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