An old idea dies hard.

My sister is dying. She has lost so much weight that she no longer looks like the sister who used to make me laugh so hard. She used to say such funny stuff that as a child I believed the old idea that overweight people were jollier than skinny people. I believed a lot of ideas that were seeded in my fertile young mind; they took root and began to grow long leafy vines in my head. My big sister believed old ideas too. She is being strangled by the belief that cigarettes quiet her nerves, give her a cool look, and smooth over the empty jagged place in her mind.

She believes the lit white stick of tobacco is her friend. She has pancreatic cancer, strongly linked to smoking. She isn't overweight anymore; she isn't jolly; she isn't quieted or cool, nor is her mind smoothed over. She is dying, and she is still smoking.

My brother has survived two heart attacks; the last one required angioplasty. He used to make me cry when I was little, as brothers can. He believed boys should be boys. He teased and taunted and tried to scare me with stories of loose panthers that could eat my heart out and monsters that wore hooks that could hang on to me and never let me go. He knew those stories weren't real. But the very real evil of nicotine is eating his heart out, and the hook of nicotine addiction will not let go. He couldn't wait to get out of the hospital to light up. That's what scares me now.

My dad smoked three packs of nonfiltered cigarettes a day. He believed lots of old ideas. He believed that worry was beneficial. He wouldn't leave a fan on all night for fear that it would cause a fire. He wouldn't leave a window open either; he feared that someone would jump in and steal one of his children. Instead, we breathed his cigarette smoke all night. He didn't know to fear that. Dad wouldn't let us eat suckers or popcorn for fear that we would choke to death. Yet when we started to smoke, he ]it our cigarettes. He didn't know that it was choking us to death.

In a world where new ideas are generated by the minute and flashed up on household computer screens, people continue to accept old ideas. The old idea that smoking looks cool belongs to the 1920s. Flappers thought everything they did was the cat's pajamas. The idea that nicotine is not addictive belongs to the 1960s. Baby boomers thought they could quit anything, but they can't seem to quit their desire for smoking.

We imagine this generation to be so smart, so cool, and so fearless that we will walk into the new millennium with an explosion of new ideas. But when we see our family and friends still pulling in the toxic smoke of tobacco laced with pesticides, we know that humans are not smart enough, not cool enough, and not scared enough to walk away from some old ideas.

My sister is dying of cancer. My brother is a time bomb. My father died of heart disease. My father-in-law died with emphysema. Those seemingly innocent packs of cigarettes they bought at the local deli took a bite out of their wallets and their lives. Nicotine is no friend, no soother, no joke. Smoking dies hard; that's an idea you can bet your life on.