Growing up as a child I never thought that I would lose one of my parents at such an early age. I was wrong. I lost my father to lung cancer when I was 17 years old. I don't remember a time in my life when my father has not been a part of it. He was hard working, and he enjoyed being with me, my mother and all of my siblings. He also loved spending time with his grandchildren. But one of my dad's faults was that he was a smoker. He began smoking around the age of 12. Because he started smoking at an early age it was hard for him to quit smoking, even though he knew that smoking was having a bad effect on him. He would try to quit, but the times that he quit it was not that long after that he would start smoking again.

When he was 48 turning 49, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. When someone you love has cancer, to see them go through it can be very hard on you. My father did do chemotherapy, but because his health was so bad, chemotherapy did not work for him. We had only found out in February 2000 that my dad had lung cancer and he died that May. Losing my father has been really hard on my family. It was especially hard on me for a long time. I felt abandon and guilty in many different ways. With him dying I felt as though I missed my time to be with him. All my siblings are older than myself. He got to see them go to their senior prom, be at their high school graduations, walk my older sister down the aisle when she was getting married, and share in the celebration at my brothers wedding. I also felt guilty for not spending more time with him.

I now know that the time I was able to spend with him will always be with me. By seeing how smoking had controlled his life, I knew that I never wanted to smoke myself. By being a smoker you think that it only affects you, but it does not. It affects everyone around you, even if you do not get cancer. By smoking around others, you are basically making them a smoker even if they never light a cigarette. They get something called secondhand smoke, which can be just as bad as smoking. So please think about how you want your life to be and hopefully, smoking will not be apart of it. It does not just affect you--it affects everyone you love and those who love you.