticed that the toes on my left foot were turning black. More scans and they say I have clots in both legs.
Several doctors came in this morning to discuss my condition. I pretended to be asleep as they lifted the sheet at the bottom of the bed and peered at my leg. “Gangrene, lack of circulation, necrosis, amputation” – all of these words were batted about between the white coated men and women while I lay paralyzed by the thought that they might want me to look beneath the sheet. The doctors all look so young, younger than any of my kids. I find it hard to believe that any of them really know what they are talking about. I wondered how many of them would be out in the parking lot for a smoke break after they finished with rounds.
I can’t feel my left foot, I don’t want to see what it looks like. Come to think of it, I can’t feel my left knee, either. I’m so cold, I wish to hell they would turn the heat up in here. I heard the doctors talking to my husband and daughter outside in the hallway after they finished examining me. My daughter came into the room afterward, trying to hide the tears sliding down her cheeks. My husband hovered in the doorway for several minutes, hands in his pockets rattling his change. I looked away when my daughter lifted the sheet and saw for herself. She gasped and ran out of the room, my husband followed and they did not come back for over an hour.
It’s getting dark and I am having a difficult time staying awake. My husband is asleep on a cot in the corner, my daughter in the recliner chair next to my bed. I’m afraid to close my eyes, afraid that I won’t wake up again. I try to focus on the hospice pamphlet on the table next to the bed. “Peaceful Transition”, it says, across a picture of a setting sun. The nurse who left it gave me some medication that she said would keep me comfortable. She covered me with a warm blanket but I am still shivering as I feel myself slipping away.
Goddamn it, I’d give anything for a cigarette.
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