Thread: Light up a fag and die

My Father died as a result of an accident. He opened the front door of a derelict shop and fell through an open trap door and down onto a table standing in what was a storage basement. As a direct result of the fall, he fractured a rib which in turn pierced a lung. Despite the best endeavours of medical staff at St Barts hospital subsequently a few days later he died of a heart attack. A coroner’s inquest confirmed the reason for his demise as being a heart attack following an accidental fall.

In fact Father died because his lungs had been weakened. In the years before his death he had suffered from various illnesses all of which were centered on his lungs. Both lungs at one time or another had collapsed. Of course, the piercing of the lung as a result of the fall had hit home at Father’s weakest spot. Fluid was constantly building up.

Most of my father’s working life had been spent in central London. For much of WW2 he was a policeman patrolling the streets. During the Blitz he would have been on firewatch, waiting for the bombs to fall. Later on during the war he continued to serve as a beat bobby protecting the public during the blackout. Yet again he would have been walking along the pavements running alongside the crowded streets of a city of eight million people. In those days there were no anti-pollution laws and the diesel engined commercial vehicles spewed out smelly exhaust fumes. London was famed world wide for the smog which killed its citizens. The air was far from fresh and was laden with particulates, the smoke from factories and the soot from the coal fired fireplaces. Perhaps with hindsight the police and other essential services walking the streets should have been issued with face masks but they were not and their lungs suffered as a result.

What finally did the most damage to my Father’s lungs was undoubtedly the fact that for much of his adult life he had smoked homemade rollup cigarettes. Without question he was addicted to nicotine. Over the years his lungs would have become coated with tar, particularly because he did not incorporate a filter in the ’fags’ he made for himself to smoke.

The family eventually got to hear about Father’s accident. The brothers each went to visit and saw him sitting up in bed. He seemed to be ‘OK‘. The nurse said he would probably recover. We left him in their care Two days later we received a phone call suggesting strongly that we came to visit Father as soon as possible. By the time we got there he was dead. Indeed later I wondered if he was already dead when the nurse had called. He had fought for breath until the stress on the heart caused it to give out. His own heart had strangled him.

As they cleared the bed the staff found, secreted away in the corner of the bedside cabinet, a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. Obviously the Old Man had bribed someone to get him some fags. He had killed himself. His addiction was too strong. He was stupid. He had choked himself to death.

Or was it with the tobacco companies which made the cigarettes that the guilt lay? They know nicotine kills. They know it is addictive. That is why their business is to distribute nicotine. That is how they make their money. They sell an addictive and toxic drug to addicts. However my father’s death was officially attributed to accidental causes rather than a nicotine related illness. He was not recorded as being a victim of an addiction to tobacco. Maybe the air pollution in the wartime years did more damage to his lungs. Maybe the broken ribs should be considered merely as a premature trigger. With damaged lungs like his, he would not have lived to a right old age.

I have never in my life smoked even one cigarette. It makes the breath stink. It makes the hair stink. It makes the clothes stink It is a foul habit. At least farting is natural. Why women soak themselves in expensive perfume and then light up a ‘ciggy’ defeats me. Cigarette smoke is all pervasive. Anyone who smokes is stupid. In my book they do not deserve sympathy. They are killing themselves. So don’t ask me to weep over their demise.

What can I say if my own Father laying in a hospital bed and struggling for breath, lit up a fag to satisfy an irresistable urge?

You really didn't like him much...

Sad story. Well written. As crazy as the following statement might seem--your father still had to lead the life he led; otherwise, he wouldn't have been him.

I don't think anyone who smokes is stupid. I think anyone who cannot see (or understand) another person's weakness or addiction might be stupid. My wife is a smoker. She has a brilliant mind. At times, I might throw a hint for her to quit, but I would never demand she quit. In my youth, I was addicted to heroin. Other people's words couldn't help me. I had to make up my own mind. It was I who had to be ready to quit on my own. Fortunately, I did. But I did lose quite a few chaps to heroin overdoses. I would never call them stupid. They just hadn't reached the point in their minds where they were willing to quit. Death, not their own decision to quit, had gotten to them first.

At least, your dad's death provided a lesson for you. You are smoke free. Congrats.

Again, talent with the pen. Good job.

Not bad for a start. The last three paragraphs were quite ragged and read like an emotional first draft. I'm sure you can tidy them up after taking a deep breath and reading them over.

The strangest thing about this piece is that life just seems to happen to your dad. I don't get a sense of who he was at all—Did he have a favorite saying? What did he look like? Was he one of those stoic, tough old soldiers or did he soften at the end? Also, the family "eventually" heard about your dad's accident. Had they been out of touch? Did your brothers feel anything when they went to see him?

I think that the piece would vastly improve if you sprinkled some humanity/emotions throughout.

Lady & Gentlemen, I thank the three of you for your comments . It is not often that I wake up to see that an article of mine has attracted written comment, which of course is always valuable to the writer, be the comment favourable or unfavourable.

BLOGGS: I did not dislike my Father but he had no place in my life - partly because during the six years of war he had no presence in it.
Your short and apt comment makes me realize that I had little respect for him. He was a weak man, whom I never got to know.

ROBIN. It was partly you earlier writings which provoked me into writing this piece. I recognise that an addiction is a tough nut to crack
and it doesn't help if Government has to choose between the revenues from taxation and positive action to make life difficult for the pedlars of the
substance - in this case - tobacco.

PAT. It was not my aim to endear my Father to the reader. He was a weak man but one who was clever enough to survive a war whilst working in one of the prime targets for the enemy war machine.
A school mate of his eventually became a prime minister whereas Father remained a lowly police constable throughout his twenty one years of service. I remember only one serious one to one conversation with the man even though I was 44 years of age when he died.
We three sons had visited him earlier on what was to be his hospital death bed and were later surprised to hear by telephone that he had died suddenly. The corpse would have been moved to the morgue but no one of us asked to see the body.

Yes, my intention was to write the piece in a cold, callous and matter of fact style which the subject of addiction to nicotine warrants.

Originally Posted by Divus

PAT. It was not my aim to endear my Father to the reader. He was a weak man but one who was clever enough to survive a war whilst working in one of the prime targets for the enemy war machine. …

Actually, I wasn't suggesting that you try to convince the reader to like him. I just thought that a little more detail and/or emotion would make the piece a better read. You don't always have to like people to make them more interesting. But then, since you said that you never got to know the guy, I can see why the piece feels somewhat hollow. That's probably exactly the effect you were aiming for. … (?)

Originally Posted by Divus

substance - in this case - tobacco.


A school mate of his eventually became a prime minister whereas Father remained a lowly police constable throughout his twenty one years of service. .

JUst a thought: The position one finds himself/herself in life--being in a high or low place--hasn't a darn thing to do with a person's character. There have been Presidents and other Heads of State who have had to leave office disgracefully.

This is a follow up article - read it as Chapter 2

When did you last see your Father?

By modern standards both my Father and Mother were addicts. Father was addicted to nicotine and his tar coated lungs was to contribute to his early demise. He fluffed it at the age of 64 just as he was about to retire as the beneficiary of three separate inflation linked pensions. What a silly man. Mother however had him beat. She had died ten years earlier than him after having taken one too many sleeping pills on the same night. She went to sleep, never to wake up. She had always had difficulty in finding sleep so she regularly called the doctor and asked for help by taking some sleeping pills. The family doctor knew Mother well, so he would write yet another prescription for her without asking too many questions. It did not help the situation that Mother was also a tranquiliser addict. Thankfully, these days the controls on issuing powerful prescription drugs are far more strict.

To be fair to Mother, she had lived out most of World War 2 in London on her own or so we boys were led to believe. A young attractive war widow living in a city filled with sex starved servicemen would have had difficulty sitting on the shelf of righteous chastity. She would have had ample opportunity to flutter her eyelids and smile invitingly since Father as a policeman would have been away from home working long hours on shift duty. Indeed, later on in the war there had been a period when Dad as a conscripted serviceman was thousands of miles away in Canada trying not to learn how to fly an RAF Lancaster bomber. If he had qualified as a pilot then he would have found himself flying over Germany at a time when the life expectancy of a newly qualified bomber pilot was a matter of weeks. Nothing of what I ever learned about Dad led me to believe that he was a keen volunteer but neither did I think he would have run away when the time came to stand firm. I saw him as an artful dodger not a coward.

For six years Mum had been a free soul living in a war torn city where living for the moment was an understandable way of living. The secrets remain hidden as to what she actually did in 1943-1944 whilst living in Central London. I certainly do not know since I had been sent off to safety to live with Grandma down in Kent where her house was just about 40 miles across The Channel from the nearest Luftwaffe base. Luckily the Germans were more interested in flying over to bomb London where Mother lived rather than to stop and bomb me living down in Ramsgate.

Following on from the Blitz, Mother would have come to recognise the distinctive sound of a V1 guided missile but she had been lucky enough not to be standing underneath one when inevitably it fell to earth. Dodging the missiles when they ran out of fuel was a bit like not winning the jackpot. The later V2 rockets represented a very different threat. There was no warning of their imminent arrival. One minute the street would be quiet, the next minute there would loud bang and a pile of bricks would lie where once there had been a house . A nerve wracking experience for the onlooker to say the least. The bomb sites thereby created would remain for long after the war had ended.

Mother’s biggest mistake in life was made years later in the 1970s after the war was over. The story goes that Ma went to bed early leaving Dad to watch the TV. She had to get up early the following day to get to work early. It was a regular occurrence for her to take time to drop off to sleep, so she felt she needed pharmaceutical help. Dad would have waited and gone up to bed a few hours later especially if he was on late shift duty. They always slept in the same room but in single beds. I personally never saw Mum as a sex pot especially since there was no overt affection shown between her and Dad. As for Dad, well he was a good looking chap blessed with a winning smile and what Mother may or may not have denied him, he could easily have found elsewhere, or so I am led to believe. Anyway Mother had proved her worth as a wife in producing three healthy sons over a period of fourteen years. Women of her generation had yet to discover the peace of mind generated by The Pill. Child bearing was in those days part of the wife’s job description.

Undoubtedly the War had destroyed any semblance of family life for me, Father and Mother. We did eventually came back together at the end of the War. Mother’s sleeping problems may well have developed from living those six years with a very real risk of instant death. For his part, Father, as a policeman in wartime would have witnessed sights of mutilated bodies not meant to be seen by sensitive eyes. Both sought solace in cigarettes and in puffing away to calm the nerves they had become addicted to nicotine.

I can imagine Mother’s death bed scene. Maybe Dad entered the bedroom. Maybe he changed into his pyjamas and had climbed into his own bed, only then to realize that Ma was neither snoring nor breathing heavily. Who knows? He never said. As a trained policeman on the spot he would have tried to render resuscitation and then he would have called for the ambulance. But his efforts were to be of no avail. Mother was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. The official cause of death was clearly stated on the death certificate as an overdose of barbiturates. In the post war era it was quite a common route for women to follow and meet one’s maker. Too much trauma had been inflicted on the brain by a long all out war. Nowadays the affliction is called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Neither I nor my brothers ever saw Mother’s body. We accepted Father’s description of events and we read the paperwork. Dressed in black each of us attended the cremation. None of my family has ever been religious, so the ceremony was conducted by a pastor whom we did not know. Perhaps more importantly the churchman had not known Mother either. However the formalities of death had been completed by the service.

For the family it was the end of an era. Mother had been a very dominant and forthright woman. She possessed a harsh tongue which she kept sharpened. After her demise Father’s lifestyle noticeably changed. Indeed he blossomed and a string of neatly dressed women entered into his life. For a couple of years my youngest brother continued to live with him along with the woman who later became our step mother. All I remember of the lady was that she nearly always wore white, whereas Mother had usually favoured black. In truth it was only through respect for my Father that I met with her. She was not to my liking. However Father seemed happy enough for a few years. I suspect he had rediscovered sex. Her family made him welcome and after my brother moved out of Father’s flat, we brothers gradually saw less and less of him. Then the woman went and died of breast cancer and Father was again left on his own. I began to see a little more of him not that the distance between us became less.

Even then I was not close enough to Father to find out exactly how he felt about surviving two wives.

A few years later when tidying up his estate I did discover a few little secrets but nothing which revealed much about him as a private person. He was still working full time at the age of 64 but living alone when he had the accident which led directly within a few days to his death. His body was cremated at the same crematorium as previously used for his two wives. The ceremony proved to be equally lacking in emotion.

Thinking back, I recall one occasion at my house when my pet dog died, partly as a result of my own inattention. Father was surprised at the depth of my distress about the death of an animal. He had carved with unexpected skill a headstone for my pet. As he did, so he remarked that if I had not known over the years the pleasure of the dog’s companionship, then I would not have experienced the pain of the animal’s death. Somehow those wise words could have been applied to the relationship between him and me although at the time I had missed the point.

I had never really known the man, so when he died I did not feel for him the grief that perhaps he deserved.

Originally Posted by

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I had never really known the man, so when he died I did not feel for him the grief that perhaps he deserved.
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I think this sentence about says it all.
My reaction: I feel sadness. Do things(generations) ever change?
Each of us are trapped in our own silly little minds, some wondering if it's the right way to do "it".

Or was it with the tobacco companies which made the cigarettes that the guilt lay?

I have trouble with blaming others. Your father had a drug problem. Love your father, hate the drug problem. Although it is a difficult path, it is his problem as much as others have problems with eating too much, adultery, alcoholism, etc. I feel bad for everything people had to go through, and many still do, since their memories won't let them rest well at night.

I couldn't read all of this. I see it as a call for pity. Yeah, you have to bare your soul sometimes to sort things out in life, and I'm sure it was great therapy, but you need to move on and look towards a brighter future.