A Milestone

This week marks an important milestone for me - it has been a year since I quit smoking. I started smoking when I was 15 years old - so I could be "cool". I quit smoking last year, after the very quick and traumatic experience of losing my sister to lung cancer. So I smoked for over 40 years. Wow!

I always wanted to quit. I kept trying to find an easy way though, Can you believe I've been through hypnosis, acupuncture, patches, nicotine gum, zyban, as well as a quit smoking program offered at a local hospital once when I was younger. The older I got, the harder quitting seemed to be. The last time I tried to quit, I actually became physically ill - shaking, sweating, headache, etc. I'd pretty much come to the conclusion that I would always be a smoker.

And then I found the perfect program to help me quit - I had to watch this aggressive cancer completely destroy someone I loved, in a brutal way. I suddenly realized that I'd been lying to myself all my life; every smoker lies to themselves.

Cancer only happens to others.
When my number's up, my number's up. It's fate.
Who wants to live forever, anyway?
I have relatives that lived to be almost 100, and they smoked.

It goes on and on. My sister told herself each of these lies. Let me tell you how things transpired. In chronological order.

- A woman I worked with lost her husband to a form of lung cancer.
- A coworker developed lung cancer, and it metastasized and went in his brain. He kept smoking until he died.
- A coworker's mother died of lung cancer. The world lost a beautiful woman I admired. My coworker begged me to quit smoking.

My sister was being treated for bronchitis since December 2013, but it wasn't getting any better. I was planning to visit and she kept asking me to wait until she felt better. One day at the beginning of April 2014, she phoned and told me she had bad news; she had a tumor in her left lung and she was having more tests done. I went right away to be with her. I held her while she cried that she didn't want to die. I tried to be strong for both of us. I gave her diet advice, bought her Essiac, signed her up for the Trillium program so her prescriptions could be paid.

I drove my sister and her daughter to the Respirologist in Windsor. We had to take the CDs with the MRI results to give him. I made a copy of them before we went. She had to go in a wheelchair because she was having trouble breathing. He asked if any of us still smoked and my niece and I raised our hands. "Take this as a wake up call" he said. I realized that I had been getting a lot of wake up calls lately. So many people around me had died of lung cancer, and it was getting closer.

When I got home, I looked at the copies of the CD and I saw the cancer filled almost the entire lung and had spread to the bronchi and throat. I knew she likely wasn't going to make it, but I wanted to help her fight. And then nothing happened. No calls to start chemo or radiation. Nothing. I was panicking - time was of the essence! Then my niece called me and told me she was in the hospital. She was weak and had lost a lot of weight.

I took my daughter with me so that she could have a chance to see her aunt one more time, just in case. On the way to Chatham, my daughter said "I hope with what's happening that you're not going to smoke this weekend." I promised her I wouldn't and I bought some nicotine gum and threw my cigarettes away.

At the hospital, I begged my sister to keep fighting. She said "Why?" She couldn't breathe, she had trouble swallowing. They had her on a morphine pump and told her she had to get stronger before they could give her chemo; she was too weak for it. She never got stronger. The cancer had spread to the other lung, to her throat, lymph nodes, stomach, intestines, liver, kidneys - it was everywhere.

Lung cancer is one of the most aggressive forms of cancer.

Within a month she had gone from crying she didn't want to die, to begging for death. The next week I got a phone call from my niece on May 2, 2014, a Friday afternoon, right before I left work. My sister had insisted on the chemo, despite being told she wouldn't survive. She seemed to be better for a little while after the chemo and was sitting up and talking. Then she went into a coma. I picked my daughter up and drove like crazy to get there. I didn't make it. She passed away about 45 minutes before I arrived.

I didn't need a lot of gum. I keep telling myself that I can never have a cigarette again, my life depends on it. I never want my daughter to watch me die that way. I counted the days on my calendar and every day I gave myself a number. I knew if I slipped, I'd be back at zero. I didn't slip. I wanted to though, and even now a year later - I want a cigarette. I even went so far as to steal a cigarette out of a friend's pack. If you've never smoked, you have no idea the hold this has on you! But I didn't smoke it. My sister's death will count for something.

So it's one year later. I had found the most effective way to quit. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, and yet in many ways, the easiest.

I miss you Cecile.

This work by Suzette Leeming is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada License.

Memories That Haunt

I was less than 5 years old when I saw my father beat my mother with closed fists. This happened in my biological family, before the CAS took us away.

"Why did you hit Mommy?" I asked my father. "I didn't." he said.

I think that memory stayed with me my entire life, because there was a disconnect between what I saw and the answer I received. When the mind can't reconcile events like this, it can become a memory that haunts.

My mother suffered from mental illness and for those first 5 years of my life she was in and out of mental hospitals. She took the physical and emotional abuse my father heaped on her. Maybe she didn't think she deserved any better.

When my father started abusing his children though, she gathered all the strength she could and left him, taking us with her. Unfortunately, without the social safety net we have today, she was unable to support 4 children and she sank deeper and deeper into psychosis, until one day the police showed up with a CAS worker. She spent the next 7 years in a psychiatric hospital; we spent the rest of our childhood in foster homes.

I have a new appreciation for how she tried to protect us. When I was younger, I perceived her loss of us as a "weakness". When I became a mother myself, I felt that she should have been able to hold it together for the sake of her children. Now I feel a sadness, that all these years after she's gone, I finally understand and appreciate her.

My father remarried, to a woman who had 5 children - 3 girls, 2 boys. I don't know if he abused his wife, but I do know he abused her children. She knew about the abuse and yet she stayed. When I talked to her about it, she felt she had no options, no way to leave him. When he went to jail for sexually assaulting her daughters and a grand daughter though, she covered for him. And waited for him to return. At his funeral a couple of years ago, she tried to give me a hug, and I couldn't.

"Why not?" she asked. "I never did anything to you."
"Because you stayed." I told her.

My mind can't reconcile this and it's become a haunting memory. Why does a woman stay with a pedophile? Why does she cover for him and protect him? Why does she let him hurt her children? Is it weakness? Is it insecurity or lack of intelligence? I can't understand it.

She wasn't an evil person herself - she was a bit gruff (east coasters tend to be like that), but I don't think she was a "bad" person. I am reminded of the following quote though "All it takes for evil to survive is for good men to do nothing." She did nothing, and evil survived.

She passed away 2 days ago at the age of 85. I didn't go to see her in the hospital. To be honest, because of my condemnation of her, my presence would only have upset her. I'll go to her funeral though, out of respect for my step brother and his family. She was his mother after all.

A chapter in my life is now over. I thank her, for helping me to respect and appreciate how hard my mother tried, with everything stacked against her to protect her children. That's what mothers are supposed to do. I finally forgive my mother for not being stronger - she obviously was an amazing person.


This work by Suzette Leeming is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada License.