"She said she was going to leave this world beholden to nothing and nobody."

Today I am thinking about addiction and getting clean. I am remembering my mother, lying in a hospital bed, in September 2009. She has just been diagnosed with multiple brain metastases from lung cancer. She is waiting for surgery to remove the largest brain tumor, which is causing confusion, impacting movement, slurring speech, and incapacitating her to the point that she is unable to care for my father, who has Alzheimer’s disease. My mother is 67 years old and has smoked cigarettes since she was 15. She has tried to quit many times, in many ways. Currently she is “cutting back” and only smokes unfiltered cigarettes (claiming that she takes fewer puffs because they are so harsh) on the front porch at certain times. But now she has been confined to a hospital bed for 2 days and she is jonesing bad. There is an order for nicotine replacement therapy but nobody has delivered it. My siblings, my father, and I stand awkwardly, cramped in the hospital room, staring at my mother. We are exhausted and are just beginning to succumb to the H1N1 flu which was swarming that September and that we caught while sleeping in the hospital waiting room. My mother scowls at us because she needs her fix and we are not helping. She pounds her nurse call button and speaks sharply, “Get me a nicotine patch NOW or I am going outside to smoke.” We are reminded that nicotine addiction is real, and addicts should be treated promptly and with compassion, and not allowed to suffer. Thanks to that nicotine patch, my mother kicked her habit and died clean, like Mrs. Dubose in To Kill a Mockingbird, “beholden to nothing and nobody.”