Smoking is inexplicably cool again and I’m not happy about it.

After a period of health-related stigma, it is now considered culturally acceptable and even desirable to be seen with a cigarette in your hand. It signals sophistication, rebellious attitude and undeniable coldness.

Newsweek reported on a “cigarette renaissance” among Generation Z, a trend that bothers and confuses me, and is hard not to take personally.

I never had the slightest desire to participate because, to me, cigarettes represented something much more sinister: death. And I was too afraid to try one.

I grew up watching celebrities smoke in movies.

Growing up, my mother, who was obsessed with the old black-and-white movies of her youth, admired glamorous movie stars, many of whom smoked cigarettes.

When she was young, we watched her favorite movies together on our huge couch. I, too, was mesmerized by beautiful women like Rita Hayworth, dressed in Gilda’s flowing dresses, while using cigarettes to seduce and exert power over the men around her, or Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” wearing the now iconic mouthpiece while window shopping for jewelry. Both women seemed very different from anyone I had ever met, embodying the height of elegance and sophistication.

While I quickly adopted my mother’s love of the Golden Age of Hollywood, I never smoked a cigarette, although most of my friends did when they were teenagers. They were the “Breakfast Club” kids who rebelled against conformity and thought that if they smoked, in addition to dressing too much in black, they would appear more mysterious and desirably misunderstood.

my dad had lung cancer

One of my first memories is of my father smoking his cigarette while I played in my park. He got lung cancer when I was 4, and the sight of spider-shaped black spots crawling up his back after surgery made me afraid to hug him. I was always afraid that he would get sick again.

Despite quitting smoking, his cancer returned eight years later. I was 12 years old. It turned out that his lungs were too damaged to heal. From then on, an oxygen tank accompanied us everywhere; every breath was a struggle. His last two years were agony. When I was a teenager and constantly visiting him in the hospital, I promised myself never to smoke. My friends told me I was too tense. When I unsuccessfully suggested they stop, they accused me of preaching.

A few years later, as a 23-year-old actor in New York, I landed a role in a short film that required my character to smoke. He only had a few lines holding the cigarette and pretending to inhale. I fumbled with it between my fingers, my hands shaking, trying in vain to imitate the classic movie stars I grew up with and how they held theirs.

Embarrassingly, holding a cigarette was much more difficult than balancing in the stilettos she was wearing. After several takes, the assistant director took the cigarette from my hand, “This is how it’s done,” and with enviable style executed a perfect circle of smoke in the air.

I apologized and explained that I hadn’t even tried a cigarette before. He looked at me exasperatedly and shook his head. Suddenly, traumatic memories of my father coughing up blood flooded back to me. That’s when I started to realize how much cigarettes were a trigger for me. I even asked myself: was it wrong of me to accept a role that compromised my personal values? So when all these years later, cigarettes started flooding the TV again, it not only surprised me, but it also brought back all those same memories.

Cigarettes stole my time with my dad.

Now cigarettes are considered “cool” again. It saddens and bothers me how quickly so many people are willing to forget what smoking does to their health. It feels very selfish to be robbing not only lungs but also years from the families of our loved ones.

Lung cancer stole my dad, but in reality, cigarettes stole our years of health and happiness together. The ones we had were filled with his anger and frustration because of the suffering he knew he couldn’t escape, and my own fear and anxiety about losing him was overwhelming.

So despite this resurrection of smoking as it approaches the Ozempic-level “it” factor, I won’t be smoking anytime soon and I hope others who find this latest fad interesting come to their senses. We owe it to ourselves and those we love to do better.