How Alcohol and Cigarettes Affected My Life: The Story of Me and My Dad

I could hear him each morning, making a pot of coffee and coughing, always coughing. I was happy that his first drink was coffee because I knew soon enough I would hear the sound of a beer can opening. The first beer would lead to at least a dozen more and a pack of cigarettes would join them. That was where the cough came from; it was a smokers cough, a prelude to how his life would end, of how my dad would die.

I was only 10-years-old when my parents divorced. People worry about how divorce affects the kids, but in my case, the divorce was the best thing that could happen. I loved my dad, but he was an alcoholic with an addiction to cigarettes, and nothing was more important to him than his beer and cigs. Not even his children. He would beg, steal or borrow and yes work, to pay for those two items.

I never understood how he could let alcohol and cigarettes control his life and dictate his actions. As a child, I begged him to stop smoking because it smelled bad and I was tired of my clothes smelling like his smoke. I didn't comprehend at that young age that cigarettes were deadly, that smoking would eventually kill my dad and my granddad. I only knew that stepping on his lit cigarette butt was traumatizing to me. I knew that grabbing the cigarette out of his hand as he passed out on the couch, so that he would not catch himself or the house on fire, was not what I should be dealing with as a kid.

I loved my dad, but his alcoholism meant that his behavior was unstable. He said things he thought were funny, that were really just cruel. I didn't invite kids to my house because I didn't want my dad to embarrass me when he had been drinking too much. Besides, our house smelled like cigarette smoke, and most of my friends houses did not.

"Sometimes you're asleep I whisper "I Love You!" in the moonlight at your door. As I walk away, I hear you say, "Daddy Love You More!"~Tim McGraw

I started out as a daddy's girl, I adored him. Over the years after the divorce, our relationship was mostly non-existent. The alcohol and cigarettes still ruled dad's world. Contributing money to help his kids get new school clothes or play sports were not a priority, it just never happened. How can you buy school clothes for your kids when it would mean giving up your beer money? I got use to having limited clothing and hand me downs. Mom worked hard to always provide us with what we needed and despite my dad not contributing in any way, mom always allowed us to spend time with him if we wanted to do that. She never talked bad about him.

Dad and I tried to piece together a relationship as I got into adulthood. It was based on me not having any expectations of him and knowing that his words were that of an alcoholic, so I could not count on them or him. By the time dad was 62, he was using an oxygen tank, had a couple of strokes and was diagnosed with emphysema. Finally, he quit smoking, but it was too late. He knew his life was going to be shortened. The last time I saw him before I moved from California to Texas, he went out of his way to be nice to me, to say nice things, to tell me I looked good and that he was proud of me and would miss me when I moved away. His words floored me; I'd not heard them before.

Less than a year after I moved to Texas, my dad's health declined to the point that I was planning a trip back to California to see him one last time. He died before I could make the trip. I attended his funeral instead and said goodbye to my 64-year-old father. It was a nice funeral, I'm sure my dad would have appreciated it. I took some of his ashes back to Texas with me. The following Father's Day I spread his ashes in my dad's favorite lake in Texas, a place we had had a couple good memories.

I share these truths not to disparage my dad's memory but to let other's understand me a little better. I hope it helps those who love me to know why it is I feel so strongly about alcohol addiction and cigarette addiction. Those two things, separately or together, devastate lives. My voice was limited as a child, but I'm an adult now. I choose not to be silenced about how I feel.

"Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes." ~Gloria Naylor

Source: Author's memory