Something When We Do Nothing: Essays On Smoking And How It Destroys, 1

When I was seventeen, I smoked my first cigarette, handed to me by a cute girl after I told her "Sure, I smoke."

It came about because a girl brought out cigarettes, and because I was stupid, and because tobacco existed.

That was not the first time cigarettes came into my life, and it won't be the last time. It was just the most direct time and it sprung into my head the other day as I watched my mother's head droop down, pulling her oxygen tube forward and causing her to lean into the pole that held up her feeding tube. She clutched towards the pole with one hand.

Her other hand held tightly onto the unfiltered Camel cigarette, one of the hundreds of thousands of cigarettes that she has smoked over her lifetime, one of the increasingly diminutive number she will smoke before she dies.

My mother has lung cancer. She was diagnosed in April of this year. Seven months later, she has lived longer than I initially thought she would when I first visited her in the hospital.

That is, if what she is doing now can properly be called living.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said this about smoking: "The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco." He may have been right about that being the first illusion, but it is not the only illusion smokers have. Smokers, and those who tolerate smoking around them or by others, have illusion upon illusion upon illusion: they believe (as I did) that smoking makes them more creative. They believe (as I did) that smoking calms them down, and they believe at the same time that smoking perks them up. They believe that smoking does not interfere with their body's ability to go on breathing and thinking and living. They believe that their teeth are not hideously yellowed, that their fingertips are not shriveled and stained and hardened by the gripping and pressure on the lighter and innumerable small burns presented by cigarettes. They believe the shortness of breath as they walk or sit or talk is from a cold, or the humidity, or anything but the slow, steady, constriction of the tiny pouches of air in their lungs.

They believe all that in spite of and in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

It is possible to go on believing those things, possible to go on believing them until you are standing in your mother's living room, looking at the 40-year-old Nativity scene set up recently for Christmas, and you turn around to tell your mother a memory about that Nativity set, and, upon turning around, realize that every bone in your mother's shoulders are visible, and not just every bone but the tumors that are growing in her, as well. At that moment, as you look at her and see a pale skeleton of the woman who raised you (almost always with a cigarette nearby her), as her eyes droop and her hands flutter and she tries to stay awake and look at you, at that moment you stop believing those things.

You say to her: "You did a good job raising us, Mom," saying that instead of what you were going to say, because you realize that time is short and you want her to hear that more than you want her to hear the memory of the Nativity scene.

You stop believing those things about smoking and instead you curse the fact that cigarettes were ever invented.

And then you gently take your mother's hand, which is shaking slightly, and you help her tip the ash off of her cigarette and ask her if she needs anything else before you leave.

That cigarette, the last one my mom smoked while I was there visiting on Monday night (but almost certainly not her last one of the night or her life), hung in my mind as I drove the long ride home in the cold night. That cigarette, which I so easily was able to take and flick the ashes off of and hand back to her, using movements remembered and familiar from my own seventeen years of smoking, that cigarette is one of the few specific cigarettes I can remember in my life, and I imagine I will remember it for the remainder of my life, for as long as I can remember things. That cigarette, its cursed poisonous smoke curling up from it, the glowing embers of Hell on the end of it, will live in my memory alongside the other specific times I can remember smoking or quitting smoking, a series of tainted poisoned images that clutter up my mind and my lungs and throat still, cigarettes and smoking and disease and death crowding into pictures and memories that I have, fluttering throughout my life, a life that is surely shortened just as my mom's has been.

That cigarette is still in my mind three days later. It is the image I have of my Mom from my Monday visit to her, and it saddens me to think that it is the image of one of the visits I will have with my Mom, that what I will remember from our Monday night together is that moment when I helped her avoid burning her hand, or her chair, or her carpet, taking the cigarette from her and then giving it back to her, letting her shorten her life a little more still now because what does it matter? They have already killed her, those cigarettes, the latest victim in the long line of casualties set down by the quest for profits, the desire to be cool, the belief that there is something of freedom in the act of killing onself slowly by deliberately inhaling burning material.

As that cigarette haunted my mind, as I cleared my throat this morning and felt the remnants of my own years of smoking, as I struggled to remain upbeat in the face of my Mom's impending death, I also fought to make sense of it all, to put it into perspective, and decided that the way I could do that is the same way I make sense of everything: by telling it to someone else. By sharing it. By telling about the cigarettes and the smoking that I have seen and done and battled in my life, by sharing from time to time memories and thoughts on the havoc that smoking has wrought on my life, the effects being most direct recently but never having been too distant from my life.

The harm caused to me by smoking -- by others' smoking and by my own smoking -- and the harm that has been caused to others around me by those same things, has always been present. I just tried to ignore it, for too long I tried to ignore it and glossed over it.

But on Monday night, I could not ignore it any longer. When I turned around and saw my mom fading there, I could no longer internalize all of that.

That is how this new series of essays began to be formed in my mind. As I drove home that night, as I thought over the past few days, as I continued to mull over these things, I determined to write about them, and I will. These things happened because I, and others, were stupid, and because tobacco existed. Now, I'm going to talk about them.

I'll still be the same me, in between times when I write about this. I'll still make the same dumb jokes and tell the same boring stories over and over, I'll still wax philosophical about things that don't deserve it and still make outrageous claims that I cannot possibly back up (and then I'll back them up.) For all of us, life goes on until it doesn't. Because of that truism, it's important to not wallow in sorrow and guilt and recrimination and sadness.

But sorrow and guilt and recrimination and sadness deserve their days, too. It is the bitter that allows sweet to exist, and the knowledge of sad things makes the laughter at funny things all the more heartfelt. So I will laugh and joke again. Just not today: My mother is dying.