by Lila Zimmerman, LMFT

WHEN A CIGAR IS JUST A CIGAR BUT A CIGARETTE IS MY FATHER

In Memory of Robert E. Zimmerman, Jr. (March 7, 1958 – August 4, 2026)

I started smoking again when my father died. Smoking with a fervor I have not previously known. Cigarettes, among other self-injurious activities (and objects) were perhaps the main culprit in his dying. They themselves, not benign of course, but more so his attachment to (use of) them. The confounding reality that he could have been spared this particular end and yet he refused, proclaiming often that this is what he loved and living without what he loved made no sense to him. This was painful to hear, as you might imagine, because it meant I would not be able to live with what I loved, which of course was him.

He smoked his last cigarette several hours before he died and I had it with him, curled up in bed. I was lying next to him watching him watch the ceiling, imagining what he might be seeing up there. His eyes, in his last few days, were wide and hardly ever closed. It appeared to me he was watching something of his life, friends in the corners of his bedroom, a film reel of days gone by. Perhaps me as a baby, holding me up above his head, me delighting in seeing him below me, not knowing yet the danger of being dropped. We were together in his last days as we were in my first. He was only skin and bones, more fragile than I had ever seen him. He could hardly inhale but he held his cigarette like a baton, waving it side to side, directing his final act. 

The object is always being destroyed. The destruction becomes the unconscious backcloth for love of a real object, that is, an object out-side the area of the subject’s omnipotent control (Winnicott, 1968).

It is possible that every time I reach for a cigarette I am reaching for my father. I am repeating something for myself: the wanting, the having, the losing. The having it again. My transitional object, lethal as it may be. My way of keeping going, deferring my grief. I am keeping him alive inside of me, a toxic paradox of loving him and hurting myself as he loved me and hurt himself. A tar filled and dangerous substitute for my grief, an object destroyed and returned in perfect condition. He comes in packs of 20. In this way I can have him as often as I want but not at great expense to myself. A hazardous compromise. As if it ever truly works to resurrect the dead without dying a little bit yourself. Every myth of bringing back our dead holds this tragic irony and warning. But for now it seems impossible to stop, unprepared to meet what waits for me when the smoke clears.