Just Stop Already

As of today, I've been putting off my next cigarette for 19 years.

I don't intend for there to be a next one, but I've torched that intention three times before, so I distrust the word "quit."

I was a pack-a-day smoker by the time I was in high school, having started when I was 9. (Yes, you read that right.) There were those three smoke-free periods—a year when I was 20, three years starting at age 26, seven weeks at age 34. Each time I stopped—including the current 19-year-stretch—it was cold turkey. I know others who have done it with gum, or a patch, or e-cigs, or whatever. The method is less important than the simple determination to stop.

At any rate, I had smoked for more than 20 years out of 25.

Several times in the six years I've been on Facebook, I've commemorated this day publicly with a "yay me" post. This time, instead, I'm thinking about my mom, who stopped smoking around the same time I did. My siblings and I—former smokers all, the four of us—are hoping she'll be around to celebrate her 87th birthday in a week-and-a-half. Mom was diagnosed with lung cancer earlier this summer, and it is doing what cancer does.

I don't judge smokers. I know it's hard to stop, and I know why. I can still relate to all the things that ever made me want to smoke in the first place. Even today, I might catch a whiff of someone's cigarette smoke and think: Damn, I could light one up this minute. Just one.

But I know better.

If you smoke, you should stop.

You can.

You should.

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