'Danger: Cigarette Smoking Causes Cancer'

Even then I knew better than to smoke around her and though my side of the family all smoked when we were together, we usually made the children play in another room.

My daughter had one parent in her early years who did not smoke at all; her father, so she never became addicted. She says she tried to smoke as a teenager, when most of her friends did, but she never liked it at all, and couldn't do it. But I am well aware that it is only by chance that she escaped. Because all three of my sister's children smoked - even though my sister grew up in the same house I had and knew what I knew.

Later, the connection became almost impossible to ignore. Cigarette advertising was banned from broadcasting, but not from billboards and magazines. Joe Camel was a post television marketing tool. A survey of kindergartners showed that a large percentage of them could recognize Joe Camel. Cigarette smoking began to be banned in most public and indoor places, and the warnings on cigarette packs read, not

"Caution" but "Danger. Cigarette smoking causes cancer. Cigarette smoke contains poisons and carcinogens. Cigarette smoking can cause birth defects in infants of pregnant women who smoke."

Later, it was too late; we were addicts, slaves, junkies who would do almost anything for our fix and who would not, could not, look directly at the truth. Not even when we listened to our father's "frog" voice, the one he produced with a device inserted in the tracheostomy he breathed through after having his larynx and part of his throat removed due to the throat cancer he developed from smoking.

Not even when we listened to our mother's cough and saw her struggle to breathe even with her oxygen machine - and watched her still smoking. Even then we ignored and blanked out the connections; ignored it so completely that we smoked in the same house, often in the same room, with our father and his tracheostomy and what he called his "cut throat". Thank the gods he was never one of those people who held the cigarette to the tracheostomy and inhaled. After he survived his operation he was done with smoking. But hell, with my mother and his smoking children around, the poor guy probably didn't need to smoke.

He survived five more years after his laryngectomy and then the previously undetected tiny spots of cancer on his lungs which had metastasized from his throat before the cancer was removed began to grow. In six months they grew from the size of pinheads to walnuts to grapefruits and the cancer began to metastasize to his spine. It caused him torturous pain and was eventually expected to reach his brain. He didn't die from cancer, though.

He always said he felt that God had given him an "out". He had a serious heart defect, a cardiac arrhythmia which made it necessary for him to take Procardia every day and without which he could die. He said if his life ever became unendurable, all he had to do was stop taking those pills. We found later that that was exactly what he must have done, because less than a week after being admitted to the hospital with severe pain and inability to breathe and receiving the diagnosis of inoperable metastatic lung cancer, my father died suddenly, instantly, from a massive heart attack.

And yet...and yet...we buried him, had a lovely unusual funeral where my brothers spoke of him and my sister sang and played her guitar for him; where my mother wept and spoke of how beautiful it was...and on the way home we all stopped at a tavern my father and she had often frequented and we sat in their favorite booth...and we all lit up our cigarettes.

And yet...and yet...a year later as our mother lay in her hospital bed, dying of end stage COPD, we walked away from her deathbed and went outside to smoke. I remember her eyes above the oxygen mask - she was fully conscious, fully alert nearly to the very end. She watched us leave the room knowing where we were going and why. I remember her eyes; the look that was a mixture of horror and longing...I remembered them then and I will remember them always.

And yet...and yet...we still left her bedside to smoke and it is a measure of the depth and power and the pure tragedy of my family's addiction to cigarettes that we continued to smoke, obsessively and constantly, even through our despair and our loathing, for eleven more years after we returned to her room and watched her ugly and terrible death, a death we ourselves were destined to repeat. A death our own children were going to have to watch the way we did!

But then, this year, I and my sister and her husband and my mate "somehow" found the strength to break the chain of human misery by quitting - once and for all - the dreadful habit that was killing our family and had been slowly killing it for so many years.

One of our brothers quit cigarettes several years ago - but he still uses tobacco. He dips and he knows he will have to quit.