The drive to my elementary school was two cigarettes long, three if we hit red lights on Woodward Avenue. By the time my mother lit her second, the Volkswagen was foggy and acrid from the first. I liked to cough theatrically in protest of the smoke–a tiresome affectation, according to my mother. She found my objection to cigarettes priggish and a bit bratty.
In fairness to her, I was a priggish child, fond of quiet and order and rules, already judgey toward my bohemian parents–one an artist, the other a progressive lawyer. I was mortified by their ancient VW hippie bus, rough-hewn homemade bread, and long, sixties-style hair. I admired my friends’ moms’ smooth, tidy hair-helmets and shiny station wagons. I’m sure my big reaction to cigarette smoke felt like more of the same to my mother. Her compromise in the car was to crank down the driver’s side window, which sent the smoke rushing straight back at me and my baby brother on the blasting Michigan winter wind.
If I jumped out of the car in a cloud of smoke and ran into first grade smelling thickly of tobacco, in the late seventies I was not the only one. Children’s comfort was not a national fixation then. Parents smoked. One of my favorite books around that time was Ramona and her Father, by Beverly Cleary, in which a young girl, Ramona Quimby, successfully campaigns her father to quit smoking by throwing away his cigarettes and putting anti-smoking signs in surprising spots around the house. One of them said SMOKING KILLS, which terrified me. What if my parents died? It’s the universal horror of all children. Cleary handles Ramona’s fear of losing her father with directness and sensitivity. Still, it’s hard to know if the author isn’t poking a bit of fun at Ramona’s moralizing. Ramona is consistently and enjoyably extra throughout the series and the adult reader can perceive some tongue-in-cheek on Cleary’s part
Inspired, I tried the same gambits on my own father, who, unlike Ramona’s father, was not amused and had no intention of giving up smoking.
He told me to knock it off. “This is incredibly tiresome,” he said. “People who are against everything are the most boring people there are.” From then on, my feelings about smoking were triple-threaded: visceral reaction against the lung-searing, eye-watering stink; terror of my parents’ possible death; and shame about my own narc-y and uncool ways.
The “Smoking Kills” message kept burning its way into my consciousness through the seventies and early eighties: PSAs on TV, the increasingly dire and medically specific warnings on the packs of cigarettes scattered around our house, and a vividly grim freebie coloring book from the American Cancer Society, passed out haphazardly at school one day, that told the story of a boy and girl whose father died of lung cancer from smoking. A feature of the era’s public health strategy was apparently deputizing kids to police their parents’ smoking. Kids on anti-smoking ads mugged cutely and said things like, “P.U.! Smoking stinks!” and the parents would chuckle, chastened, and grind out their butts. The coloring book was part of this effort to get kids to stop their parents from smoking, but the American Cancer Society didn’t know my parents. My father called the coloring book propaganda. My mother complained to the teacher the next day about targeting children with excessive scare tactics.
“Lots of people smoke,” they told me, “And they’re just fine.”
When I was diagnosed with Stage Four cancer in my forties, my oncologist asked me if I’d ever smoked and, in a tone that probably echoed the prim child I’d been, I said no, of course not.
“Were you exposed to secondhand smoke?” the doctor asked. And my whole body went cold and still.
“Both of my parents smoked,” I told him. He looked up.
How much? How often? From what age, came the follow-up questions.
From before I was born, throughout my gestation, infancy, childhood, young adulthood. As I answered, the oncologist typed and I felt like I was falling down a chute, wondering if the person whom Smoking Kills was me. A surprise twist: I was the parent who was going to die and leave bereft children behind.
“They smoked a lot,” I said.
“How much? If you had to estimate?”
My mother lit her first cigarette on waking. My father smoked himself to sleep at night. They smoked as we carved pumpkins, sang Christmas carols around the piano, dipped eggs into bright dye. They smoked in our bedrooms while they read aloud to my brother and me. My mother, a skillful and innovative cook, especially for the time, smoked while making dinner every night, an ashtray balanced on the back end of the stove, lighting cigarette after cigarette on the gas burners under simmering pots. After dinner, dishes cleared, they smoked together as they laughed and talked and debated. I knew in the wordless way children apprehend family codes that cigarettes were part of my parents’ life just as books, music, art, and politics were. I couldn’t have expressed it, but smoking was one way of telegraphing their membership in the waning counterculture, especially in our conservative and well-heeled Detroit suburb. Like them, smoking was arty and progressive and cool.
But then, suddenly, it wasn’t. As the eighties ushered in Reagan and jogging, one by one my parents’ friends–artists like my mom, writers, ad execs and liberal lawyers like my dad–quit. Our next-door neighbors put up a little etched glass “No Smoking” sign in their living room to avoid any awkwardness with guests.
“So tacky,” my mother said. “So rude to shame your guests that way.” My father just laughed: he thought vocal non-smokers were insufferable squares.
At first the holdouts joked among themselves, like, “Oh, you too?” and my parents enjoyed sharing that transgressive spark, but soon enough that pleasure disappeared. They had to ask permission to smoke in other people’s homes. That, too, became anathema. They slid out of dinner parties to smoke on their hosts’ front porches while younger passers-by pushing strollers glared at them. Smoking no longer signaled cool sophistication or earthy intellectualism. It began to signal not having your shit together. The class associations around cigarettes shifted so dramatically in the eighties that by the early nineties, there was no longer any way to be a stylish or upscale smoker. When strangers saw my slender, fit-looking, nicely dressed, middle-aged parents light up, they stared openly. Their few last sheepish friends quit. My parents did not.
They viewed fear of secondhand smoke as puritanical hysteria or another silly health fad like step-aerobics or low-fat cheese and continued to smoke in the house. “If you don’t like smoke, don’t smoke,” was my father’s take on anti-smoking rules, glibly ignoring the science about the threat smokers posed to others.
Banned from respectable adult social life by the early millennium, cigarettes became for my parents an embarrassing private need that forced them outside the mainstream. My father had to take his office elevator to the street and suck down cigarettes alone in the rain. When I invited her to a presentation at the high school where I taught, my mom couldn’t go the length of the event without a cigarette. She slipped out to smoke in a pleasant grassy area right below a bank of classroom windows. I never understood: did she not clock how shockingly off it was to smoke at a school or was she jonesing too badly to care? The students were delighted by this unexpected weirdness. “There’s a random lady out there smoking!” The dean stormed out to interrogate her and sent me a scorching email afterward: “you should know better.” Was he kidding? I’d known better since I was seven, but I couldn’t get my parents to stop smoking.
Around this time my mother told me something that shocked me. She’d had three siblings who died of SIDS. Two did not live long enough to leave the hospital. The other died at home. These losses gutted my grandmother, who retreated a bit more from her living children after each death. Staring out the kitchen window into her garden, my mother said, “It could have been the smoking, I guess.” More studies were coming out. Parents’ smoking was the single biggest risk factor for neonatal death. Smoking not only killed smokers, we now knew. Smoking killed babies. That generational trauma, along with the new data stacking up higher and higher, well, none of it made my mother quit. When my sons came along, she was careful never to smoke around them and always washed her hands after having a cigarette so she wouldn’t transfer even trace chemicals to their skin but after she held them, cigarette odor clung to their clothes. Here was a fourth generation of babies to smell like smoke.
Her mother, an elegant lifelong smoker, died of cancer and still my mother still went on smoking.
She began getting terrible respiratory infections, pneumonia, chronic bronchitis Her cough never totally disappeared.
“Excuse me,” she’d say politely after a hacking bout of her classic smoker’s cough, “I have a tickle in my throat.”
At the height of Covid, my parents, stone-cold terrified of the virus, railed against Americans who didn’t accept science, ignored medical experts, wouldn’t adapt their behavior to new realities, refused to put others’ health over their own preferences, scoffed at risk, belittled others’ fears, shunned communitarianism in favor of individualism, and mired themselves in irrational forms of tribalism. I didn’t point out the irony. They were describing precisely their own reaction to every anti-smoking push that came along for decades. None of us talked about the fact, clearly driving their fear, that as longtime smokers they were more vulnerable to the virus.
My father finally quit, quietly, without fanfare, around the time I was diagnosed. He said in the end it was political, that he couldn’t stomach the corporate corruption and capitalist greed of Big Tobacco any longer. Smoking had been lefty. Now it wasn’t. I wondered if anything else helped his resolve–cognitive dissonance, maybe, in imagining himself sneaking out of the cancer clinic for a smoke break while his daughter was pumped full of a different kind of poison. He started chewing nicotine gum and now his teeth are stained the color of a paper lunch bag. When someone on the street lights up, he unconsciously leans in to catch the scent, the flavor.
Several months ago, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. When her initial biopsy was inconclusive, she told me she was going to assume the best because it probably wasn’t cancer.
(Lots of people smoke and they’re just fine.)
It seemed unlikely to her that fifty years of heavy smoking had caused cancer. She underwent a lobectomy, losing a third of her right lung. During surgery the doctor removed a second tumor, not yet biopsied, and sent it to the pathology lab to be analyzed.
“Do you think that one will turn out to be cancer, too?” My mother asked me, still thinking that maybe, with her mother dead from cancer, three infant siblings buried in the family plot, her daughter fighting an incurable cancer, and a cancerous mass in her own lung, maybe, just maybe, the second mass wasn’t cancer. I recognized the skewed, denial-based logic of the addict. I told her yes, as gently as I could, I thought the second mass would be cancer.
After my mother quit smoking, she emailed me.
“I realize it’s too little too late, but I wanted you to know that I quit,” she wrote. I never replied because I didn’t have the words. I didn’t feel like congratulating her. It would have been the right thing–big-hearted, empathetic, mature–to praise her effort, acknowledge how hard it must have been for her, and celebrate her victory, but my feelings were too complicated. On one hand, I know how hard it is to quit, how billions of dollars are pumped into a remorseless machine whose only goal is to get and keep people smoking. I know that cigarettes are, chemically, more addictive than heroin. On the other hand, millions of Americans stopped smoking during the years of my childhood. Many of my friends’ mothers laugh about having smoked in the sixties and seventies. They always hurry to add, “But of course I quit when I got pregnant.” Countless parents quit smoking to protect their kids, but mine chose not to. I couldn’t cheer for her.
There’s no way to know for sure if my cancer is the result of secondhand smoke exposure; it’s easier not knowing. To suspect my parents of killing me does no one any good. Maybe it was a faulty strand of DNA or just bad luck.
I recently asked my father, who is still painfully angry about Americans’ anti-science response to Covid, why the science on smoking had so little impact on him. Why hadn’t he believed the science or cared about the risks to himself and others? For decades! He thought about my question for a long time.
“I wanted to smoke more than I wanted not to.”
The honesty of this answer left me, yet again, with nothing to say. It was the perfect description of a bad habit, sad and simple. I’m not suggesting addiction psychology is simple, just that his stripped-down equation was.
I have mixed feelings about Ramona and her Father now. Ramona’s anger over her dad’s smoking, her confusion about why an adult would keep doing something dangerous, and her terror of losing him all made me feel less alone as a child, but Ramona’s success made me feel more afraid and bereft when I failed. It’s not fair to suggest that if they’re plucky and persistent enough, if they love hard enough and ask sincerely enough, kids can talk their parents out of addiction. I’m sure Beverly Clearly didn’t mean for kids to draw that conclusion, but it’s inevitable: there’s no fantasy more powerful than a child’s belief that she can keep her parents safe. Of course, it’s just that—a fantasy. And now my sons worry about my safety while also feeling helpless. It’s fucking terrible.
And yet, as I edit and consider this material, I detect in myself a whiff of the prig, the rule-enforcer. Those naughty smokers! Shame! I find myself wondering, despite the family body count, “Is this maybe all a bit histrionic? I mean, they’re just cigarettes.” More young people seem to be smoking again, and when I walk through my lively Chicago neighborhood, I am careful not to scrunch my nose, wave the smoke away with a prissy hand. Even with cancer, I don’t want to be a drag. I hold my breath and keep going.
Rosemary Harp's fiction and essays have appeared in Fiction magazine, Electric Literature, Creative Nonfiction, and other journals. She is a fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and a perennially hopeful Detroit sports fan. Rosemary lives in Chicago with her husband, their three teenage sons, and a dog. She can be found at rosemaryharp.com.
Photo credit: Mathew MacQuarrie