dead women in my life ...posted by Maze

Drew me like a moth to a windshield....see I have been thinking of the dead women in my life.  In 4 months I lost my mother, my maternal grandmother and my sister.   September, October and January.  Singularly these events are easier to deal with, when they gang up on me it makes my head hurt.  I keep coming back to them, here and there in the quiet moments.  I'll pull off a little piece and deal with it for awhile until I've taken the emotions out of it. 

But there is this one piece,  that looms large, and is sort of the binding agent that ties these three deaths together, more so then family does.  They all smoked heavily, and they would all be here today if they hadn't.  I have one sister left, and she has smoked since she was 15, I have never smoked.

My mother smoked until the last two years of her life, stopping  when she was found unconscious on the floor of her home after a fall,  she went into a nursing home where she never got out of bed or took a breath of her own power again.   She died just a few days before her 77th birthday.

My sister literally smoked until she died.  She was found on the floor of her bedroom, with her oxygen tubes off.  The speculate that she had removed it to have a cigarette, and it fell to the floor.  Since she couldn't go more than a few minutes without oxygen they think she passed out trying to retrieve them.  This was a woman who had only been home a few weeks after having a heart attack, on top of diabetes.  She was 56.

My grandmother had managed to quit smoking several years ago, but the damage had been done and her lungs couldn't keep up. She was 83.  (She was my Grandfathers 3rd wife, and was only a few years older then my mom, but the only Grandmother I had ever known)

For most of my life I was vehemently anti-smoking.  If I knew you and you smoked, you couldn't stand being around me, and a few people I didn't know couldn't stand me either.  Then I lost a good friend of mine to a heart attack and I was hit by a car while out running.  That period in my life changed my outlook, and for awhile I decided that if someone enjoyed smoking enough to trade years off of their lives for it, who was I to tell them they couldn't.  Then my mom went into the nursing home, both my sisters health started to fail as did my grandmother's.  I saw first hand what their addiction did to their bodies, and their loved ones. I saw their quality of life decline until thoughts of how they would be better off dead crept into my head where they and guilt would careen around inside my head like those motorcycle riders inside the giant drum.  Even now I don't know which bothers me more, what smoking did to me or what it did to them.

So that's the part I keep working on the smoking part and am I pissed for what it took from them or pissed for what it took from me.  Or just pissed that they didn't care enough about the rest of us to stop?