After my father died of lung cancer, I lit a cigarette

It’s about 1:00 PM on November 21, 2001. My aunt turns to me and says, “He’s gone.”

I’m sitting in my living room in Poole and my dad’s battle with lung cancer has just ended. He was only 66 years old.

Without thinking, I open the sliding doors, go out into the garden and light a cigarette. I inspire

Exhaling, I look inside. I see myself lying where my father was: wires, machines and the slow drip of morphine. A picture of what could easily be.

Next to me I imagine my daughter, Olivia, at my age. “That killed him,” I think, “and now it’s killing me.”

My father started smoking when he was a teenager. From then on, he was a hooked customer.

I can still picture the thick haze of smoke in our living room. I can see the stacks of cigarette cards that Dad collected with each purchase piled up with rubber bands on our dining room dresser.

then I picked up a cigarette for the first time when I was only 13 years old. Half of my friends at school smoked; it wasn’t just considered “cool”, it was the norm.

I fueled my habit by flipping coins my mom gave me for lunch money. As a broke student, I stooped lower: grabbing bums from bus stops and sidewalks, scavenging as if my life depended on the next fix.

And in a way, it did. Because smoking is not a “choice”. Addiction has a way of wrapping its fingers around you.

It controlled me for almost three decades and at its peak I was blowing 20 a day.

Two-thirds of people who smoke start before the age of 18, and two out of three smokers will die from tobacco-related diseases.

Like my father, I would also go and collect the cards inserted in each pack of Silk Cut cigarettes.

Trapped in a toxic loyalty scheme, I would exchange the cards for household items, including two silver candle holders that I gave to my mother. The irony is that I was also trading years of my life away.

Secretly smoking in the garden, he knew things had to change. He was no longer the athletic, fit kid he used to be. A common cold would put me out for weeks.

Worse yet, my children, Olivia and Will, were old enough to start rebuilding my habit.

Anyone who has struggled with addiction will understand that the years that followed were far from easy. What came next was a constant battle: gum, patches, pills, a hypnotherapy session that ended before it began.

Later, my brother recommended a smoking cessation service, which I quit again and again. The hardest part was picking up the phone.

I hadn’t tried a smoking cessation clinic yet, but seeing my brother successfully start his smoking cessation journey gave me hope. Years of denial led to a 30-second call that changed my life.

I remember arriving at the clinic on that cold, gray day in November 2009: the beginning of freedom. For good this time.

After confronting the harmful chemicals that make up cigarettes, we were invited to leave our packs in a meter-high pile in the corner of the room. I ceremoniously threw away my lighter and cigarettes and never touched them again.

It has now been exactly 14 years and 10 months since my last cigarette. Around eight in 10 people who smoke have tried to quit, and it pains me to think that problems with the funding of smoking services could deprive people of the opportunity to quit.

Last week, I found out how much money I would have blown on smoke if I had continued to smoke 20 a day. The number is mind-boggling – I got to £20,000 and had to stop counting. That’s money I could have spent on paying off my mortgage sooner, vacations with my kids, or even the sports car of my dreams.

Changing my commercial job to work for Cancer Research UK changed the course of my life and I have made it my mission to help rid this world of what killed my father.

When I look back on the day my father died, I no longer feel guilty. It was the spark, not just of that cigarette, but of my journey to quit. That moment spurred me to cut ties with a product that was robbing me of my health. I am now 54 years old and about to turn 50^th marathon in his memory.

Our politicians now have an opportunity to protect the nation’s health, and raising the smoking age would help to do so. The landmark legislation proposed by the Government will mean that my children’s children will never be able to legally sell cigarettes.

When it comes to saving lives and making preventable deaths like my father’s a distant memory, we cannot afford complacency. If we have the opportunity to quit smoking for good, we should take it.

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