Convulsing.    

 

        Trembling.

 

                          Unrecognizable.

 

Presently, this is what my grandfather looked like. The same man who would book an appointment with the doctor months in advance, now laid in bed, shaking beyond his control. 

His ears could not register the calls that were being made, over and over again, as his head and body were not in sync. Even with his rapidly depleting condition, we were hoping for a single gesture or word to come from my grandfather’s lips, but his mouth had no sign of being able to function again. He could not hear, he could not speak, and most certainly, he could not feel. His eyes were not functioning, since he stared at us, soullessly. My grandfather’s body was just bones in the shape of a human, slowly decaying, with ruins known as pain. The cancer in his lungs was expanding and the person within him was constricting. No matter what we did there was no getting to him, and with that, we held my grandfather with a familiar feeling of fondness. But he remained a caricature of the person we knew him as... 

                                                                                       Perseverant.

                                                                                                           Responsible.

                                                                                                                                 Personable.

 

As my grandfather was having this seizure, I kept visualizing him as his past self. I thought about the many moments I heard about him from my mom, and the times I personally spent with him. He was the first man to pick me up in his arms, since my father was in America when I was born. He used to take me when I was a baby and place me beside him at night just so he could be able to sleep with me. This was all before the cigarettes had finally caught a hold of the lungs that they knew dearly.

When I was seven years old, I remembered seeing my grandfather’s packs of cigarettes. They would be on top of the main chest wardrobe in my grandfather’s home. Looking at them from afar, I would wonder what about how these thin and white cylindrical tubes gave him so much solace. It was hard to understand because when watching television, there were so many of commercials advising people against smoking. However, I decided to ‘save my grandpa’. My goal was to snap each one in two. I actually went through with it and it felt so satisfying to see them break apart. When my grandfather found out what I was doing, he seemed more concerned of  his family’s feelings than anything else. He reacted calmly, and did not mention any sign of a loss from these lung-destroying devices which brought irreversible damage.

 Breaking the cigarettes was a way for me to let my frustration towards my grandfather out. I was sick of seeing him smoke. He used to cough so much that he would have to hold himself up by placing his hands onto his chest. Every time I told him “Please do not smoke. It is dangerous for your health,” he would laugh and say “Okay, okay I will not next time.” But… next time, he would light up a cigarette and forget my request for him to stop. However, when he saw the wrapping paper unravel with the unburned tobacco bits and the filtration strewn apart, he began to understand my message.

The fumes of a cigarette are like no other. It cannot escape the user or the person who inhales it. The smell gets on your clothes, harm the children (even when they are not smoking it themselves) and force people to cough who are inhaling it for the first time. It is ironic that when someone starts smoking, they ignore the initial coughing fit. They choose to continue harming themselves. Like the cigarette itself is giving a sign, for the new bait to rethink their decision to smoke, but it is too often ignored. 

The taste of a cigarette is bitter, or like burning newspapers, but it could also be an acquired taste. For some it could taste “fresh”. After years of tasting it, this could lead someone to not taste the actual food that could actually benefit their health. Cigarettes become the nutrients for the user when it’s filled with toxic materials such as tar and burnt carbon, but it disguises itself as a dream filled with relief. It severely burns the tongue and sets the throat on fire, all to get put out again. But don’t worry, the next session is in a couple hours. If they are impatient, they could even smoke till twenty of these killers are gone by a day or two. 

The biggest ruse of cigarettes is that the smell, the taste and the feeling that comes with it become a part of the person who is lighting it up. Even then, it cannot become a friend of their host. The cigarette acts as a parasite that gives temporary feelings of coolness to the body as it restricts blood flow and the very organs, lungs, that provide us a natural coping mechanism called breathing. Oxygen, what all smokers breathed when they first came into the world, becomes replaced by cinders, ashes and unpleasant smells. What their system rejects, they accept fully. Once these cigarettes have a deep hold on the user, it is able to control their senses and take away their true essence of being human. It begins to trick them into believing that without them, they cannot function among the “normal” people and slowly wins trust. It deceives people into believing that they have a purpose in their life, until their lives are taken by it. 

A cigarette is akin to a bomb for the human body. It goes off for many and stays dormant for years and years or inactivates indefinitely for others.

 

My grandfather eventually stopped substituting his breathing with smoke as he got older. However, the forty years he was adamant on believing that cigarettes were benefiting his life, he lost out on. His body had taken the constant suffocation of his organs and trekked on for ten more years. However, the body decided that it could not do it anymore. It fought for years, but the cigarettes got to him in the end.  

For that I want to ask the cigarettes that my grandfather smoked, “What was it that bothered him?” because I wonder if someone or something else could have been done to help him get over his sorrow. He was a very quiet person, someone who talked here and there. Even with his family, he smiled and cracked jokes, but he seemed to never talk about his problems. As his granddaughter, I never heard him complain about his life. Actually, one of my fondest memories of him is sitting on the corner of a couch and looking expressively at a television. He was an extremely private person, uniquely so, as I never again came across someone like him ever again.

Smoking is the antithesis to breathing. It took away my grandfather’s ability to properly breathe and left him with a hollowed body with ashes for organs. His lungs could not support the oxygen he needed to breathe after years of feeding his nose, mouth and everything else with the       smog coming from the manufactured toxins that some people dare of making. In the last moments of his life, my grandfather was determined to breathe.  When he turned to my aunt and said “Will you be able to save me?” and we all had to look away when he raised this question fearing his reaction to our response. For that, I wish he had listened to me. Maybe it would not have made a difference or maybe it would have. That “maybe” now lives in the air.