December 24, 1974, Quantico Naval Hospital, Quantico, Virginia

I looked through the thick glass windows of the double doors. In the courtyard beyond, I watched the blades of a military helicopter slowly spin to life. The thrump, thrump, thrump vibrated the doors but I couldn't actually hear the noise. I did hear a nurse walk by behind me, her shoes squeaking on the cracked linoleum floor.

Movement caught my eye as a door on the far side of the courtyard opened. Doctors, their lab coats flapping in the breeze of the rotating blades, pushed and pulled a wheeled gurney toward the chopper. The back end of the transport slowly lowered like the jaw of the whale that caught up Jonah.

I leaned against the doors and pressed my face to the glass, trying to see her. My mama. She was on that gurney and she was being taken to a better-equipped Naval hospital. I watched until the big green whale swallowed them up, watched as the helicopter slowly rose and then disappeared over the edge of the building. With a sigh, I turned back around. Here it was--Christmas Eve; I was sixteen years old, and alone.

When my mama--Mary Frances Sorrell DeMartino--was in her late twenties, she'd suffered from tuberculosis. She spent several months in a sanatorium just after WWII. She'd been 'cured' with the use of streptomycin. You would have thought that not being able to breathe would have been enough to set her on a path to a healthy lifestyle, but you would have been wrong. In those halcyon days of the 1950s, smoking cigarettes was a happy and accepted past time. So Mama smoked. And smoked. To the tune of three packs a day. I remember she used to say, "I don't smoke that much. They usually burn out in the ashtray." Unfortunately, not enough cigarettes burned out in the ashtray.

Mama spent one month to the day in the bigger, better Naval Hospital. When it didn't look like she'd be coming home any time soon, my dad and I bundled up the forgotten Christmas presents and took them to the hospital. We tried to laugh and tell jokes, but she was strangely quiet and tearful. It seems she'd gotten the news but didn't tell us straight away. She had lung cancer.

They decided to remove her left lung in hopes they could give her another six months. I kept telling myself that it would be all right. She was a fighter. But the day they took her to the operating theatre, I could see the fear in her eyes. I wonder if she could see the fear in mine.

The lung removal was a success, yet the news was bad. Her right lung was failing and the cancer had migrated to her heart and other organs. They placed her in a room with another dying woman and we waited some more. Six days went by and we were invited in to see her for a last time. She held my hand so tightly that day. It was like she tried to gather some of my life force and I would have gladly given her what I had. The hardest thing I have ever done is to let go of her hand. She died the next day, surrounded by doctors who wouldn't even allow us to be by her side as she made that final transition.

I've told you this sad story for one simple reason:

CIGARETTES KILL. PLEASE DON'T SMOKE.