Dear Tobacco,

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Dear Tobacco,

I've been thinking about what it might feel like to be addicted to you.

I can imagine the conversation in my head about how I would want to quit you, and reasons to belittle myself at the same time. I might feel that smoking, and continuing to smoke, was a sign of selfishness. So then because with addiction comes the power to self impose a guilt trip and yet still not be able to kick you, and then starts the pattern of self hatred.

I might feel weak, easy, victimized, powerless, and full of shame while still continuing to crawl back into your bed. I might feel angry at myself, angry at you, angry at your pimps and their pyramid of power. Perhaps I would want to rid myself of your touch, but find it too easy to slip back into your arms. I might cry at how much you'd made me feel like I'd sold my soul to you.

And if I were to then be rid of you, I might grieve that perfect moment where you filled my blood with calm and my lungs with a warm coating of your drug. I might want with all my soul to bring you back into my body, but know that to do so would only be a sign that I was still that person I hated that loved you so. Perhaps I'd avoid you so I could finally be proud of me.

I can't really claim to know your addiction since I did little more than flirt with you in high school, but sometimes I wonder if the only reason I haven't fallen into your arms is because my body rejects you despite what my mind might let me do.

You're the one in bed with so many - tell me, what do they say to you when you decide to reward their slavery with nothing but the need for more of you?

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Dear Tobacco,

I got to go out for lunch today to do some errands at the bank. On the ride back to work I was in line for a red light and looked out beside the car to the beaten up grass median along the road.

It's bad enough that the grass growing in the median is clogged with weeds, salt, gravel, and exhaust, but it's also got to deal with you too. I was only briefly stopped, but in that time I saw:
  • The outer shell of a pack of tobacco rolls
  • The inner paper shell of the same pack
  • The inner foil lining of one side of the pack
  • Several old 'butts' leeching their way into the soil
  • Some gum

Then I started thinking statistics again. How could I not when you were the dominant cause of the litter on the side of the road? For instance, one tobacco roll/cigarette results in a fairly tangible amout of waste... and I'm not even thinking that big of the picture. I'll show you what I mean:

25 smokes = 25 filters = 2 to 4 separate pieces of foil per pack = at least two separate pices of construction type paper to constuct the pack = one plastic pack wrapper + 8 wrappers from the carton + paper to construct the carton = 16 total wrapper paper pieces = at least 24 pieces of foil = 200 toxic leftover filters = a lot of pollution!

This doesn't take into account lighters, their packaging, bags stores give cartons in, receipt paper, matches, boxes, wrappers, and anything else disposed as a result of the consumption of you. Nor does it take into account the various types of waste incurred by other forms of you - like the little plastic tubs that smokeless come in.

It's funny how much physical waste you contribute to, and yet all we are left with is smoke.

Smoke, addiction, and nothing tangible other than litter. Lovely.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Dear Tobacco,

I'm really mad at myself right now for screwing up with blogger and erasing a perfect post to you. I was in such the zone and totally getting down so many 'teen angst' moments I had that related to you, and now it will be a complete bummer to try to recreate.

I can't help but think that you had something to do with it. Go me and my conspiracy theory - only this one is all in my head I guess - heh.

In good news, my workplace has finally regulated it's outdoor smoking areas and will be eliminating all indoor smoking rooms(like the one in the staff lunch area). Also in good news, Canadians are smoking less even if they are getting tubby.

I'm still bitchy though.

I'll get to you later.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Dear Tobacco,

Heather Crowe's obituary really tells it like it is, and is a wonderful legacy for her cause. I signed the guestbook. I suppose you could read the obit, but unless you think you'll change your mind about continuing your stranglehold on society, you might as well just let everyone else read it.

Perhaps they won't want anything to do with you anymore either.

Remembering

Monday, June 05, 2006

Dear Tobacco,

I saw that cameo you had on Smallville tonight... I thought it was important to mention because you were definitely in league with the bad guy. There was this guy that Luthercorp had hooked on a serum who could manipulate any nearby electricity to form tangible balls of electricity that he could use as weapons.

Your role was to help show just how evil/hooked this guy was. He took a small ball of electricity and lit his tobacco roll with it! It was perfect! I was initially just surprised that I was watching the show (it was on at the gym) but found myself actually tickled that you had been paired with the bad guy. It's taken some time, but I am finally seeing more of you as right-hand to the villain than to the hero.

Now my forgiving side was seeing the worst that addiction can do to someone. This dude was willing to kill Superman and his family so that he could get his fix. Thankfully he wasn't in need of a smoke or he might have killed sooner - but either way you would probably like to have a hand in his death. I wonder if that will work it's way into the plot sometime too... heh heh.

Yes, I thought it was great that I've found a show that portrays you as a subtle bad guy unlike the shows I've watched growing up that show you as the subtle good guy.

'Bout time.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Dear Tobacco,

Kathleen has something to say to you. Her letter sent chills down my body, but I don't mind that. They are a real reaction to a reality that is raw and vivid... you have caused so much pain in her life that I only wish she can keep you at a distance from now on.

She reminded me that I ought to have my email posted for others to send their letters to. I think I'll use an image of it so that the SPAM software doesn't get a hold of it. Spammers are as bad as you, except they don't kill I suppose.

It sucks that you still manage to be somewhere in our sights every day...

Dear Tobacco,

This weekend is the seventh anniversary of my taking Rick down to Columbia-Presbyterian for his second surgery. The incision from the first surgery a week before never healed, and when he coughed I could smell your triumphant, noxious exhalation from the hole in his back. For a week I slept on the couch by his bedroom, not because I could help him, but so he would not be alone as he racked and heaved and spat up dull pink and gray tissue. Before we left for the hospital, he wanted to sit down in the backyard. It was a beautiful June day, as lovely as the day we had wed, nearly 23 years before. He wasn’t one for open affection, much less for “talking things out.” In fact, he never admitted to anyone that he might not beat you. But in that green and golden sunlit space he said to me simply, “Thank you.”

We had to wait two days before he could be scheduled for another operation – days I spent sleeping in a chair by his bed, of the charity of the nurses, waiting, slipping outside – yes, to confide in you, comforter and killer, buying you guitily, stealthily, at the corner newsstand. He had surgery on Monday... and you know where I spent that night – in the psych ward of the same hospital, unable to deal with a husband’s dying and an adolescent son’s – 85 miles away -- inarticulate horror of that fact. But I saw him Tuesday, and on Wednesday I came to the step-down ICU where he’d been moved. I didn’t realize at the time, but they’d fitted him with a morphine bolus – every few minutes he’d groan and press the magic button. I didn’t realize at the time, but they had pretty much given him up and they didn’t care how much morphine he got. I guess by that time I was so exhausted or traumatized or perhaps deliberately oblivious that I didn’t recognize how close he had traveled to your final embrace. The oxygen indicator alarm on his forefinger kept going off and it irritated him, so I’d press the button on the console to quiet it. The nurses were too busy to check its frequent clamor. He couldn’t speak, just jotted queries – the last about his son, whom I was to bring to visit on the following day. He ate dinner with great appetite – I don’t remember what the main course was, but he loved the corn kernels, thought them fresh from the cob.

The nurse came to straighten the bed and check his dressings. When we helped him sit up, he grabbed for the paper cup and spat – and this time it was bright red, red as a rose, red as blood from an afterbirth, red fresh from an artery, and the incision in his back blew open and out poured lymph and blood and I said to the nurse, “He’s bleeding.” She was already doing her nurse things, calling the code, trying to get me out of the way. I said, for lack of anything better, stroking his arm, “It’s OK, it’s OK, you’ll be OK.” But he pushed me away, saying “Stop, stop.” And the blood gushed from his nose and mouth and he frantically put on the oxygen mask and as frantically tore it off as it filled with that merry color. I cried, “I love you, don’t you leave me, don’t you fucking leave me,” but I wasn’t any longer in his field of vision and I saw, yes I saw when he left. The code team came and worked on him, him who was gone, him whose clay-colored body jerked nervelessly under their pitiful devices, oh god his dear body and they tried to get me to leave but I wouldn’t and they joked and flirted even as they acted out the formalities of their training until his surgeon said to me it’s time to let him go and oh, you think I didn’t know that nine months ago?

His sister and father and widow and son and friends smoked like chimneys during his wake and cremation (oh lost and by the wind grieved ghost). ................. six months here and six months there without you, but it wasn’t until nearly seven years later that I finally hated you enough, Dear Tobacco, that I found the grace to leave you (which of course had been lying all along at my feet – how cleverly you weave your mists and myths of rationalization!).

Succumbing to your wiles and embracing you for over 30 years is the biggest regret of my life. Does that make you happy, thief and murderer?

Kathleen Chaffin

Friday, June 02, 2006

Dear Tobacco,

Last month you took an enemy of yours - also a victim of yours - to the grave. She was, and will continue to be, the face of second-hand smoke in Canada. What an extraordinary person she continues to be; a true role model for us all in terms of the choices she made to fight you while fighting lung cancer.

You see, she had nothing against you until you decided to convince the cells in her lungs to fight themselves and become a serious cancer. Then, without your blessing, she began to take your name in vain to anyone, and everyone, who would listen. She no doubt cried like I have upon hearing of others you've stolen, and her story brought both comfort and pain to anyone who shared her status as someone touched, or rather punched, by you.

She was a voice against you even when her breath wouldn't let her yell. She moved mountains and helped usher in a smoke free public Ontario and Quebec, and her whispers will no doubt be in the ears of those who legislate you around our country. You didn't want her to see how she had triumphed against you, instead you reminded her damaged body of your power as her cancer returned to ultimately claim her.

You might have taken her body from us, but her voice will live on.

I've had several search requests from people looking for the eulogy from her funeral last month. With permission, it is posted below.

Long Live Heather Crowe.

A few years ago, Heather Crowe would be the first to agree that her life was not extraordinary. She would have said that she was an ordinary woman, living in ordinary circumstances with an ordinary job and ordinary hopes for a comfortable life after retirement.

But when Heather learned that she was going to be forced into a retirement that would be neither comfortable nor long, she became a most extraordinary ordinary woman capable of doing the most extraordinary ordinary things.

In the three and a half years of her dying she was able to do something few of us are able to do in all our years of living – to make a lifetime of difference.

Heather was born the third of 7 children to a family in rural Nova Scotia. From her family, Heather learned the value of hard work, she learned courage and determination and she learned selflessness.

Like many before and after, Heather was driven ‘down the road’ to find work in Toronto and to build a more secure future.

Emotionally and spiritually, however, she never moved far from her family roots, from her connections to her brothers and sisters, nor from the native teachings of her Mi’kmaq mother.

It was the career she started in Toronto and continued in Ottawa that would eventually kill her.

For 40 years she served food, poured drinks, and wiped tables, but for 39 of those years she did so in venues where, as she put it, “the air was blue with smoke.”

Heather said that waitresses were often ‘invisible workers.’ Invisible too was the damage that was being done to the cells of her lungs by the smoke-filled air she breathed.

By the time these cells developed into tumours and became visible to CAT scans and X-rays machines, Heather’s cancer could not be reversed.

Heather said that learning that she had lung cancer was “like having a mirror shatter into a million pieces. You see the shards on the floor,” she said, “but you can't put them back together. It changes your life forever."

Most extraordinarily -- Heather decided to do more than just stare at the pieces on the floor.

She decided that she might have been an invisible worker, but she would not be an invisible victim. She set about to present her case – against extraordinary odds – to the workers compensation system.

Later, suffering from chemo-caused nausea, she made another decision. No one else, she decided, should have to endure what she was going through. She set about to present their case – against extraordinary odds – to the political system.

Heather became a woman transformed.

She stopped being a waitress, and became a woman with a mission.

She became a voice for hospitality workers, for prison guards, for casino workers, for home-care workers, for all working Canadians who were left unprotected from exposure to second hand smoke.

She became the ‘visible victim.’ Heather was unstoppable.

She pushed herself on trips across Canada to communities large and small, to meetings friendly and hostile, to politicians supportive or discouraging.

She searched out, and found, people who could help and then pushed us to be more ambitious.

She brought to her campaign a waitress’s sense of timing: she wasn’t satisfied with the idea that it could take years to bring laws into effect, and she didn’t see why we should be either.

During her 3 year campaign, Heather lived on borrowed time. She paid steep interest on that loan. In addition to the physical discomforts left by her cancer treatments, there was the stress of learning new skills, meeting new expectations.

Heather had become, in a way she never anticipated or planned, a public figure, a focus of attention.

She moved from waiting on tables to sitting at the head table. She stopped being invisible and became highly visible.

For a deeply private woman from a deeply private family, this was not an easy transition, nor always a comfortable one.

She had become well known as the waitress who was ‘dying’ from second hand smoke, yet she wasn’t dead yet.

People began to ask why. Sometimes they asked her.

There was always the dark cloud of terminal illness on the horizon. Waiting for it to darken further was very hard. In some ways, Heather was relieved when her cancer returned last September.

“There’s only so long you can cheat the devil,” she said. “And I feel I have already cheated him for the past three years. I am happy with the things I have been able to do in that time.”

In those three years she did truly extraordinary things and many of those things made her happy indeed.

She met, encouraged, cajoled, charmed and stared-down premiers and ministers. By putting a face to cancer from second hand smoke, she persuaded many of them to act on the knowledge they had.

These successes made her happy.

She touched the hearts of many, and received hundreds of letters of support and appreciation from people across Canada.

These kindnesses made her happy

She stayed in touch with Moe and “the girls” from work, and her visits with them made her very happy.

But nothing made her as happy in her mission as working with “the kids.”

Kids from Ottawa’s Expose mobilizing youth against tobacco.

Kids from Kingston rallying to support a tobacco treaty.

Kids from Commando Oxygene circulating petitions to support the new Quebec law.

Kids in countless classes watching the video about Barb Tarbox that Heather brought to share with them.

Heather insisted that she would not be in front of these kid – she would not be behind them – but she would stand beside them.

They were her future. They were her joy.

Another extraordinary thing grew out of Heather’s campaign.

A family of supporters grew around her.

Politicians, government workers, community groups, educators, student activists, journalists and her nursing and health supporters worked together as though no one had ever heard of federal-provincial tensions, or institutional rivalries or financial concerns.

Heather not only found the best in herself, she brought out the best in all of us.

And she brought us together.

Heather’s family of supporters was not the only family that grew closer during her final years.

Heather loved her daughter and granddaughter with a deep passion, even though, as mothers and grandmothers are wont to do, she sometimes expressed that love in unwelcoming worrying ways.

No granddaughter was more loved than Jodi Ann. No daughter more the focus of her mother’s life than Patricia.

Canadians responded to Heather in an extraordinary way. They realized that what had happened to her could have happened to anyone, but that not everyone would have responded as Heather did.

They were moved by Heather’s honesty, her selflessness, her determination – and her success. Heather was a true Canadian hero.

Heather met Barb Tarbox a few weeks before that other champion’s death.

“Barb Tarbox has been a fashion model with a glamorous career,” she said. “Beside her, I feel like the little red hen.

And then she added, with her typical grasp of the perfect metaphor: “I have been scratching around in the barnyard trying to find enough to eat. When it’s already too late, I discover the barnyard is a toxic waste dump.”

One day as the Little Red Hen was scratching in a field, she found a grain of toxic wheat.

"This wheat should be clean" she said. "Who will safeguard this field of wheat?"

"Not I," said the Duck.
"Not I," said the Cat.
"Not I," said the Dog.
"Then I will," said the Little Red Hen.

And she did.

Dear Tobacco,

You're just as good at making Heros as you are Victims.

You see, in this case you've bred a hero and a fatility in one fell swoop.

I still think you'd be happiest if the hero had a close relationship with you too - the more the merrier, eh?

calgary.ctv.ca - Calgary news from CTV: "Heros in fire"

POSTED AT 11:15 AM Friday, June 2
Careless smoking is to blame for a fatal fire in the city’s southwest Thursday night.

The fire broke out in a condo complex at 4915 35th Avenue S.W. just after 11 p.m.
Before emergency crews arrived on scene, the resident manager of the complex burst into the residence and rescued a 67-year-old female from the second floor, saving her life.
Paramedics treated the woman for smoke inhalation and transported her in stable condition to the Foothills Hospital.
Her condition is not considered life threatening.
Firefighters located a second woman inside the residence.
Paramedics aggressively treated the 45-year-old unconscious woman and transported her to the Foothills Hospital in critical condition, but she did not survive.
Arson investigators say careless smoking started some bedding on fire and the flames were intensified by an oxygen system that had plastic tubing running throughout the suite.
The fire damage was confined to the bedroom and bathroom areas with smoke damage throughout the suite.
Officials say the resident manager and another man were instrumental in getting the 67-year-old woman out of the suite safely. The Fire Department will be recognizing the heroic efforts at a later date."


 

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