My first cigarette was a Lark.  Show Us Your Larks! the ads cried out.  Behind the high school gym with Susie Shapiro, Mary Katherine Connelly, Maggie Riley and Jill Esposito, I hacked like a cat with a fur ball.  I didn't like it.  But it made me feel adult.  And a little wild.

          Watching the red tail lights of my parent's Cadillac fade into the traffic after they dropped me off at my college dormitory, I lit up a rebellious Kool.  There was a sensual quality to the sound of the match head scratching the strike pad and the sizzle of flame, the scent of sulfur burning.  The weight of the padded filter hanging from my lower lip, hearing the paper at the opposite end catch, inhaling the smoke gently, holding it in my body like a wave before exhaling slowly, slowly, tendrils from my pursed lips, satisfied.  I liked it.  A cigarette was the relationship you know has no future but you stick around for the sex.

           Having quit smoking off and on for years, the concept of The Big Quit didn't, in principle, carry with it the unexpected, life-altering consequence it ultimately did.  Context, I would come to understand, is everything. 

         "Okay, Patricia," says the tall, slender black orderly, glancing at the patient chart hanging on the back of the wheelchair occupied by my tall, fair-haired, very male husband, "Let's go." 

         I trot behind them like a lost dog through the confusing maze of corridors, swinging doors and elevator banks of the Pavillions of Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago.  It is early March, 1987, still winter, and I am holding so many coats and sweaters, caps and scarves in my arms, I feel like the outerwear section at Lord & Taylor.  Hospital music is a dissonant mix of squeaky, rubber-soled nurses and orderlies scurrying on the ancient gray tile and linoleum floors, beeping monitors, the buzz of chatter moving in and out of rooms.  It's a chaotic hive, like radio static, but I focus only on the fzzzzz of the smooth rubber wheelchair tires ferrying my husband to God Knows Where.

         The young orderly finally stops pushing Nigel's chair, and parks it in front of the nurses' station at the Maternity Ward. 

         "Um, excuse me?" I say to his back as he begins to walk away, "You've made a mistake here."

         He stops, turns, rolls his world-weary, uncaring eyeballs at me, walks over to the chair in which my husband is now shaking with uncontrollable laughter, looks again at the chart and pronounces:  "Nope.  Patricia Conner.  Maternity."

         "Does he look pregnant to you?"

         Tears are streaming down Nigel's cheeks.  I know he is thinking of Monty Python.  I want to smack them both. 

         "Does he look like someone named Patricia?"

         The orderly gives me his blankest stare, shrugs and his whole body tells me I am the biggest pain in his ass today.  He is what my English mother-in-law calls a "jobsworth," as in this is more trouble than my job's worth. 

         "Lady, I deliver the chair to wherever the chart says."

         "So, to be clear, you don't look to see if the patient matches the chart on the chair."

         He walks away, answering my question, apparently rhetorical to all but me. 

         Nigel is an Oncology patient.  He has tumors, not a fetus, in his body.  He is scheduled for his first radiation treatment today.  We are late because we are in the Maternity Ward.  In the radiation oncology unit in the bowels of this hospital, no will come look for us. 

         Will they assume he has decided against undergoing the only form of treatment that will buy him more time?  Will anyone care about one missing patient?  Will they only come looking for him when a bill is overdue?  Hospitals, I will come to learn, will turn the earth over to find a delinquent payer, even if it means following him to the grave, but they are content to allow a cancer patient to be ferried to the Maternity Ward and dumped in the hallway.  

         I throw our winter gear into Nigel's lap.  I learn I can simultaneously hyperventilate and try to read a hospital map.  "You Are Here," it says.  Fine.  Knowing where "here" is doesn't help me to get "there" because "there" is not on this map.  We are in an era that is "pre" everything helpful – cell phones, Internet, email, fax machines.  I find a phone in the unattended nurses' station and dial "O." 

         "Operator."

         "Please connect me to Radiation Oncology."

         "Please hold."  As the line to the department rings and rings, all I am holding is my breath.  Doesn't anyone understand a life hangs in the balance here?

          How the hell does a perfectly healthy man go from strep throat to metastatic lung cancer in a nanosecond?  How? 

         On the day of his diagnosis, while he undergoes one of the thousand scans of his body, I stand shaking in a stall in the women's restroom, bargaining with God.  I recite my litany of transgressions – a long one – and swear I will make good on every bad thing I've ever done or thought.  I will be a better wife, a more compassionate stepmother, a kinder daughter.  I will give up everything I like, everything I might like in the future, if only God will allow Nigel to live.  And then, I throw in the real deal:  I Will Give Up Smoking.  Forever.  Amen.  And toss an almost full pack of Marlboro Lights into the toilet followed by the little bit of lunch I had forced down. 

          As I sink back on my heels, I feel a little Divine assent move through me.  My faith was strong.  The audacity of hope indeed.  I know better -- when science fails, when one abandons reason and logic in favor of faith, civilizations crumble.  But hope is all I've got.

         Underneath the pile of wool, Nigel edges the wheelchair toward me.  He tugs on my sleeve, and I put the phone down and see him smile and shrug.  It tugs on my heart.

         "It's alright, honey," he assures me.  "We'll get there.  They'll be too scared of you not to let me have my turn."  Only Nigel can make me smile in the midst of a meltdown.  I touch his soft cheek, noting the tinge of gray in his skin.

         As I turn back to the map, I hear him behind me, his clipped English accent acting both parts of a macabre, cancer-skewed version of the "Dead Parrot" routine, mimicking John Cleese and Michael Palin so perfectly it makes me snort. 

         "I want to exchange this patient, please. Why?  Well, he's dead.  No he's not. Yes he is.  No, he's just sleeping.  He's dead."  And he natters on.

         This is how we cope with the horror, how we cope with the fear. We are ghouls. 

         I step behind the chair and try to push a six-foot-four man holding eighty pounds of winter clothing in his lap, out of this awful hospital, out of Chicago, and out of this nightmare. 

         But, together, we find radiology.  When we do, we see the door to the outside alley wedged open.  A half dozen dying patients stand just outside, smoking beneath the "No Smoking" sign before facing the treatment that kills the visible rogue cells while the unseen enemy advances.

         Nigel dies in my arms on a sun-bleached January morning in 1991, three days before the U.S. Army invades Iraq for the first Gulf War and four days before his youngest daughter turns twelve.  We scatter his ashes into the wind and the water one day before my thirty-fourth birthday.  That night, at dinner, his best friend hesitantly hands me a small, wrapped package:  a simple golden strand necklace, a gift from my husband for a birthday he was afraid he might miss.

         At his memorial services, friends bring casseroles and stews along with condolences.

         "It was God's will," they tell me.

         I hope God smokes.