My mother quit smoking on October 16, 1977.

I know this date precisely because it was such a momentous event in my mother’s life. As she told it, in an uncharacteristically dramatic way, “I was listening to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto Number 5, The Emperor, with tears pouring down my face because I knew was smoking my last cigarette.” The date and story were told to us many times afterwards.

It was a dare that brought this pack-a-day smoker, someone who had tasted her first illicit cigarette at age 11, to the point of quitting. Suffering from some respiratory ailment, she was referred to an ENT specialist. The physician diagnosed her with a deviated septum and told her she needed surgery. Throughout the appointment the doctor also used my mother as his human guinea pig to demonstrate various techniques to his medical student “Dave.” “Suddenly Dave’s hands were around my throat,” my mother reported afterwards. “I knew if I had the surgery, Dave would be the one holding the scalpel.” She decided against the surgery. While leaving the examination room, the physician sent her a parting shot, “I think you should quit smoking, but I don’t think you can.” This declaration incensed my mother – the gauntlet had been thrown down and she accepted the challenge.

To her credit, she never smoked another cigarette. She was a determined woman and when she set her mind to something, she did not give up. But providing her lungs their much-needed new lease on life cost her in other ways. She began to suffer anxiety attacks, which led to the use of medication for many years. Cursed by her family’s genetics, she also hit menopause in her early forties, just around the time she quit smoking – weight gain ensued, followed by depression, and then significant weight loss. She confessed to me years later that she even lost interest in her children, motherhood being the one thing that had always kept her going.

Perhaps my father understood that my mother needed a carrot, in addition to a stick, to succeed in her attempt to quit smoking. In 1977 my mother was a stay-at-home mother who, at that time, had no income of her own. Somehow she and my father came to the agreement that he would “pay” her the money that she was saving the family by not smoking. This she set aside into what my parents came to call her “smoking account.” Even though technically this was money my father had earned, she came to see this as “her” money.

Having some discretionary income gave my mother a new lease on life. She decided to start buying artworks with it. She commenced touring local galleries. She attended art exhibitions. She became friends with local artists. Over time she acquired numerous paintings by prominent Newfoundland artists – good-quality prints and originals by Christopher Pratt, David Blackwood, Hans Melis, Julia Pickard, Ilse Hughes and Sylvia Bendzsa, among others. She became acquainted with a local framer who gave her solid advice on how to properly set off and preserve the artworks she had purchased.

When my parents built their custom-designed house in 1985, my mother took great interest in decorating the house to her taste. The staircase to the upstairs featured a 12-foot wall made of stained glass – the upper panels contained a large triptych of stained glass that had come from a chapel dedicated to mariners. For the smaller section on the bottom, she commissioned a local artist to create stained glass panels to match the larger ones. And then she hung all her paintings in that stairwell to display them in pride of place, her own miniature art gallery.

When my parents moved to Toronto in 2009, all those paintings came with them. There wasn’t sufficient room in their new downsized condo to display them all. Many of the artworks spent the ensuing decade taking up space in a closet. When my mother moved into her long-term care home in 2018, her favourite paintings travelled with her to make her new room feel as homey and familiar as possible.

Then it fell primarily to me to clear out my parents’ condo to ready it for sale. After my sister and I chose the paintings we wanted to keep for ourselves, there were still a number of artworks left to deal with. We knew how much love, thought and money our mother had spent on acquiring these paintings. They were too good to simply donate to Value Village or the Salvation Army as “wall art.” I suggested to my sister that we offer these paintings to The Rooms, the provincial art gallery and museum in St. John’s (our hometown), to see if they would be interested in adding any of them to their collection. As luck would have it, The Rooms selected two paintings by Hans Melis, who had been appointed the provincial artist by then Premier Joseph Smallwood (Melis is also the sculptor of the statue of John Cabot located outside Confederation Building). Interestingly enough, it turned out the gallery didn’t have any of his art in their collection and our family was able to help fill that gap.

And so my sister and I are pleased to know that our mother’s legacy of collecting Newfoundland art will live on in the permanent collection of a Canadian art gallery. All because our mother quit smoking on October 16, 1977.