RESOLUTION

I never smoked a day in my life. Not even a drag on a joint in the sixties, despite the encouragement of my peers to join the party. In my young adulthood in the early 1970s, cigarette smoking prevailed as a social norm. There were no restrictions in restaurants, beauty salons, hotel rooms, stores, schools, hospitals or doctor’s offices, on the beach, even in airplanes – remember the little ashtray wells built into the armrests?

Ashtrays on the desk were commonplace in the federal government office where I worked in Boston, my new city after fleeing with my college degree from my home state of New Jersey.

Cigarette advertising was an accepted fact of life: Marlboros for the real man, Virginia Slims for the liberated woman.

I met my husband-to-be at a New Year’s Eve party on Beacon Hill when I was twenty-three years old and figuring out my post-college path in life. He was nine years older and established in his career, in his city life, as a father of two boys . . . and in his incessant smoking starting in his early teens.

Paul was a hairdresser in a fashionable Newbury Street salon. A cigarette dangling from his lips as he cut hair and conversed with models or wealthy matrons, the casual flick into the ashtray, then the final smush under his thumb, created a sophisticated persona of the times.

After we married and left the city, I insisted that he step outside the house to smoke. He was fine with that, even in harsh New England winters, because freezing in blizzard conditions was apparently more palatable than trying to stop. His dad smoked cigars daily, even while working at his Esso gas station; the sight and smell of a hearty smoke was a pervasive fact of Paul’s childhood.

That is, until our daughter was in middle school and the country was finally waking up to the dangers of tobacco in the 1990s, including the impact of second-hand smoke.

Her middle-school class participated in a yearlong anti-smoking campaign – aimed more at preventing young people from experimenting and getting hooked – but she decided on her own to try to get her dad to quit. She brought home written materials and often broached the subject with him. Finally, he decided to tackle the addiction that had characterized his entire teenaged and adult life.

Over a decade, into his 50s, the poor guy repeatedly tried various measures and spared no expense in his efforts to find a cure: cold turkey, prescriptions for nicotine patches, nasty-tasting nicotine gum, worry beads to occupy his fingers, expensive sessions with a highly-reputed hypnotist specializing in smoking cessation, bumming cigarettes instead of buying them.

And people still smoked everywhere, making it even more torturous for him.

Finally, in a last desperate attempt to conquer his “habit” (it was not called an addiction back then), he signed up for a program at the local hospital in which a nurse led a weekly group of aspiring quitters. He attended faithfully and followed the structured assignments, but he kept the details of the process to himself. After the course was over, the nurse called to check on his progress.

And then the series ended . . . along with the smoking!

I’m not sure what factor conquered the forty year addiction, although I have my hunch—surely the loving pleas of his daughter, then the peer group experience with the oversight of a compassionate nurse who called him one last time and then let him go, but not before expressing her confidence in his capacity to succeed.

He saved the Certificate of Completion among his important papers.

Paul admitted that he felt a compelling desire for a cigarette from time to time after that, but he fought it hard and never again lit up. Other changes helped too. Society became increasingly more enlightened about the dangers of smoking. Packs of cigarettes were withdrawn from drug store and supermarket checkout displays, and became progressively more expensive.

To my relief, each year of abstinence reduced his chances of contracting a serious lung condition. He remained physically active and strong, maneuvering his farm-sized Yanmar tractor to lift boulders and build stone walls in our yard, until a fast-moving dementia illness took him down, sadly, in his seventies.

In earlier days, conquering a bad habit on one’s own made a big difference. Decades later, we are all affected by systemic environmental factors, regardless of our individual efforts to lead a healthy life. We cannot avoid the extreme and immediate effects of global warming: record-breaking heat this summer, the dangerous pollution of large regions of the USA from Canadian wildfires, drought or floods, displacement of threatened populations, harm to the oceans and agriculture, disappearance of animal and plant species, and more.

This photo is my daughter’s morning view (in June) from her Manhattan law office on a day with the maximum level of dangerous air quality – a dystopian sight that is nevertheless here and now. The view of the river and the skyline on the other side are obliterated.

But Paul considered his victory over smoking to be one of his proudest accomplishments, an important benefit not only to himself but to his family, and in his memory I pay tribute to his struggles and his triumph.