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The Breath of God

A Testimony

By Terry Dunkle
New Year’s Day, 2006

That summer, I dropped out of college and took a job in my home town in Pennsylvania as a clerk in an aircraft hangar. The mechanics all smoked. So did the co-worker who gave me my first plane ride. He had a devilish streak: he took our little two-seater up to 9,000 feet and plunged it into a tailspin. Through the windshield, I saw the ground whirling, closer and closer. “Uh, George,” I said. At the last minute he pulled out, laughing like a hyena.

Afterwards, when I climbed out of the plane, my legs were shaking. George offered me a Lucky Strike. This time I didn’t get sick -- the smoke made me feel heavy, anchored. If you’ve ever smoked, I’m sure you know the feeling. I liked it.

There wasn’t much to do in this job except answer the phone. So for the next few days I sat at my desk smoking Lucky Strikes and reading Valley of the Dolls, a bestselling novel about movie stars getting hooked on tranquilizers. I didn’t know it, but in a way the book was also about me.

The day before payday, I ran out of cigarettes. Within a couple of hours I felt nervous. And suddenly I realized I wanted a cigarette. Badly. I borrowed 30 cents from George and made a beeline for the machine in the lobby. As I pulled the silver knob and watched the pack fall into the hopper, I thought, Dunkle, you’re hooked.

Years passed, and I kept on smoking. Soon, my lungs hurt every morning, and I had a cigarette hack. I wheezed when I laughed. Yes, of course, I worried about lung cancer -- but I was still in my 20s and figured I had plenty of time to quit.

In 1979, when I turned 30, I decided it was now or never. I stopped smoking, cold turkey. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. I was in a constant, 24/7 panic. My hands shook. My temper flared. But I made it through a week, then a month, then six months. And at the end of a year, Mary and some of our friends threw a surprise party for me.

I was glad I had quit, but I still missed smoking. Whenever somebody lit up nearby, the aroma sent me into a nostalgic tailspin. The only thing that pulled me out was thinking about that surprise party. How could I let those people down?

Five years later, I left my home town, and all those friends, to go to the big city and become an editor. I eventually landed at Reader’s Digest -- famous for its anti-smoking articles. Nevertheless, I was surprised to learn that a lot of the editors smoked. There was even a machine in the basement, just underneath my office.

One morning a couple of years after I joined the staff, a memo landed on my desk, announcing that one of my co-workers was being promoted to a position I had coveted. I handled the news gracefully, but underneath I was seething. Within hours, I found myself marching downstairs, slipping quarters into the machine, and pulling that silver handle again. From that moment, I was back to smoking a pack and a half a day.

Ironically, over the decade that followed, my career took off like a rocket -- in part, because I began producing anti-smoking articles. One of them was titled “America’s New Merchants of Death.” It exposed tobacco companies for marketing cigarettes to Third World children. It was read by 100 million people in 17 languages, and triggered 20,000 letters to the White House. It saved millions of lives -- or at least thousands. It was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Yet the editor who produced this famous article was a smoker. I was 44 years old and had been addicted to tobacco almost half my life.

Not long afterwards, I read a scientific paper about nicotine addiction. Every time you smoke a cigarette, it said, tiny receptors grow on the surface of your brain. As long as they are occupied by molecules of nicotine, they stay quiet. But as they wear off, the empty receptors begin sending chemical messengers into the center of the brain, screaming, “Feed us! We’re dying!”

Somehow, knowing that the terrible panic of quitting was just a chemical lie made it easier for me. And so finally, on a summer’s evening in 1994, I smoked my last cigarette.

One day in the spring of 1995, Ken Tomlinson, the editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest, invited me over to his house after work. We sat in his back yard sipping Maker’s Mark, his favorite bourbon. “Hey,” he said, “look at this.” And out of his pocket he pulled an aluminum vial containing a genuine Havana cigar. It was a Bolivar Dalias. Twenty-five dollars. And he had two of them.

I had never smoked a Cuban cigar, and my reporter’s instinct demanded that I try one. It was safe, or so I thought: Unlike cigarettes, cigars aren’t addictive, because you don’t inhale them. So I said, “Wow! Thanks, Ken!” And we lit ’em up. (Could you turn down a $25 cigar from your boss?)

Within a week, I was smoking -- and inhaling -- a cheap Dutchmaster every day on my way home from work. I was so ashamed, I gargled with a bottle of Listerine I kept in the glovebox, and I drove the last mile with the windows down, hoping Mary wouldn’t notice the smell. She says she never did.

I quit cigars three times over the next five years. During my last episode, I was smoking a White Owl every night during my two-mile walk. I dropped the butts into a sewer grate across the street from Art and Sue Roberts’ house.

All of this is funny to recall today, but at the time it was agony. I began to think this humiliating relapse would continue for the rest of my life -- and probably a very short life, too. I mean, how many people do you know who inhale cigars? (I once saw Charles Kurault interview a man who ate cigars. I don’t think I would have gone that far, but with tobacco you never know.)

The year I turned 50 -- on July 27, Mary’s birthday -- my self-loathing finally got the best of me. Halfway through my evening walk, I developed a coughing fit. I thought about what Jim Steele, the preacher in the little fundamentalist church I attended as a child, used to say: the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It is a sin to defile it. There, in the moonlight, on a deserted corner, I knelt and prayed, “God, please take this from me.” I ground my last cigar to a pulp with the heel of my Nikes and walked home, at last feeling free.

I was never tempted to try tobacco after that. God had answered my prayer. The demon who had possessed me for 33 years had finally left my body. Or so it seemed.

I had also been a heavy drinker. Until 1999, I had averaged four or five drinks every evening. I loved gin, wine, beer, whisky -- anything that contained alcohol. I don’t think I was an alcoholic -- I hadn’t missed it at all when I quit. But I knew that cancer was far more likely in someone who not only smokes, but also drinks.

Then, about a month after the pain started, as I cleared my throat for the first time one morning, I saw in my handkerchief a tiny dot of red. A classic sign of lung cancer.

I immediately called Jay Weiner, the doctor I’ve been seeing since we moved to Danbury, 22 years ago. He said, “You need a chest X ray. The sooner, the better.”

I had the X ray that afternoon, and Dr. Weiner called me the next morning with results. “There’s something in the upper-right lobe,” he told me. “It’s just a dot. It’s probably nothing. But you need a CAT scan. Right away.” My appointment was for noon Monday. Today was Friday.

I hung up the phone and sank into my easy chair. I thought, could this really be happening? I, who had come from a long line of German farmers who lived into their nineties, could die at 56 from cancer?

I went to my computer and googled “lung cancer survival rates.” An article on WebMD said that most cases weren’t detected until the tumor spread beyond the chest wall. In 90 percent of these, death came within a year. Even if the tumor was caught earlier, the odds of dying were 60 to 80 percent.

For the next half hour I paced round and round the house, wringing my hands and saying to myself, “Oh, Dunkle, what were you thinking?”

I felt an urge to run. I went outside and dashed half a mile up the Kilian hill before admitting that I couldn’t escape this -- it was inside me. I turned around and walked home, passing the sewer grate where I had thrown all those cigar butts.

When I came back into the house, there was Wally the Schnauzer, wagging his tail and looking up at me -- probably wanting a bite of cheese. Wally is 13. He’s developing arthritis, and can’t run up the stairs and jump onto the beds the way he used to. As I patted him I thought, Wally, I may be gone before you are.

I thought about my family. My dear, longsuffering Mary -- the solid rock who went back to work when my business was ailing, and never complained. My son John, 25, whose intellectual brilliance sometimes amazes me. Bill, 22, whose quiet integrity seems to destine him for leadership. Tom, 13, suddenly learning to be a man. How would they turn out? I wouldn’t be around to see. I wouldn’t be around to help. And it was all my fault.

My eyes fell on a book on the coffee table, authored by a writer whom I had edited 20 years ago. I, too, was meant to write books. But somehow I had spent my life helping other people write theirs. I’d been planning to write my first book when I retired. Now it seemed I wasn’t going to retire.

What were you thinking, Dunkle?

On Sunday, I came to church. I don’t remember the sermon. I don’t remember the music. What I remember is sitting in the front pew there with the choir, looking out the window at the headstones in the cemetery and thinking, “This time next year, is that where I’ll be?”

And I remember communion. It was served that Sunday by intincture. I watched each of you come forward, and I heard Steve Fuller say, “This is the body of Christ, given for you.” Bob and Harriet, Becky, Jessie, Wini and Parker -- everyone. And I sat there silently weeping, because I suddenly realized how much I loved you all.

After church, I finally told Mary. I had been protecting her in case it turned out to be a false alarm. But now I remembered our vows: In sickness and health.

Mary listened to my story, and then she held me in her arms and said, “There’s nothing wrong with you. I’m sure of it.” She didn’t offer a rationale. I didn’t ask for one, either. I had learned, over 33 years, that Mary had uncanny intuition. But even Mary isn’t right 100 percent of the time.

That night, I lay awake for hours. It really is true that when you face death, your whole life flashes before you. Memories, both tender and terrifying. At age two, sitting in the creek beside my grandfather’s house while my older cousins played in the water. Toppling forward. Tasting the water. Breathing it. Seeing tiny brown fish darting among the bright green algae rippling in the current. Moments later, being lifted, sputtering and coughing, into the sweet air, by familiar arms. She had been picking raspberries along the bank, with her back to me, and suddenly sensed danger. My mother had given me life twice.

This was the last thing I remember before falling asleep in the wee hours of Monday morning.

At 11:45 that morning, I drove to my CAT-scan appointment. I put a favorite CD in the player, by a gospel quartet called J.D. Sumner and the Stamps. One song has always moved me particularly, but this time it spoke directly to my heart. I couldn’t help singing along:

Amazing grace
Shall always be
My song of praise,
For it was grace
That bought my liberty.
I do not know
Just why He came
To love me so.
He looked beyond
My faults
And saw my need.

Now I was sitting in the waiting room, listening to the receptionist talk about her daughter’s wedding while a man next to me read an article in Smithsonian.

A short, plump woman in a blue smock came out. “Mr. Dunkle?” she said.

I liked that. So often, medical people insist on calling you by your first name -- robbing you of your dignity at the moment when you most desperately want to preserve it. I thought of her instantly as a friend. “Please call me Terry,” I said. She had a sweet round face and kindly eyes. Her name was Angie.

Angie took me into the CAT scan room. The scanner looked like a huge metal donut standing on end. She asked me to lie down on a padded bench with my feet poking through the hole of the donut. She said she had seen my X ray and knew what we were looking for. She told me I was going to have to hold my breath for a long time. Then she went into a little booth and said over a loudspeaker, “Ready? Now take a deep breath…and…HOLD.” The machine started humming and the bench crept through the donut, taking a digital, 3-D picture of my lungs.

The exposure was nearly a minute. I hadn’t held my breath that long in years. My heart was pounding; I felt faint. I thought about Uncle Jim, who died two years ago of pulmonary fibrosis. “It’s like drowning,” he had told me, “only it goes on and on.” I thought, Is this how I’ll feel, near the end?

Finally, the machine stopped humming. As I lay there with my eyes closed, gasping, I heard Angie’s voice again -- up close:

“I’ve got a secret,” she said.

I opened my eyes. She was bending over me, grinning.

“What?” I said.

“I’m not supposed to tell you this -- the doctor is. But honestly, I don’t see anything in there.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“What about the spot in the upper-right lobe?

“It was probably a plate defect. Film isn’t that reliable, you know.”

She took my hand and helped me off the bench. My eyes filled with tears. “Thank you, Angie,” I said. “God bless you.”

On my way home I sang that song again, this time at the top of my lungs. I stopped at CVS and bought my family a two-pound Whitman Sampler. I had been born again, you see -- for the third time -- and what every child loves most is candy.

Today the pain in my chest is gone. “It was probably a musculoskeletal thing,” Dr. Weiner said. “You’re not getting any younger, you know.”

All of this happened last October. None of you knew about it, except Pastor Cindy. I deliberately saved it to share with you this morning, on the first day of a new year.

My story happens to be about smoking. And maybe some of you smoke, or have smoked -- but that’s not important. The lesson is much broader. Maybe you drink too much, as I did. Maybe you eat too much. (I do. My resolution is to lose 40 pounds by the Fourth of July. Pray for me. And if you see me down at the Dubl Twister ice-cream shop, ask, “What the heck are you doing here?) Maybe you don’t get enough exercise. Maybe you skip your annual physical. (I used to have mine every other year.) Maybe you keep putting off your colonoscopy. Maybe you work too hard, or put yourself under too much stress.

Whatever you’re doing to yourself, please remember this: Every breath we take is a gift from God. Take care of your temple.

Amen.