My grandmother smoked for forty years. Kool menthols, same brand from the time she was nineteen until she quit in her late fifties. She told me that story the day I told her I was going to stop, sitting at her kitchen table in Decatur, and she squeezed my hand and said, “Then we’re going to pray you through it.” She meant every word.

I started smoking at 23, working a retail job that had me on my feet nine hours a day dealing with problems that were never my fault but always mine to fix. My coworker Tamika smoked on breaks and one afternoon I asked her for one and that was that. Thirteen years. I didn’t even clock how long it had been until I actually sat down and did the math, which was a little horrifying. I’d been smoking for more than a third of my life.

I smoked Virginia Slims Menthol mostly, which is a cigarette with a specific cultural history in Black communities and among Black women in particular, and I say that because it matters to me to be honest about the full picture. These companies marketed heavily to our communities for generations. They put money into events and magazines and made smoking look like something refined and grown and independent. I was not immune to that. Nobody is entirely immune to that. The brand choices we make are not accidents.

I tried to quit twice before the quit that worked. The first time was cold turkey, unassisted, during a week when my schedule happened to be quiet. I made it eight days and then had a fight with my ex over the phone and was smoking before I’d fully registered what I was doing. The second time I used the Nicorette lozenge, the 2mg kind, and the nausea got so bad I stopped using them after three days and then stopped the quit attempt a few days after that.

What was different the third time was Grandma Cecile.

I’d been going to her church more regularly, a Baptist congregation in Decatur where she’d been a member for over thirty years. My faith had always been there but it had gone kind of quiet in my twenties, the way it does for a lot of people when life gets busy and complicated. But I’d been finding my way back to it, and when I told Grandma Cecile in the fall of 2022 that I was ready to try again, she made me a specific offer. She said she would call me every morning for the first thirty days, first thing, and we would pray together before I got out of bed.

I want to be clear about what this meant in practice, because I don’t want to make it sound abstract. This was my 81-year-old grandmother setting an alarm for seven in the morning every single day to call her granddaughter and pray with her before the granddaughter had to face the day without cigarettes. That is an act of love so specific and so practical that it still makes me cry a little to think about it.

I quit cold turkey on a Sunday in October 2022. Didn’t use any NRT. I’d done my research and talked to my doctor, and she said cold turkey was a valid approach especially if my previous NRT attempt had caused problems. My quit date was intentional: Sunday, so I’d have the day at home, and so the first morning call with Grandma could happen on a day when I wasn’t rushing out the door to work.

The first week was rough in the way everyone says it will be. Restless hands, trouble concentrating, a low irritability that sat on me like a second skin. I chewed a lot of sugar-free gum and drank too much coffee, which my doctor had said was fine within reason. The morning calls helped enormously. They gave the day a structure that began before the craving could get established. Grandma’s voice has a specific quality of certainty that I find calming in a way I can’t fully explain. She has seen hard things and come through them and she sounds like that.

The hardest moment happened in week three, on a Sunday.

In my family, Sunday dinner after church is the kind of gathering that has its own gravitational field. It has been that way my entire life. After the meal, the adults used to gather on the back porch. When I was little, most of them smoked out there. By the time I was an adult smoker myself, the porch gathering had become part of my internal landscape of belonging: the smell of food from inside, the evening light, the sound of the family talking about everything and nothing, and a cigarette. The porch, for me, was one of the strongest smoking cues I had, and week three fell on a Sunday when we had a family dinner.

I stood in the backyard instead of on the porch. I told my aunt why and she didn’t question it, just brought her chair out to where I was standing. We talked for an hour. At one point my cousin came out and offered me a cigarette without thinking and I said no and she apologized and I said not to worry about it. Grandma Cecile watched the whole thing from the porch with a look on her face that I can only describe as satisfied.

When the craving peaked in those twenty minutes between the end of dinner and when the porch crowd started to thin out, I prayed quietly by myself, standing in my aunt’s backyard with my hands in my pockets. I asked for the specific thing I needed, which was just to get through the next ten minutes. I have always found prayer more useful as a moment-by-moment tool than as an abstract comfort. You ask for the thing you actually need, right now. I needed to make it to eight o’clock. I made it to eight o’clock.

Grandma called every morning for all thirty days, sometimes thirty-one or thirty-two on the days she forgot to count and just called anyway because the habit was set. After the thirty days she called less often but never stopped checking in entirely. She told me she was proud of me in a way that had a specific weight to it coming from a woman who had done the same thing herself at a different age, under different circumstances, and knew exactly what it had cost.

I have been smoke-free for three and a half years now. The porch at family gatherings is mine again. The craving doesn’t come anymore when I stand there, just a mild recognition that it used to.

Grandma Cecile is 84 now. She’s slower than she was and her knees give her trouble, but she is sharp and funny and present. She came to my birthday dinner last month and we sat next to each other and talked about everything happening in the family and she didn’t mention the smoking once, which felt like the real completion of something. We don’t have to pray about that anymore. We pray about other things.

I’m telling you this not to say that faith is the only way or even the right way for everyone. I’m telling you because what worked for me was having someone who loved me show up every single morning with accountability and belief. That accountability came in the form of prayer because that’s the language my family speaks. For you it might look different. But the shape of it is the same: you need someone who is not going to let you disappear into the struggle alone.

If you’re still smoking, find your version of that. Find the person who will call every morning for thirty days. Find the ritual that grounds the day before the craving gets there first. You don’t have to white-knuckle it alone. Nobody expects you to. The people who love you are more willing to show up for this than you might think. Let them.

You can get through week three. You can get through that Sunday dinner, that specific hard moment that lives in your bones like a memory. I know you can, because I did, and I had thirteen years of the habit and a porch full of history to get through.

You are not alone in this. Not even close.