This is regarding the Feb. 6 editorial “Smokers and sufferers.” My dad passed away 15 years ago this May, in the early morning hours after his beloved granddaughter graduated from Notre Dame.
Dad had been a smoker ever since World War II — not necessarily a chain smoker but a smoker nonetheless, alternating occasionally with a pipe. He quit cold turkey one Friday night in February, 28 years prior to being diagnosed with a very aggressive form of lung cancer.
I drove him back and forth to every radiation and chemo treatment with extra treatments that were applied to the brain as a preventive during a very hot summer a year before he passed away.
Daddy was a bombardier with the Eighth Army Air Force in World War II, serving 35 missions in a B-17. Lung cancer was what killed him. I think about him every time I see someone light up, and I think about the fact that he had quit 28 years before.
— Joanne Fee, Hazel Crest
