Smoking - Melody Cryns

I sat on the cool hardwood floor in the den playing with my new doll house and looked over into the kitchen at my Mom who sat at that same, special spot she always sat, her yellow plastic chair at an angle as she read her ever-present book, a tall thin glass bottle of Tab always on the table next to her alongside an ashray with twirls of smoke floating up into the air and around my mother’s head making her look magical and mysterious. Every now and again Mom would take a swig of her tab and a puff of her long, skinny cigarette, probably Benson & Hedges. I knew what kind of cigarettes Mom smoked because I’d go to the store and get them for her almost every day. Mom had written a note to the clerks, Ned and Jack, at UC Market, a small market right around the corner from us. There was never a question when I’d say, “Three packs of Benson & Hedges. Ned and Jack knew exactly what I meant. I never had any desire to touch those cigarettes either. They belonged to my mom and I smelled the smoke and that was more than enough for me.

It never occurred to me as I watched my mom sitting here, so engrossed in her book, in her Tab and her cigarettes, that the smoke might be bad for us. Sometimes all the smoke made me cough for blow my nose, but that was about it. It was just a part of who my mother was, and the smell of the smoke made me feel happy and secure – it meant my mother wasn’t too far off.

To this day, even 40 years later after we all found out how awful cigarettes really are for people, I find the smell of cigarette smoke comforting in a weird sort of way that I’d never be able to explain to anyone. No, I’d never take a puff. They’re pretty nasty – but the smell reminds me that Mom is close by. It’s those blasted cigarettes that probably caused her to die at the age of 63, but who knows? Mom didn’t have lung cancer and she breathed on her own until she died.

Sometimes I’m sad because a couple of my kids smoke and I want to shake them and tell them to stop, but I don’t know how.

When Mom lay in her bed where she said she “wanted to die at home,” her best friend since 1962, Vicki, actually lit up a cigarette and placed it between my mother’s lips so she could take a long, hard puff.

“What the heck?” Vicki shrugged as she took the cigarette away waiting for Mom to get ready for the next puff. She’s going to die anyway. We might as well give her exactly what she wants.

I nodded. I had to agree.