ThE aSashaNation

Her Final Warning - Why I Quit Smoking #quitsmoking #smokingkills

I wrote this to a friend earlier, and felt that I was ready to share this with all of you. I do not want to preach and I do not want to take your free will. I do however want to save your life.This will be my only note of this nature.

     It’s tough, and I won’t even try to pretend that it’s not but you’ve already done the hardest part. You’ve decided that this slow form of suicide no longer has a place in your life !! I think that’s the most difficult thing, to actually force yourself to realize that the truth is we WILL die from smoking. We WILL get cancer, we WILL be in pain, and we WILL be eaten alive right in front of our eyes like a cheesy hollywood horror film.

     I’m gonna let you know something I don’t talk about. My grandmother died of lung cancer attributed directly to smoking. I was raised by this woman all my life. She was strong as an ox. Spent her whole life being a good person and working hard. Planted all her own gardens, maintained her own land (nearly 2 acres) cooked fabulous meals, kept an immaculate home, and could dance circles around me and my friends with her energy. She got sick in September, 2 days before I left home for college. She didn’t even know there was anything wrong until she collapsed and had to call 911 while I was at work. This was in September. By January, this woman, my whole life, died. I was there with her and thru Christmas one night she called me into her room when she still had a little strength left. She put her arms around me and told me she loved me and that I had to do something for her. She pulled back the blankets and ordered me to look at her body. I’ve drank every day for the last 6 years to forget the image of what I saw. With a voice much stronger than she was, she demanded I look her over and tell her what I saw. It was a warning. It ATE her body, it ate her up. I thought I was looking at an outtake from that movie “Cabin Fever”. This woman who carried me when I was little, pulled me on my sleigh, one time lifted a car that had fallen on my grandfather while he worked on it so he could escape, who made friends, and created crafts, who sang and raised a family and loved people, who had another 20 good years ahead of her, had been ravaged by disease. No one told her back in the day smoking would kill her and I assure you she wanted to live. And her final act which I found repulsive and cruel at the time, was meant only as a final act of love to warn me not to die like she did. I could hear her you know, at the end. Crying in the night, looking at the ceiling delerious from morphine asking her mother to take her “home” (heaven).

     I share this with you so that you can use it for strength the way I do. It hurts a lot to remember this. It also hurts a lot to not have a cigarette. But I promise you, what my grandmother went through hurt more than any nicotine craving ever could. Because it wasn’t just her body that died, it was her spirit. I could see the look of hopelessness in her eyes and the realization that she had done it to herself. Thousands of times she made the concious decision to put that tobacco to her lips and inhale, and in the end it did not love her back. As I have sobered up these last months I have allowed myself to remember this and know that it would be spitting in her face, but most of all my own, if I didn’t take the advice. I’ve found more stories than I can count about people our age and YOUNGER who have died violently from this, and all their eyes look the same in pictures. Disbelief that they did that to themselves. We spend our whole day protecting ourselves you know? Looking both ways so we don’t get hit by a car, locking our door so an intruder can’t harm us, getting vaccinations so we don’t get sick. Then we come home and choose to breath in 1000’s of toxic chemicals with the full knowledge that we might as well drink the cleaner under the kitchen sink. Would you stand around happliy chatting in a circle on a workbreak and watch your co-workers pour poison in their coffee and not say a word? Yet we all do that with cigarettes, watch each other stab ourselves with invisable knives and carry on like it’s perfectly normal. That in itself I think is the very definition of insanity. We must take responsibility for our actions. The tobacco companies look us right in the eye and tell us their product is going to kill us, yet we buy it! If a man on the street said “hey, give me $10 and I’ll give you this knife and you can prick yourself everyday for the next 20 years until you die” you would run for the hills screaming he was a lunatic. Yet it’s really no different than going into a store to buy your smokes. 

     Keep up the good fight guys. You’ve just made a decision to live and don’t you dare quit on yourself. Because you are worth more than to do this to yourself and your family needs you more than you need cancer.. We all do. I’m here anytime anyone need to talk about it, anytime it feels too hard and you need a friend. Please believe me it’s as hard for me as for you, I’ve been smoking 18 years and it seems like such a natural part of life. But I’ve survived too much to kill myself like this and I hope you all feel the same way too. xoxo

for more advice and assistance quitting please check out this link (http://whyquit.com/)

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