I remember when I was kid in school back in the 1950s in health class they were warning about the dangers of smoking. They rolled out the famous picture of the man with no teeth sporting a rather gruesome looking laryngectomy hole in his throat. On top of that, a local man was invited to speak to us who also had had this procedure done because of the smoking. I did vow then and there never to smoke, but what I really focused in on was the age of the man in the picture. He seemed really old.
In class they emphasized that smoking causes premature aging and early death from such maladies as cancer, emphysema, or heart disease. But that old man in the picture was happy, smoking his cigarette through the laryngectomy hole. Besides being the poster child for addiction, my young mind saw a contradiction in the argument that smoking causes early death.
Some years later, as a teenager, I read an article in the newspaper about Mrs. Green who had lived to be one hundred years old and had smoked every day of her life since age ten. That reminded me of all the education I had claiming that smoking shortened your life. One of the statistics touted as a “scientific study” was that for every cigarette you smoke it shortens your lifespan by ten minutes. I brought this up to one of my teachers. How could Mrs. Green have lived to be one hundred years old and gotten there smoking every day since age ten? My science teacher, Mr. Reichert, retorted, “Well, think how long she would have lived had she not smoked the whole time?” I thought, 150? 200? I’d heard that there were people that live that long in places like Bulgaria and China, but no one actually believed it to be true.
Statistical improbabilities aside, I came to a startling conclusion back then, that I spent the rest of my life confirming: Mrs. Green died because it was her time to die. Stated more clearly: death is independent of any physical cause.
I got into many debates with people on this subject, but as I headed into my fifties, I began to find others who had come to the same conclusion. I’m a touring blues musician, and you’ll find many of the hardest-lived lives in this profession. Blues guys who’ve done drugs, smoked two packs a day, ate copious amounts of unhealthy food on the road, and led terribly dramatic emotional lives. Then you hear they finally died at eighty-seven or ninety-two. In fact, Pinetop Perkins, the famous blues piano player died in March at age ninety-seven. He was no angel, lived life to the fullest, including smoking and drinking and eating plenty of ribs.
