Today mom and I talked about the way my father died a few years ago. I’ve always felt like I should get really real about it because it might help somebody not make the same choices, but it’s really depressing. Marsha Cooke’s plea for people to quit smoking made today the day.
There’s two main ways smoking is going to kill you; cancer or lung disease — aka Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease aka COPD. The latter is what got my dad, as it did Leonard Nimoy and millions of other Americans. If you smoke enough, statistically you will get one of them.
My father smokes for decades and quit smoking more than than ten years before it killed him. He felt fine for years. He even felt good. But as we age our lungs naturally degrade. That’s why many older people have shortness of breath. Smoking accelerates the degradation hugely.
What this means is there’s a momentum you must account for with lung disease. A point of no return. Which means you have to stop immediately. But even if you think it’s too late, that your lungs are closer to fucked than to not, I’ll tell you why you still have to quit.
One day when my father was around 69-70 years old he lost his breath and never got it back. The natural aging of his lungs combined with he decades of damage made it so he could no longer do every day things that we take for granted, but that when taken away will ruin your life.
Dad moved his toiletries to a bathroom downstairs and sleep on his sofa; going up and down the stairs was too much. He had to park in disabled spots so he would be as close as possible to the entrance of wherever he was going because he felt — and looked — like he would die.
At restaurants dad had to sit at the table closest to the entrance because he couldn’t walk from one end of the joint to the other. When he got back to his car, he had to lean on it for several minutes to catch his breath and find the strength to climb in and buckle up.
Then came the oxygen tank. They make belts with oxygen packs but they carry less air, and he was so fearful and out of shape that he needed that tank you’ve seen that people pull on wheels behind them. Imagine taking that everywhere you go for the rest of your life. 24/7.
Imagine being so out of breath you can barely make it from the front door to your car, and then having to lift an oxygen tank and its accompanying apparatus and situate it in your passenger seat like it’s your child.
The medicine helps keep you alive but it’s its own kind of disease. The steroids will blow you up like a balloon, people will think you look like you’re going to explode. Not a joke. That’s what it looks like. Then the psych meds to deal with the depression all of this causes.
Now imagine your friends and family watching what’s happened to you. How embarrassing and undignified and humiliating it is for them to see you almost pass out or die just moving from point A to B, or trying to reach something high, or from raising your voice.
And the worst part of it all is you know it’s 100% your own fault. All these people watching you struggle and decay have been telling you for years to stop smoking and you didn’t listen and now they’re going to watch you die. You hate yourself, you resent them, you’re fucked up.
The last years of my father’s life were spent in a little room in the back of his house where he sat in a chair with his oxygen tank and watched tv. Efforts to get him to take steps to improve his quality of life failed. Because treating COPD means completely changing everything.
You live a certain way for your whole adult life. Independent. Healthy. Then seemingly overnight you’re a bloated cyborg, your kids are talking to you about moving to retirement homes or closer to them, about diets and exercises and therapy. 100% lifestyle change. It’s too much.
Dad finally let me go to his shrink with him. I’d been trying to encourage him to do something, anything to improve his quality of life. He said to the doctor, “Can’t you just give me something to get out of this... this funk?” I’ll never forget what the doctor said.
“No.”
“No.”
Dad didn’t quit smoking in time because it was too hard. Fast forward to the end, he couldn’t help me save his life because that was too hard. In the beginning the cigarettes are too strong. At the end, the mental and physical decay were too strong.
I was at Comic-Con when my dad’s cousin called to tell me his sister hadn’t been able to get in touch with dad for a few days and called the cops to check on him. They broke in and found my father dead on the bathroom floor. He was 72.
My father could have lived many more years with a high quality of life. But he died as the direct consequence of a choice he made decades earlier to die in exactly the way he did: sad, depressed, full of regret, without dignity or grace, physically broken and hopeless.
Smoking kills you in the slowest way and yet most brutal way. You feel fine and then one day it’s too late; you’re left with just one choice, change absolutely everything about your life or die in the terrible way I’ve described, with life dripping out of you like a broken tap.
Or you can quit smoking.
