Cigarettes and Families

Neurologists are fond of saying, “When a patient has a stroke, his whole family has a stroke.” The comment is a bit too pithy for my liking, but it is also true, and certainly not just for stroke. Every diagnosis affects the life of a family and the relationships within.

Libraries are full of memoirs about parents’ mental illnesses and substance use disorders. I’ve read my share of them; some are great reads, but they all have their dark parts. This is my addition to the genre, though it is decidedly brighter than most.

My father was a devoted smoker. He ranged between 2 and 3 packs a day, about 150 pack-years in med-speak. He paid the price for his smoking, while my mother and I mostly got away unaffected. His smoking did shape our lives and is inexorably linked to my memories of him.

When we traveled, adjustments had to be made for his smoking. My father felt he had mastered smoking in the car so that nobody else would smell the smoke. If the driver’s window and the sunroof were cracked, we were told that nobody else would smell the smoke. Knowing he had to smoke, we couldn’t really say that it wasn’t true. The fallacy was underlined by the fact that one of my occasional chores was to clean the inside of the windshield. The rags I used always ended up stained with nicotine.

My mother and I were equally protected when we flew. My father always insisted that we sit in the first row of the smoking section.

Despite these efforts, traveling was not risk-free. In the car we had, the cigarette lighter was broken. To light up, my father would either hold the wheel with his elbows or have my mother reach over to steer.

Going cigarette shopping was, weirdly, a highlight of my youth. He and I would always go together. The ride would take us down a beautiful, winding, rural road to a shop called The International Hayloft. The meaning of this name was, and remains, a mystery to me. I always accompanied him because there was something more than father-son time in it for me. The Hayloft sold baseball cards and scratch-off lottery tickets. The baseball cards always made for a great ride home as I pored over the stats on the back and worked the hard stick of gum. If my scratch ticket was a winner, I’d repay the initial investment and then decide whether I’d buy more baseball cards or more lottery tickets. I quickly learned not to risk my winnings.

Ironically, the most persistent impact of my father’s smoking on the family came from the chronically recurrent attempts to quit. There were often mason jars filled with cigarette butts and water around our apartment. This was a Smokenders’ technique; the appearance (and the smell if opened) was supposed to keep him from falling off the wagon. Mostly, though, we benefited from the hobbies he took up during the periods where the nicotine-starved anxiety and idle hands needed an outlet. There were wine bottles cut in half to be used as vases. There were wreaths made from collected vines. There were cases of homemade jam. Perhaps the best, though, was a rhinestone suit he made me. Starting with plain blue cotton pants and a matching jacket, he began by decorating the back of the jacket with my name and a sunrise. The pants had rhinestones down the legs and around the pockets. I like to think I was the inspiration for the song Rhinestone Cowboy.

I also benefited financially from the attempts to quit. Once, he decided to give me the $6.15 that he was spending weekly on two cartons of cigarettes. (This was clearly pre-1970s inflation.) The rationale was that if he went back to smoking, he would be spending twice as much. He went back to smoking; I kept collecting. When I got to high school, the money I’d saved funded quite a record collection.

How did I not end up a smoker? As far as I can remember, I was never tempted, and then I was repulsed. My father probably helped me, wittingly and unwittingly. He bought me a cigar when I was ten. Maybe every ten-year-old should get a cigar to make them unlikely to smoke. My asthma — OK, maybe I didn’t come away completely unscathed — probably helped keep me away from cigarettes as well. Finally, as an adolescent, listening to a parent’s smoker’s cough was another effective deterrent.

My father finally stopped smoking. His final cigarette preceded a hospitalization for heart failure, during which he spent a week on a ventilator. When he left the hospital, he said, “I don’t smoke anymore.” I was skeptical, but he really didn’t.

Ten years later, when he was dying of small-cell lung cancer, I asked if he had any desire to smoke. I was thinking of my grandfather, who quit smoking in his thirties and said he still dreamed of it in his 70s. He once admitted that he sometimes walked behind smokers for the scent of the smoke.

My father said that after he’d left the hospital years before, he’d lost all temptation. There was not a day that he was not surprised that he no longer smoked.

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