If you can't quit, be discreet

It was my youngest daughter Nina who made me stop smoking. She was three at the time when I turned 50. Clambering up my bed early that morning, she planted a kiss on my cheek and greeted me a happy birthday.

 Then she asked me how old I was, and I told her. She paused for a while as if considering something of extreme importance. Then, in the undiluted innocence of a child, she blurted out: “Hapit na diay ka mamatay (you’re going to die soon)!”

 Right then and there a great consuming fear struck me. No, it was not the fear of my own death. It was the fear of dying without seeing this child grow up to become a nice and fine young woman, as her elder sisters Carmel and Lia had become.

 That was eight years ago. My lungs have been free of smoke since then, having kicked the habit right then and there that cold September morning. It was this killer vice or seeing my Nina become a dalaga. I guess the choice was a no-brainer.

 I am writing about this now, although I have a nagging feeling I may have written about it sometime in the past, because I happened to read the October 5 column of Jojo Robles in the Manila Standard in which he reported an interesting piece of info related to smoking.

 Robles wrote that he had information President Noynoy Aquino violated international and Philippine aviation regulations by smoking on Philippine Airlines flight PR 104 that took him home to Manila via San Francisco from his recent US trip.

 According to Robles, Noynoy was on the upper deck of the Boeing 747-400 jumbo jet and there smoked throughout the 14-hour flight. The smokers in his entourage smoked with him, a ploy that Robles said prevented Aquino from being singled out, in case there were any complaints.

 But while naturally there were no complaints, other passengers on the plane knew who was upstairs and what was going on. In an enclosed space for 14 hours, there was no way anyone could not get a whiff of the unmistakable scent of burning tobacco.

 Aquino is now 51, or just a year older than I was at the time I quit smoking. He, of course, does not have a family. The pretty maids all in a row to which he has been linked are probably nowhere nearer to becoming Mrs. Aquino than he is to quitting smoking.

 As a former smoker, I can attest to the immense difficulty in giving up smoking. The only way to beat it is not to coax it down the stairs one step at a time, as how Mark Twain prefers to lick bad habits, but to throw it out the window at once, as how he abhors doing.

 I tried many times to slowly give it up, but always things and circumstances conspire to bring you right back in. Once I tried limiting myself to five sticks. It was ok for a while. Then it went up to seven, then 10, then 20. Pretty soon I was back to two packs a day.

 Another time I succeeded going two weeks without lighting a stick. Then I got caught in a family reunion where several cousins smoked. I am not a drinker. But on rare occasions as that one, I allowed myself a bottle. That little and I lost it. And I got back to lighting up.

 Smoking, you see, is an addiction. One time I forgot to stock up with enough to last me through the night, being a late sleeper. To my horror at past midnight, I found I was out of cigarettes. And stores in the neighborhood were already closed at that late hour.

 You know what I did? I scrounged through my heaping ashtray to look for cigarette butts that were long enough to light again for a few more puffs. That is how consuming cigarette smoking is. And boy how glad I am that I no longer have to contend with that problem again.

 And that is why I can only commiserate with Aquino regarding his smoking predicament. I am in no position to tell him to quit. That is a decision only he can make. But if he decides to keep the habit, he should at least be discreet about it. 

 For one, it was wrong for him to agree to becoming the Department of Health poster boy against smoking. For another, it is even more wrong for him to publicly break the law just to engage in his bad habit.