An Italian-American Woman Quits Cold Turkey After 26 Years

My name is Elena Rossi. I grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in a house where the kitchen always smelled like Sunday sauce and cigarette smoke, and for most of my adult life I did not understand that those two things were separable. I am 49 years old. I smoked for twenty-six years, and I quit cold turkey fourteen months ago.

This is not a story about willpower, exactly. It’s more a story about finally deciding that I loved something more than I loved being comfortable.

The World I Grew Up In

My parents came from Campania in the early seventies. They settled in Bensonhurst because that’s where the Italians were, which is how it worked then. My father smoked Camels. My mother smoked Virginia Slims. My Uncle Sal smoked DiNobili cigars that smelled like burning rubber, and my Aunt Rosa smoked Kools because she said menthol was easier on her throat. My grandfather, when he was alive, had a pipe. Sunday dinner was eight or ten people around a long table in a small kitchen, and by the time the espresso came out, the room was hazy.

Nobody talked about quitting. It wasn’t a topic. You smoked or you didn’t; if you smoked, you smoked, and that was that. Health warnings existed but they belonged to a different world, the world of pamphlets in doctors’ offices, which was not the world we actually lived in.

I was twenty-three when I started. I want to be honest about that because a lot of quitting stories say things like “I started at fifteen, I didn’t know better.” I was twenty-three and I knew better. I was working as a paralegal in downtown Brooklyn, and several of my coworkers smoked, and one afternoon outside the building I just asked one of them if I could try one of hers. She handed me a Marlboro Light. I inhaled, I coughed, I felt slightly sick, and then I tried another one the next day.

Within three months I was buying my own packs. Within a year I was at a pack a day. That stayed mostly steady for the next twenty-four years.

The After-Dinner Cigarette and What It Meant

In my family, the after-dinner cigarette was a ceremony. You helped clear the dishes, you made the espresso, you brought out the pastries from the bakery on 86th Street, and then you lit up. My mother would hold her Virginia Slim with two fingers and lean back in her chair and that was her signal that she was off the clock. The meal was over. The cigarette was the period at the end of the sentence.

When I quit, one of the first things I had to figure out was what to do with my hands after dinner. That sounds trivial, but it wasn’t. The hands needed something. The ritual needed an ending. For months after I quit I found myself reaching for nothing at the end of meals and feeling genuinely disoriented.

I say this not to romanticize smoking. I say it because if you’ve ever tried to quit and failed, and someone tells you it’s just a physical addiction to nicotine, they are leaving out half the story. The physical addiction is real and it is hell. But it’s wrapped inside twenty-six years of ritual and memory and family and the feeling of belonging to a specific world. You quit both things at once, or you don’t quit at all.

What Finally Made the Difference

My doctor had been telling me to quit for years. I had COPD developing — not severe, but present and progressing. My lung capacity tests had been getting slowly worse. I heard it and I nodded and I went home and smoked on the fire escape.

What finally made the difference had nothing to do with my health at first. It had to do with my mother.

She turned seventy-four last winter and her breathing had been getting bad for two years. She went in for a scan and they found significant emphysema. Not cancer, thank God, but the kind of emphysema that will take years off her life and has already taken quality from it. She was sitting in my kitchen when she got the results, and she looked at her cigarette, and she looked at me, and she said, in Italian, something that translates roughly to: “This thing beat me.”

My mother is not the kind of woman who says things like that. She is not the kind of woman who admits to being beaten by anything. I took her words home with me and I sat with them.

I smoked for about two more weeks. Then I threw my last pack of Marlboro Golds — I had switched from Lights years ago — in the kitchen trash on a Tuesday afternoon, and I did not buy another one.

The Cold Turkey Reality

I want to be honest about cold turkey. It is unpleasant in ways that are hard to describe without sounding dramatic. Day two and three are the worst physically: the headache that sits behind your eyes, the irritability that makes you want to scream at innocent people, the moments when your body is absolutely certain it is dying and only a cigarette will save it. That last feeling is not rational. That does not make it less intense.

I took ibuprofen for the headaches. I chewed a lot of Nicorette gum in the first two weeks, not on any kind of program, just as a bridge for the worst moments. I told my sister immediately so she could check on me, and she called every day for the first week. I told my best friend, who lives on Staten Island, and she texted me daily.

The Sunday dinner at my mother’s house, about three weeks in, was the hardest. I drove over there and the kitchen was its usual cloud. My Aunt Rosa was there. Two cousins. The smell hit me walking in the door and my body went on full alert. I got through it by keeping my coffee cup in my hand the whole time. I needed something in my hand. I refilled that cup probably five times. My mother gave me a look and said nothing, which in my family is a form of respect.

By six weeks, the physical craving had reduced to something manageable. By three months, it was occasional. By now, fourteen months in, it appears rarely, and when it does it passes quickly.

My Mother Quit at Seventy-Four

About four months after I quit, my mother called me. She had stopped smoking. Her pulmonologist had enrolled her in a program, she was using the NicoDerm CQ patches and then stepping down, and she was doing it. She said my quitting had shown her it was possible.

I cried on the phone and tried to hide it from her. She pretended not to notice, which is the other form of respect in our family.

She has been smoke-free for ten months. At seventy-four. After more than fifty years of smoking. Her breathing has improved. She is still dealing with the emphysema and she always will be, but it is not progressing. The doctor is pleased.

If my seventy-four-year-old mother can do it, I do not believe there is an age or a smoking history that puts quitting beyond reach.

What Life Looks Like Now

I taste my food differently. This is not a metaphor. The Sunday sauce that I have been eating my whole life tastes better now than it did a year ago, and I have been making this sauce since I was twelve. My sense of smell came back sharply enough that it surprised me — I could smell the ocean on the Staten Island Ferry in a way I had forgotten was possible.

My lung capacity tests, at my last checkup, showed improvement. Not complete reversal, but measurable, real improvement. The COPD is not gone but it has stopped progressing, and my doctor used the word “remarkable” in a way that made me feel it.

The fire escape where I used to smoke is now just a fire escape.

To Anyone Who Grew Up the Way I Did

If you grew up in a house where smoking was just what adults did, where the after-dinner cigarette was as natural as espresso, where quitting felt like a rejection of something cultural — I understand exactly what I’m asking of you when I say try anyway.

I am not telling you your family was wrong. I am not telling you that the rituals were not real. They were real. They are still real. I still have Sunday dinner and I still have espresso and I still have my mother and my aunts and my cousins and all the noise and the arguing and the food that a Brooklyn Italian family produces when it gathers together.

It’s the same thing. Without the cloud.

You do not lose the life when you put down the cigarette. You keep the life. You just add years to it.

My mother is proof. I am proof. You are allowed to be next.