The Last Mile

My mom's high school graduation picture and later with me during Thanksgiving, 2007

My little brother, my dad and my mom all left my life much before they should have.  I think about them a lot, especially when I'm out running.  That's when I'm living my life at it's fullest, placing myself out there with not much more than I was born with and pushing myself farther down the road.  It's during the last three miles of these quests, when I am past the point of warming up and have left the uncertainty of my early expectations, when I have entered a more exalted state, shed my outer complex layers, that I think about all of them the most.  Three miles from home I dedicate to my little brother and two miles out is for my dad .  But the last mile of my run is always for my mom.  

They took a lot of pictures of my mom back in 1958.  It was the year that she both graduated from high school and then married my dad.  Both life events when lots of pictures are taken.   It would be hard to imagine a more beautiful young woman than those shown in the images taken 51 years ago.  She was a classic beauty; tall, slender and with coiffured brunette hair and a fairness that could not be exceeded. Much later, her nieces that took part in her wedding ceremony as flower girls told me that they saw her with the same awe as held for any glamourous Hollywood starlet of the time.  In the years that followed she would emulate a kind of Jackie Kennedy persona and did so in a way that would have made the the first lady envious. She was just beautiful from the inside out. 

But 1958 was also the year that my mom started smoking cigarettes.  

One of my earliest memories is of my mother smoking, I think because even to a pre-schooler it must have impressed me as so unnatural.  In my childishness I would ask her to "be a dragon"  and she would oblige by exhaling smoke through her nostrils.  I can remember sitting at home in our living room every evening and stare at the the way the smoke from the cigarettes in the ashtrays would lazily rise through the lampshades and exit out the other end under more speed than it had entered, looking much like a minature volcano, apparently propelled by the heat of the light bulb.  It was fascinating.  

As a teenager, perhaps with more of a tilt toward defiance, I would pull my shirt up over my mouth and nose to filter out the smoke as it banked down in the house.  Of course I was told this was disrespectful and while lived in their home to stop it.  After, when I moved out into my first apartment, I actually bought an new ashtray and put it away for use when my parents came to visit.  And when they came over, they did use it.  It seems so odd now.  It seems like such a different time.  Times change but they didn't change soon enough to save my mom.  

I had always pestered my mom about quitting but it wasn't until I was nearly thirty years old, and she was about 50, that I had implored her to stop.  She thanked me for being concerned and that was about it.   She would remind me that is was a generational thing to start smoking back in the 50's and that at the time they didn't know any better.  I thought to myself what a cop out and what a bunch of crap.   

At about this same time, her own father died of smoking caused emphysema and on his death bed my mom promised him that she would quit. She didn't.

By the time she turned 60,  both she and my dad were tethered to twin oxygen tubing that ran for the length of their house.  They each had oxygen concentrators that chuffed and hissed out the precious wisps which had now become so relevant to their lives and the sound of which was so comforting and reassuring to them.  Traveling more than short distances became increasingly both logistically and psychologically frightening and so their last visit to our house,  four hours away, was seven years ago.  Hobbled by their dependence to the oxygen machines, the only time we saw them was at their own house or somewhere not very far away.  My boys grew from toddlers to teenagers with nothing more than phone calls and greeting cards from their grandparents.   

My dad had stopped smoking ten years prior and although he would not get any better, he seemed to get no worse.  But my mom could never get over the addiction.  For me thinking about the  combination of pure oxygen and the lit cigarette I knew she still held throughout the day was something I cautioned her on and prayed that nothing would happen.  Somehow it never did. 

But as predicted and dreaded about for so long, my mom quickly began to fail and all too soon her miserable life ended,  just days before her 50th wedding anniversary.  

And the awful thing is, I really didn't do anything to stop it.  

Nobody does.  Smoking addiction in our society just is not dealt with.  We prefer to diminish it's consequences by calling it a "habit" as if it's akin to cracking our knuckles or sucking  our thumbs.  We turn the other cheek, look the other way or we say that the smoker has rights.  We do anything but really help.  But after watching this woman, my mom,  die so young and suffer so long and have such an awful quality of life for such a long time, I really question the logic of this acceptance.  

And why do we, regular people, accept it?  (I know why politicians wont act without a public uprising.)  In part it may be that we know how smoking has a long relationship with our country that has wedded it to us by our history.  Most of the influential leaders of our early nation used nicotine addiction to fund their agenda's, gain their influence through it's hefty global profits and give themselves the time to pursue other their opportunities such as politics.  Without our country being a major supplier of nicotine during our formative years I doubt that it could have become the political power that it is today and maybe would not have even  attained independence.  Tobacco made us great and we are still beholding.  It's part of our romantic past and then, like now, tobacco is available everywhere. 

How could anything so deadly, so destructive and so awful also be so readily obtainable?  The horrific impacts that this drug has on our families and loved ones seems to be tempered by the fact that a person can go to any supermarket, anywhere, and load up on boxes of the stuff.  It's use is so accepted still that we can fill our carts full of food for our families and then at the end of the checkout line have a carton of cigarettes thrown on top as we head out the door.  No big deal, and the message again is that it must be "okay".

And what really pisses me off more than anything else is that we let the addicted person tell us that it is their "right" to do to themselves.  That this is their life and they can choose to live as they please.  

You know, my son Matthew gave me a book to read last month written by Josh Hamilton, a baseball star with the Texas Rangers.  To get to the point, this player became addicted to cocaine and then freebase crack.   Near death and after severing himself from everything that makes us human, he was  just barely able to grab a tree branch after having jumped off the cliff .  His description of what it is like to be addicted to a such a all consuming drug is stunning.   But he tells us what we already know: that people who are addicted are NOT CAPABLE OF MAKING CHOICES FOR THEIR OWN HEALTH AND WELL-BEING.   In fact they aren't able to make decisions of any type. Everything in their world revolves around feeding the addiction.   They will lie, cheat and do things contrary to their own moral code and to the people they love and care about just to get their next dose.  NOTHING is more important.  The addiction takes over and to those of us watching it from the outside, it even has it's own voice.  Our loved one is no longer logical or talking sense.  These people are literally out of their minds and yet when they tell us to go mind our own business, as my mother told me many times, I listened to the addiction and did what it said and walked away leaving my mother trapped inside.  She couldn't ask for help, but she shouldn't have needed to.  

Now my last mile is always for my mom.