Last week we failed to celebrate a birthday in my family for the first time in 80 years.  Though I wasn’t there when we celebrated my grandmother’s first birthday 80 years ago, I can imagine the joy her family felt as they thought of the life that lay ahead of that little bundle of joy.  

 
She fulfilled her potential in many ways.  She lived the American dream as a member of a generation that made the world a better place for the generations that would follow. She came of age during World War II.  When “Johnny came marching home again” she married him.  They contributed four wonderful children to the baby boom but tragically lost one in infancy. 

They moved their young family from the bustling San Francisco Bay Area to small town America where they started their own business and ran it together until their retirement.  She was a successful homemaker and businesswoman.  They saved throughout their lives so that they could be self-reliant in their retired years.  She was a wonderful grandmother and eventually great-grandmother.  But my intention today is not to talk about all the wonderful years she was granted but about the years that were taken from her.

When we see the obituary of someone who lived to be 80, we can’t help but think that they were granted a long, full life on this planet.  There are certainly many who tragically never see 10 or 30 or 50 so why not think of making it to 80 as a great success?  But for my grandmother, 80 should not have been the end.  Her own mother died just a few years ago at the age of 96.  My grandmother was the perfect picture of health and energy throughout her well life.  She had my great-grandmother’s constitution and could have very likely lived another 15 years. 

But it isn’t just the 15 future years with her that were lost.  The last 10 years of her life saw a slow decline in quality.  For the last 5 years, her world shrank to what she could reach from the end of her couch.  She would sit there day after day doing handwork, watching TV and observing life happening around her.  In her later years, her stamina was such that she could not walk by herself to the bathroom.  This is not the way it should have been.

Today my grandfather sits heartbroken and alone without his companion of 60 years.  To him, and to the rest of us, she died too soon. 

Her killer masqueraded as a friend through most of the years of her life.  It was a friendship that was not worth the cost.  For each good year she had with cigarettes, she forfeited 6 months of living life to the fullest.  You see my grandma probably smoked for the better part of 50 years.  She started smoking as a young woman when it was a very acceptable, normal thing to do.  At that time, no one seemed to realize the cost.  As research revealed that smoking was a dangerous habit, my grandmother took notice.  She tried to quit on several occasions and often would succeed for several months or even a year, but always, she went back.  It was a hard habit to kick.

I remember well a conversation that took place one day between my younger cousin and my grandma.  Kimberly was probably around 8 or 9 and she had learned about the dangers of smoking in school.  She asked grandma one day why she smoked.  She told grandma that smoking was bad for you.  Grandma assured Kimberly that smoking was bad for you.  She explained that it was very hard to quit once you started and she hoped that none of us would ever start smoking. 

Grandma was so healthy then.  She was in her 50s and always trim and full of energy, it was hard to imagine that anything bad could ever come of her smoking.  I’m sure she figured she would beat it as well.  At the time, when we thought of smoking, we thought of lung cancer and clearly not every smoker would end up with lung cancer. 

If she had only known…  If she could have only seen Grandpa sitting alone this Christmas.  Grandma was such a strong person, if she had had a crystal ball, things would have turned out differently.  She would have done whatever it took to stop but she just didn’t believe it would end this way.

Now we know so much more about the dangers of smoking.  Today there is incontrovertible evidence that if you live long enough, smoking will kill you.  It has many ways to accomplish this including abdominal aortic aneurysm, acute myeloid leukemia, cervical cancer, kidney cancer, pancreatic cancer, pneumonia and stomach cancer.  In addition to bladder, esophageal, laryngeal, lung, oral, and throat cancers, chronic lung diseases, coronary heart and cardiovascular diseases, as well as reproductive effects and sudden infant death syndrome.  And these are just the killers.  There are plenty of other health problems associated with smoking that will just make you miserable but won’t actually kill you.

My grandmother never developed lung cancer but she did suffer from three of the killers in this list.  We will never know which of the three killed her. 

My grandmother was dealt a horrible blow early in her life when she lost her first baby to SIDS.  He had been born premature but was doing fine when he died in his sleep at 4 months of age.  I assume my grandmother was a smoker at that time.  It is impossible to say with certainty, but I can’t help but wonder if smoking may have cost us his life as well.

As I sat at the family gathering we had in my grandma’s honor, I watched my youngest cousin, now in her early 20s, out on the porch.  She was watching the rain, smoking a cigarette.  She is the third generation of smokers in my family.  This is not the legacy my grandma would have ever wanted for us.  How many more loved ones will we lose before it is over? 

My grandma forfeited 10 years of living her life the way she wanted to live it and 15 years of life itself for the 50 years she spent smoking.  The 25 years she sacrificed were not worth it.  She was a proud woman but she knew what the smoking had cost.  In the last 10 years of her life, though she had stopped smoking, she knew it was too late.  She knew it would kill her and take her away from my grandpa and all of us and I know she hated that.  I know that if she could have seen sooner what would eventually happen, she would have made it happen so differently.  I know that now that we have her life as our ‘crystal ball’, there is no better way we could honor her than to make it happen differently for us. 

To all of you who think you can’t quit smoking, you can and you should do whatever it takes.  See your doctor, spend your life savings, check yourself into a facility – there is no action so radical, no expense so great that you should not do it to save your family from the heartache of losing you.  If you don’t, you will be one of the 440,000 people who die prematurely each year just the way my grandma did.  The average man who smokes will forfeit 13.2 years of life, the average woman, 14.5.  You owe it to yourself; you owe it to your children and your grandchildren. 

My mother will experience her first motherless Christmas this year.  My grandfather his first without his life long friend and companion.  It didn’t have to be this way.  Smoking remains the leading preventable cause of death in this country.  It doesn’t have to be this way for you.