MOM’S LAST PACK OF CIGARETTES
The Changing Image of Cigarette Smoking — It’s No Longer Cool
From glamor to stigma
My mother passed away a decade ago at age eighty-two. Even though she had quit smoking about twelve years earlier, she succumbed to complications with COPD and emphysema.
I never smoked, but I may as well have because my earliest memories are of my mother with a cigarette in her hand, perched on a heavy glass ashtray, or parked between her lips as she changed my baby brother’s diapers or ironed dad’s shirts.
I breathed in her acidic smoke all day every day until I was old enough to enjoy a seven-hour respite at school. I loved her so much but I hated her nasty habit.
There was no escaping the smell and grimy feel of her poisonous smoke. The acrid odor on her breath almost made me gag when she kissed me goodbye or at goodnight.
“Mommy, your breath smells bad,” I would chide her. She’d just laugh and say, “Aw, honey, no it doesn’t.”
In those days people smoked everywhere and there was no escaping it. In restaurants, movie theaters, department stores, cars, and hospitals. The only place people didn’t smoke was in church.