Cancer Sticks

Before I could look over the countertop, I learned what it meant to love someone who chooses to die slowly. My parents were in the kitchen of a half-gutted house, the kind they called an “investment” and I called a place where walls didn’t finish their sentences. The air was thick. Not drywall dust. Smoke. My mother’s laugh came first, then the hiss of a lighter. My father’s silhouette behind the fog. I stood at the edge of it all—half child, half witness. I couldn’t see their faces, but I could smell the future.

The next morning, I began my war. Tiny notes on torn notebook paper: Please stop. I want you to live. You don’t have to do this. I tucked them where they wouldn’t expect to find grief—stuffed into toilet paper rolls, sealed inside the cookie jar, folded into coat pockets like secrets I hadn’t grown into yet. I’d seen it on TV, maybe “Full House” or something with a hugging scene at the end. But in my house, there was no scene change. Just the stale aftertaste of another warning ignored.

That was the first time I understood addiction. Not as evil, but as ritual. As inheritance. As a kind of prayer said backwards. They did quit. For a while.

They swapped the ashtrays for hard candy and chewed toothpicks like they were trying to carve the craving out from the inside. No grand gesture. Just the absence of smoke, like a storm had passed and left the curtains still swaying.

But I remember the first time I tasted a candy cigarette. Chalky white, red tip painted on like a crime scene in miniature. I bought it from a candy store that still sold sugar by the quarter—a place where the shelves creaked and the jawbreakers were stored in glass jars like organs. The woman behind the counter wore a visor, and no one questioned why a child might want a pack of candy smokes. It was part of the charm. Part of the lie.

I held it between my fingers the way I’d seen my mother do—two knuckles, lazy elegance, grief masquerading as glamour. I posed in the bathroom mirror. Practiced the drag. Blew out invisible smoke. Six, maybe seven. Still young enough to believe I could rewrite the story if I just played every part. It didn’t feel like rebellion. It felt like rehearsal.

There was something holy about it—pressing sugar to my lips and pretending it hurt. I told myself it was just candy. But in my body, something else was learning. Memory before memory. Muscle before mind.

The first lie we tell ourselves is that we’re not like them. The second is that we’ll quit before it gets bad. The third is the cigarette itself.

The girls weren’t sisters, but they lived under the same roof in the house behind ours, kitty-corner and crooked, like something out of a fairytale rewritten by latchkey kids. One day they weren’t there, the next they were everywhere. On our bikes. In our basement. In the tree fort my father built with his calloused hands and weekend rage, hammering out guilt in the form of childhood joy—another piece of inheritance he didn't know he was handing down. That fort was our kingdom. Splintered wood and crooked nails. No adults. No curfews. Just heat-heavy nights and whispered games we didn’t know the rules to.

One night, the girls asked my brother and me if we wanted to smoke chocolate pigs. That’s what they called them. I didn’t question the name. It was code, and codes made the sin feel sacred. We each had one. Lit them like we’d seen in movies, hands fumbling, sparks failing. I didn’t even know to inhale. Just held the smoke in my mouth like a dare. We coughed the whole way through, laughing to cover the burn. My brother tried to blow rings and nearly choked. One of the girls did it effortlessly. Like she’d been born into it.

That night, the tree fort smelled like a campfire and freedom. I didn’t become a smoker that night. But something opened. Some part of me that had once waged war with toilet paper notes and cookie jar letters looked around and realized: this is how it begins. Not with a warning. With a whisper.

In high school, my best friend’s best friend became my co-conspirator. We weren’t close exactly, but we shared a car, a soundtrack, and a growing desire to see ourselves from the outside. We played Coheed and Cambria like it was scripture. Drove to lakes we had no intention of swimming in. That day it was Roseville. A boat dock. Late summer light and the kind of quiet that makes you feel invincible and ugly at the same time. We took turns. One cigarette. Three girls. I tried to look casual. I was anything but.

On the drive back, the panic set in. What if my parents could smell it? On my hair? My breath? My soul? We pulled into a Shell station off the highway and I went in alone. Scrubbed my hands until the skin burned—soap, sanitizer, lotion—as if I could wash the betrayal out of my bloodstream. The clerk asked if I was okay. I lied.

Even though my father had started smoking again by then, and my mother was half-hearted in her quitting, I still felt like I’d betrayed someone. Myself, maybe. The kid with the toilet paper protest signs. My friends laughed at me in the car. Called me paranoid. They were right. My parents never knew. But I did.

By the end of high school, it wasn’t a secret anymore. Everyone in my family smoked. Out in the garage, like exiled priests performing some inherited rite. My dad with his Marlboro Reds. My mom with her menthol lights. My brother and I picked our allegiances like choosing sides at a funeral. He smoked what Dad smoked. I smoked what Mom smoked. Inheritance again. Marlboro Menthol Lights. Crisp, cold, clean-burning betrayal. I told myself it wasn’t addiction—it was preference. Taste. Aesthetic. A loyalty. I started stealing from my mother’s purse. Not to rebel. To economize. Another piece of the inheritance: taking what you needed and pretending it was permission. The garage became our sanctuary. Folding chairs. Ashtrays made out of pots and pan lids. Smoke curling up past the insulation like a prayer no one expected to be answered. We didn’t talk much out there. Just smoked and stared into the middle distance, each of us convinced the others were more broken. No one ever said: this isn’t normal. No one ever said: this is love, warped into habit. No one ever said: maybe we’re trying to die slower than our grief. We just lit up and passed time. As if there were so much of it left.

For the next ten years, I was an on-again, off-again smoker. I’d quit for a work convention, spend a whole weekend smiling with clean hands and breath like promises, only to come home and go thumbing through the junk drawer, praying for a half-empty pack to materialize—like someone sifting for relics in the wreckage of their own life. I was a closeted smoker. Very few people knew—my immediate family, a handful of close friends, the clerk at the Shell station who rang me up without looking me in the eye. Cigarettes were a private ruin. A war I chose to lose in secret.

When my mother died by suicide, I made myself a quiet, bitter promise: I would quit smoking. There would be limits to being my mother’s daughter now. By then, I wasn’t in Minnesota anymore. I was in Phoenix, land of dry air and new beginnings. No one I knew there smoked. No more garage altars. No more smoke-stained inheritances. It wasn’t a clean break. It was a stagger. A few years of on-again, off-again relapse. I picked the habit back up during the move—the way you pick up a stray kitten, thinking you’re just feeding it for the night. I smoked all throughout the pandemic. Pungent cinders paired too well with fear-induced trauma, MSNBC death counts, and the local IPAs I drank to forget the shape of my own breath. Every day I promised myself tomorrow. Every tomorrow came empty-handed. Like someone who still thought she could outsmoke grief.

By 2023, I had finally red-pilled myself into quitting. For good this time, I said, like the liar I was. But when my father's dementia worsened, and I returned to Minnesota to be with him in his final hours, all the old triggers came tumbling out like loose nails from a rotten beam. Smoking had always been our inheritance. We'd sit outside his nursing home in the cold, lighting up together, pretending the end wasn’t rushing toward us. Watching my father forget how to hold a cigarette, how to bring it to his mouth, how to flick the lighter, was a devastation too large to name. We got side-eye glances for letting a frail, wheelchair-bound man smoke. They stared like the healthy always do: certain they could outrun sorrow. The day my father gave up his Marlboros was the day the grief set its teeth in a little deeper. Despite all the years I had begged him to quit, despite every statistic stacked against him, watching it forced upon him broke something in me that hadn’t even cracked when he was diagnosed. I even let him smoke in my new car. He thought it was his, in the blurring of dementia, and who was I to correct a dying man? I bought an ozone machine after he died. Deep cleaned the seats. Scrubbed the windows until the stink gave up—but the memories didn’t.

When my father died, I quit smoking. For good this time, I said. Another promise folded like a prayer and set alight. Until six months later, when I found out I had cancer.

When I found out I had cancer, I was on a sober streak. No booze. No cigarettes. No vices. Just water and clean air and the brittle righteousness of someone who believed they'd finally outrun the ghost. But with the diagnosis came a different kind of weight. Not just fear—the wild, bucking terror you brace for—but shame. The kind that arrives whispering you deserved it. I didn’t know it was common, that cancer patients often drown not in tumors but in guilt. That somehow, even as your cells betray you, you’re expected to account for it like bad debt. What did you eat? How much did you drink? How much did you smoke? What sins planted this garden? Like Cathy Jamison in The Big C, I spun out after the news. Only I didn’t have a primetime arc to land on. No commercial breaks between the breaking.

Between moving states, selling my life off in pieces, and trying to build something resembling a new beginning, I searched for familiarity the way a fever searches for a soft spot to break through. And I found it. I found it in the crumpled pack of menthols on the gas station shelf. I found it in the first drag that tasted like permission. I found it in the old ritual: lighter, inhale, forget.

I'm ashamed to admit it. Ashamed that after everything—after watching my father forget fire, after watching my mother lay down the match for good, after vowing at their graves—I still went back because habits are inheritance. But shame is a poor substitute for honesty. And if cancer taught me anything, it’s that the body remembers what the mind tries to bury. The body keeps every secret. Every inhale. Every broken promise. Every drag taken in defiance, or surrender, or grief so thick it needed a chimney to escape through.

I don’t smoke anymore. I tell myself that like a prayer, every day. Some mornings, I believe it. Some mornings, I don’t. Even if I never touch another cigarette, it doesn’t matter. I've already inhaled them all. Paper. Fire. Grief pressed into the marrow. Every breath is a reminder: I didn’t choose the smoke. I just learned how to carry it.

A blog post by Rachel Smak on grief, loss, and lessons from stage 3C rectal cancer