The Wall Street Journal-20080122-His Father-s Heart
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His Father's Heart
On Sept. 30, 1969, 16-year-old Steve McKee watched his father die of a heart attack on the couch in their TV room. A lifelong smoker, John McKee had already been stricken by a heart attack six years earlier. But, unable to quit his three-pack-a-day habit, he made no lifestyle changes that might have prolonged his life. Deeply disappointed by his father's seeming surrender to cardiovascular disease, Mr. McKee -- now an editor at The Wall Street Journal -- set out to find the man who died before his son could know him. With this memoir, he sought to find a measure of understanding for his father, and anyone affected by smoking and heart disease.
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My sister Kathy and I woke up every morning to the sounds of the same alarm clock: Dad's cough, his cigarette hack. The cilia in Dad's airways, given an overnight reprieve from all that cigarette smoke, were trying now to sweep out some of the gunk that had settled in the lungs in the past few hours. These broomlike hairs never had a chance.
His cough was, in a way, its own musical composition. It had rhythm and cadence and an awful familiarity. There was, first, a raspy breathing-in of air. Then a quick pause, followed by a double exhalation, the first hack longer than the second cough, separated one from the other by a slight catch in the throat. Breath in. Pause. HACK. (Catch.) Cough. They came in stanzas -- three, four, five at a time, the second-to-last always the highest crescendoed. It was how you knew a particular composition was about to end. It rendered the final cough a weak impersonation, a faint echo of air oozing from a battered chest. Then there was silence. No way to say how long. But it would start again -- it always started again -- with the sound of his breathing in, preparing his next arrangement.
He was first up in the morning. For his first cigarette he was on the toilet. For the second (and probably a third) he was in front of the mirror, shaving. Breath in. Pause. HACK. (Catch.) Cough. "Kathy, Steve. Time to get up."
Mom would be up next and off to the kitchen, where coffee, cinnamon toast and frying eggs were added to the mix, Dad's cigarette smoke always first among the many. Eventually Kathy would get up, and with her, WSBA radio. Then me last, always last. Ironically, as much as I hated the cigarettes, as much as I despised the coughing they induced, conjuring all this back to life is not unpleasant. They are the sounds and smells of the McKee family at 7:15 on a Tuesday morning, circa 1962. I remember too well.
Dad and cigarettes go hand in hand because Dad always had one in his. He didn't reek of smoke (dusty, dirty, disgusting); he smelled of tobacco (rich, regal, rewarding). It is a distinction without a difference, I know, but it is important to me. Because when I remember Dad, I remember the smokes, and when I remember them I am desperate for pleasant memory. I recall he smoked L&Ms, the first of the new filtered brands, out by 1952. But Kathy says I'm wrong. Prior to his first coronary, she says, Dad smoked Pall Mall unfiltered. She has this on her own good authority: She started smoking about then and snuck Dad's to get going. So I defer to her. After the first attack we agree he turned to Winston, then spent a couple of years with Marlboro and its "Selectrate Filter." Not long before Sept. 30, 1969, he switched to Kool Filter King. The menthol was said to make the cigarette safer.
I see him sitting in "his" chair (the left side of the couch, actually, where he would die) watching TV, reading, smoking, drinking a Coke or maybe a beer, multitasking. As with his cough, I remember this exactly. He reached across his body to get the cigarette from the ashtray with his right hand, put the cigarette in his mouth, and took a drag while reaching for his highball glass with his left. His drag done, he removed the cigarette and took a drink. As he took a swig, he exhaled the smoke through his nose so that it filled up and then overflowed the glass in a billowing cloud that enveloped his face and head and hair before joining the haze that hung in the room. Done, he put the glass on the end table, maybe flicked the end of the cigarette over the ashtray, and readied himself to do it again.
Mom smoked, too, back then. There are pictures of her prewar with cigarette in hand. In one -- from 1940, in bathing suit out at the lake, ever the independent -- she is 19. Mom's two sisters, Marg and Ev, smoked their entire lives, and took the cigarettes with them to the grave (though they did live to 83 and 76, respectively). Mom quit for good in 1964, after Dad's first heart attack. "I wanted to show him how easy it was," she says, her voice still combative. Prior to that she had quit a number of times, and for extended periods, but she always picked it up again.
Mom's smoking affected me very differently than Dad's. In the earliest years I can remember, it didn't bother me. She obviously smoked way fewer cigarettes than he did, and she smoked Salem, a filtered menthol cigarette, and that had to be better, right? But as I got older and Mom quit more often, seemingly successfully, her smoking came to upset me in a way that Dad's didn't. There was an inevitability to Dad's smoking. It couldn't be defeated. Nothing could be done. But Mom, she could do it; she already had. It got to where when she returned to smoking she would try to hide it from me. It was such an unsettling sight that when I found out she was smoking again it could send me to my bedroom to pull the covers over my head.
Dad did try to quit. He apparently swore off cigarettes while still in the Army Air Corps in the South Pacific during WWII. For a short time, at least, his letters home included the marvels of how much better the food tasted and how his cigarette cough had vanished. "I should have quit a long time ago," he declared. One of my parents' friends tells of a New Year's Eve party -- 1968, she thinks, Dad's last -- when she and Dad and another dad resolved to quit. It was beginning to sink in, she says, that maybe they weren't kidding when they said smoking could be bad for your health. "We were at Philbins and we were having our last cigarette at five to midnight," she says. She quit for a good 10 years. Dad and the other smoker lasted until the next morning and the New Year's Day get-together at our house. "I could have wrung their necks," she says with a laugh.
I know the feeling, minus the laughter. How many times did Kathy and I come home from school to have Mom collect us up to say, "When your father gets home from work tonight, I want you to be extra good, real quiet, because . . ."? We could finish for her: ". . . because this morning your father gave up smoking." We never had to be extra good more than one night in a row.
Why couldn't he quit? I put such hope into his giving up the cigarettes. They were the tangible evidence that he was killing himself -- one smoke, one pack, one carton at a time. The math was inexorable. Why couldn't he quit? I will never understand.
And I never will, my sister says, because I've never smoked. So I rely on her to guide me here. Kathy started smoking in 1964, when she was 15. She quit, finally and for good, in January 1988, at 38. Twenty-four years of smoke. At the end she was at three packs a day, same as Dad. "That I was able to quit is a complete miracle," she says. There is a story Mom tells of Kathy about three weeks into her quitting for good. How you doing, Kath? Mom asked. Okay, she said, okay. She was going to succeed, she said. She could tell. She would never have a cigarette again. And then she said: "But I know I will never be happy again." That wasn't true, of course, but that's what cigarettes do.
"Smoking was a real good friend of mine," Kathy told me, remembering. Even all these years later it remains easy for her to conjure the smoking life. "You need a cigarette. You're happy, you're sad, you're excited, you're calm. It doesn't matter. With everything you do, you need a cigarette. You sit down. You take a deep breath. You pull out the cigarette. You look at it and start thinking about what you're going to be thinking about when you're smoking." And the ritual begins. "You put it in your mouth. You light the match, put it to the cigarette. You take a drag. And now I'm set. I'm relaxed. I'm in the zone.
"Now, do that 60 times a day," she says.
"Smoking was part of me. I almost miss it just talking about it. Almost." She shrugs. "It was part of Dad. I'm trying to work up some anger for you here, but I can't. I understand him. If he had been able to quit, he would have. The long-term effect of quitting would have been way better, but the immediate effect was so stressful he couldn't even think about doing it. With all this other stuff going on? He hated his job. He'd had a heart attack. Any time he tried to quit, he must have been jumping out of his skin. It is that hard. He had to smoke. He . . . couldn't . . . not . . . do . . . it."
I should listen to Kathy and let go of Dad and his cigarettes, if only because he never could. But the two are so inextricably bound. For all I know, he left one burning in the ashtray by the sofa on that Tuesday night in 1969.
The only props I will allow Dad is that at least he smoked back in a day when everybody did. Virtually all of my parents' friends smoked. I spent my childhood enveloped in secondhand smoke. I would say everything and everybody smelled of smoke, except back then who could have noticed? Among the members of Mom and Dad's most immediate circle of perhaps 12, 14 couples, I can say with certainty that only two people didn't smoke. Ashtrays were a necessary decorative element in every house. I have spoken with the survivors about those old days. To a person, there was a helpless shrug of the shoulder when I asked why they smoked, followed by a meek, "Everybody did." Though as one of their friends pointed out, I was asking the wrong question. Smoking is addictive, he said. That's why they smoked. "The real question is, 'Why did we start?'" And with that he meekly shrugged his shoulders. "Because everybody did."
Once on a St. Patrick's Day, Mom and Dad had many of their friends over to the house ahead of a dance. There were the usual drinks, the usual cigarettes, a few cigars. Lots of laughs. As with every party, the living room slowly blurred beneath a grayish haze, thicker with every lighted match. One of Dad's regular hosting duties was to make periodic circles with the silent butler emptying the ashtrays. It was snowing, and as they were preparing to leave, a call came in that the dance had been postponed, so everyone settled back for another round and more smokes.
Still, the party broke up early enough that Kathy and I weren't in bed when everyone left. It was then that we noticed that our bird, a beautiful orange-yellow canary that liked to sing to the whistling tea kettle, appeared not to be in its cage, hung near the ceiling between the living and dining rooms. Dad got up on a chair, and we watched him reach into the cage and pull out a limp handful of feathers. Dad ran for the kitchen door, to fresh air, grabbing a bottle of whiskey on the way. Kathy and I stood in the hallway, horrified, as Dad bobbed its beak with a bit of booze, snow swirling in the back porch light. The bird let out a terrible shriek that sent Kathy and me running down the hall. Then there was silence, no sound at all. The canary in our coal mine, dead.
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Excerpted from "My Father's Heart: A Son's Journey," by Steve McKee, to be published next month by Da Capo Lifelong, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2008.
