Thanks to Big Tobacco, today marks THIRTY-FOUR years since my dad has been gone because of his smoking. He was only 50 years old when he died (the same age as his mom from her smoking), so he could very reasonably be alive today at 84.

This is one of my favorite pictures of him with me. He knew how much I hated his smoking and he thought it was funny when I would draw “Cancer Cures Smoking” signs and tape them to his nightstand. One year for MY birthday, he bought a smoking cessation kit for himself, because he knew how much I wanted him to stop, and this was all before his quintuple bypass at age 48.

Even that didn’t stop him from resuming smoking a month later and within two years an aortic aneurysm caused him to hemorrhage to death in rush-hour traffic on Highway 92 here in the Bay Area. He never regained consciousness and it turned my entire family’s lives upside down, including my immigrant mother who was somewhat lost without him. I had no choice but to step up and protect her and her household with my two younger siblings, so I grew up very fast knowing at that moment what I wanted to concentrate on with my activism when I went to law school (I was still in college on the other side of the country).