How I Quit Smoking  

I planned on not looking at her mother’s dead body.
Driving to the wake, I watched my lips
in the rearview mirror, at every red light,
rehearsing stark, apologetic syllables,
“I can’t. I know you’ll understand.”

I walked into the funeral parlor.
She was sitting straight up,
sticking out above the coffin
wearing her nighttime best:
Pale blue satin pj’s trimmed with white piping;
her grey complexion and bald scalp in plain sight.

Seeing the face of death without the mask of lipstick, foundation, blush,
and perfectly coiffed hair made me queasy—as if I were falling
into my own soup of sick cells that would stick to me
like twenty-eight years of tar and nicotine line my lungs.
My blood sugar plummeted; shadows of people approached
and receded; color washed out of my world—now monochromatic.

I could not stop staring. Was I seduced by her frozen face?
Mesmerized by her right arm leaning against the coffin’s rim,
her slender, long fingers holding a bright white cigarette
poised ever-so-perfectly in a sleek grasp, a desperate gasp for peace
or perhaps pleasure—the taste of tobacco tantalizing her to spite the odds?

I couldn’t avert my eyes from her body’s tenacity
to addiction at the cost of breath. I could not cover up what I faced in her face;
No smokescreen could ever protect me from the sinister,
paper-truth that I was a sister in this habit
of inhaling lethal fumes as if I could escape the sentence
of cancer, as if I would be free of the draught of death
displayed in her—a mirror for me, finally repulsed by my danse macabre
inside the self-made gas chamber called smoking.

I looked, I left, stopped cold.

Ingrid Pruss