Irony

              My mother loved children and wanted to help both adults and children alike.  Her goal in life was to help at least one child, teen, or adult.  She was a good mother who even though she was poor, spoiled me rotten. But my mother did have faults of her own she loved to party, drink, and smoke.  She started to smoke at the age of fourteen and by forty, she was a chain smoker.  My mother also had Lupus.
         Systemic Lupus Erythematosus also known as Lupus is a chronic autoimmune disease that has been around for 2000 years.  Chronic autoimmune disease is just a fancy way of saying that the immune system thinks that the body’s own tissue is a virus or disease that is trying to attack the body, so the immune system attacks it.  This means that a person’s major organs (heart, lungs, liver, etc) are being destroyed by its own protectors.  Lupus also attacks the skin, making the person sensitive to sunlight.
         Lupus is considered a member of the rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, juvenile diabetes, and scleroderma families. It is not contagious, cancerous or an STD.  It can affect anyone around the ages 15 to 45 but it usually attacks women.  Today it affects around 50,000 Canadians.  This means that there are around 50,000 people in Canada being slowly killed by their own cells, and there is no cure to stop it.
         On November 6, 1993, my mother died.  I had just turned eleven.  What makes it ironic is that it was not even the Lupus that killed her.  It was her smoking that did the job.  I watched my mother slowly dying and I knew it was not the Lupus that was killing her, but she would not listen.  Imagine yourself as a young child watching your mother slowly die, and when you tell her, she says to you that it is your imagination and that she was going to be around to meet her grandchildren.
         Now imagine that it is two days after your birthday and you have to go to the bathroom.  But your mother is having a bath. Since there is only one bathroom, you knock, saying at the same time, that you are sorry to bug her but you really have to go to the bathroom.  When there is no answer, you check to see if she is all right and walk in.  There she lay in the bath, head up as if she was snoring, cold, stiff, and blue.  She had died half an hour earlier from a heart attack which was caused by the smoking.  My mother did not know that she had achieved her goal, for her funeral was so full of people who wanted to thank her for what she had done for them that they were spilling out into the hall.
         I am not trying to tell people to quit smoking, or what to do.  I am just asking people to consider the consequences, because most people do not even think about the consequences of their actions.  I know my mother did not consider the consequences of her smoking, because I am the one who paid for her smoking.