SMOKE THAT KILLS
August 15, 2005

            There are some deaths that shake us up, pain us more than we could ever have imagined, and above all, make us stop and think. And something like this happened to me when I heard of the death of journalist and the American network ABC News anchor Peter Jennings.  It is not just that I had become accustomed to watching his show for two decades but that his death, like my father’s, was hasted by so much smoking.

            I still recall when Jennings said goodbye to his audience on April 5, a few days after having learned that he had lung cancer. His faltering voice sounded very hoarse and betrayed the terrible uncertainty felt by anyone who knows he is facing the battle of his life. In his natural, elegant style, mixed with a good dose of humor—“OK, doc, when does the hair go?” he wondered aloud on the air--Jennings said he would return to work once he had undergone his chemotherapy treatment.  He never returned to the news set; he died four months later.

            Jennings was one of those television anchors that all of the rest of us television anchors tried to imitate, without much success. He always seemed to be in control, he did his homework well before going on the air and, without any apparent effort, somehow gave the impression of knowing more than anyone else about the topics being discussed, in spite of the fact that he never finished High School. I once met him at a political convention here in the United States and was impressed by how down to earth he was. He made you feel like he was just another reporter.

            Because of this, this sense of closeness, I was deeply moved when, in a sort of confession, Jennings said on the air that he had been a smoker for 20 years and that, during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, he had taken up smoking again. And if he had not smoked, would he still be here with us, reporting the news this very night?

            Every year in the United States nearly 170,000 people are diagnosed with lung cancer. Many of them are smokers.  But thousands of others are not, like Dana Reeve, wife of the recently deceased actor Christopher Reeve. Dana, a singer who at age 44 had never smoked, may have gotten lung cancer from inhaling second-hand smoke.  That is to day, both Peter Jennings, a smoker, and Dana Reeve, a non-smoker, were sickened by cigarettes.

            And this takes me back to Mexico City and my childhood and adolescence spent in a cloud of black cigarette smoke. For almost 25 years I assumed that the smoke from the many smokers that surrounded me was something normal.  When I went to the university, my professors as well as my classmates smoked. When I went to a restaurant, the people at the next table smoked. When I was invited to a party or get-together, tobacco smoke permeated the air so that my clothes always stank of cigarettes. I lived, just like millions of other Mexicans, surrounded by smoke.

            And the really serious part is that as big tobacco companies see their profits go down and their legal risks go up in the United States, they are changing their strategies and concentrating their sales and marketing in countries with less awareness of the dangers of tobacco. The research is not very reassuring:  those of us who grew up with smokers all run the risk that that giant grey cloud of smoke that once enveloped us may someday end up killing us.

My dad was also a smoker. I suppose he didn’t do it very much at home due to my mother’s restrictions. But the scent that most reminds me of him is a strange (and endearing) combination of lotion with a trace of the unfiltered cigarettes that he would take out of the little white box he always carried with him. I must admit it is a paradox: that horrible smell brings back wonderful memories.  And that’s all: memories, because my father also died from too much smoking.

            It wasn’t, as in Jennings’ case, from lung cancer. But the lack of exercise, a diet full of eggs, meat and butter, and thousands of cigarettes smoked turned my father’s arteries and veins into brittle glass tubes. A stroke was followed by several heart attacks from which he could never recover. He died before he was 65.

            My father didn’t live to see the birth of my son Nicolas and others of his grandchildren. And the amusing versions of the “true stories” of the Ramos Avalos family that my mother tells us after dinner have doubtless been lost. Just like in Jennings’ case, I must wonder if my father would be with us today if he had never smoked. And the only answer I have is maybe so.  And that is enough for me.

            Jennings’ death, and the news of Dana Reeve’s illness, has made many Americans quit smoking. But for others the lesson came too late. There is smoke that kills…