..Before my father was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2005 we had both been quit for a few years (with the obligatory string of lapses). There's no way of knowing if his relatively brief return to cigarettes was responsible for his lung cancer or if the damage had already been done by his decades of heavy smoking. I've often wondered darkly if it was one of our shared cigarettes that caused that rogue cell in his lung to start mindlessly replicating itself.
My father was once one of those people who made smoking look good -- the urban squire in his dinner jacket, a silver lighter on the dresser amongst cufflinks and collar stays -- but he ended up as one of those people who made smoking look deadly....
