Love, loss.... and a smoking gun: the harm a lifetime of smoking can do

• Tamara with her daughter, Rosa, who has smoked since she was 15

IT TOOK my mother two years to die. It's taking my father considerably longer. Eight years and counting. He's suffocating slowly, day by day.

It was lung and brain cancer with my mum; chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with my dad, both fates sealed by their lifelong love affair with cigarettes.

Knowing this, I still chose to stand outside in the freezing cold, puffing away during my daughter's 18th birthday party the other night, as if inviting 4,000 chemicals into my bloodstream (at least 50 of which are known carcinogens) would in some way enhance the celebration. Two days later my chest feels tight, my breathing… not right.

I have had an on/off relationship with cigarettes for most of my adult life, but it had been more off than on recently. This time last year I had stopped altogether and was hugely relieved and, if I'm honest, irritatingly smug about it. I really thought I'd done with fags for good. Hubris, of course. All it took was a holiday on the Mediterranean in the company of other smokers, evocative wafts of tobacco drifting on the balmy evening air and a particularly potent jug of sangria to have me reaching for the Fortuna in its enticing squashy pack. "A blip," I said, "…just a wee holiday blip."

Breathing should be automatic, something you don't even think about, but today I'm conscious of each uneasy inhalation. I don't like this. Images of my father gasping for breath (like a fish out of water) flash into my mind and I feel panicky. I can't help wondering whether this most recent "blip" will be the one to tip the balance of my own fate.

My daughter smokes too. She's been at it for a few years now. Why wouldn't she? Smoking and cigarettes are part of her family culture. I watch her inhale deeply, a proper smoker, and feel terrible that I have colluded in this aspect of her life. I look at Rosa's flawless, peachy skin and can't imagine it ever taking on the leathery, open-pored roughness and doughy pallor of the hardened smoker – but that process will already be subtly under way.

Rosa was quite young when my mother died and, like most children, vehemently anti-smoking. But, as she shook off her childhood and all of its righteous innocence she, quite naturally, started searching for her adult identity. It turns out to be far darker – more interesting, perhaps… more worrying, certainly – than her sweet, cheerful younger self. Part of this angst-ridden new persona involves smoking. I can only hope it's temporary.

I remember the first time my father saw Rosa smoke. It was on holiday a few years after my mother had died. Dad had given up by this time (gobsmackingly, but sadly too late). I had decided it was best to confess to him that his granddaughter had succumbed to the dreaded weed, rather than have her alienated and crouching behind the dustbins sending up give-away clouds of smoke each time she needed a fix. Just one small aspect of my collusion, you see?

So the way was paved and my father surreptitiously watched as the 15-year-old apple of his eye nonchalantly lit up after breakfast one morning and took a deep drag of Marlboro Light. He didn't utter a word then, but later on declared: "Your daughter smokes like a sailor" It was supposed to register disapproval, I think, but what struck me most was the subconscious admiration, the perverse pride in his granddaughter's smoking prowess. His tone was more "Atta girl!" than "What a terrible thing."

But then so many things about smoking are perverse: starting, in the first place, what fledgling smoker ever enjoys his or her first cigarette, after all? Yet we persist until we get over our physical repulsion. My own childhood forays into smoking were less than successful. Having parents who smoked, and were fairly glamorous with it, I wanted to discover the joys of this apparently cool habit for myself. I must have been about eight or so when I had the bright idea of lighting up a hollow plant stem I found in the garden. As I sucked hard to draw the bitter smoke into my mouth, the five or six earwigs who had been squatting inside came whooshing down the stem and lodged themselves in the back of my throat. Admittedly this did halt the craving for a few years, but inevitably I decided to give it another go.

When I was about 15, I nicked a gargantuan cigar from my father's stash instead. Into the bathroom I crept, flung the window wide, lit the monster and took a drag, simultaneously breathing in deeply as I had observed my father doing. Cue loud retching and uncontrollable coughing. Disgusting! I remained ashen-faced, shaky-limbed and sweating for the rest of the night. But did my own personal Cuban missile crisis extinguish my ambition? Not a bit of it. I remained on a determined quest to become a smoker until I developed a tolerance and a taste and, of course, an addiction.

My parents' decision to smoke wasn't as bonkers as my own. They were the war generation – everybody smoked. The habit was glamorised in advertising campaigns and by Hollywood icons like Humphrey Bogart and Marlene Dietrich. Who wouldn't be seduced? Well, apart from the Nazis, who had a strong anti-tobacco movement, as it happens. What irony: while perfectly able to celebrate clouds of smoke comprising human particles belching from their death camp chimneys, they had no compunction in declaring cigarette smoking a depraved habit, typically enjoyed by Jews, gypsies and, bizarrely, jazz musicians (among other reprobates). Furthermore, they fumed, women who smoked were unfit to be wives and mothers.Recent research confirms that women who smoke are more likely to have babies with birth defects, but back then who cared for an opinion held by Nazis and endorsed by Herr Hitler? Not my Polish father, for sure.

No, smoking, when my parents were young, was not only a cheap and sociable habit, but was sanctioned by many health professionals of the day. Turning the pages of family albums it's hardly surprising that in just about every photograph of my parents, there's almost always a burning cigarette held elegantly between my mother's fingers or hanging casually from my father's lip. The epitome of cool. Or so it seemed then.

That was then, though. Things are very different now, which is why supermodel Kate Moss's swaggering display in Paris on National No Smoking Day this year is, by contrast, so laughably uncool. Not the Louis Vuitton hotpants – OK, she's got decent pins –but the sashaying down the catwalk smoking a fag, thinking it's edgy. Admittedly I'm not in a position to preach, given my behaviour at my daughter's party, but then, as Rosa would be the first to point out, I'm not an international style icon for millions of impressionable young people. Apparently Moss and Vuitton wanted to stick a finger up at the "politically correct brigade" and demonstrate their right to freedom of choice. If my dad had the slightest inkling who Kate Moss was, he would choke on his nebuliser with derision.

My father came to Scotland at the end of the war with nothing but his strength of character and an already firmly entrenched addiction to nicotine. By the late 1960s Kazimierz Kapolka, impoverished teenage soldier, had miraculously metamorphosed into George Kennedy, successful Edinburgh architect, and was a shameless hedonist. And why not? Having had his family, his home and his education ripped away from him by war at just 13, he had fought for and earned the right to make his own choices about life. He was notorious, among other things, for wearing a leather thong with a lighter-holder round his neck at all times. No wasting time searching pockets for a light for him. He smoked flamboyantly and unashamedly, drawing smoke deeply through a mahogany cigarette holder – a small concession to health, you might think, but my father didn't do concessions; it was all about ritual and, yes, image.

He was a cartoonist's dream: strong, Slavic features; showy beard and moustache compensating for thinning auburn hair swept carelessly straight back; dark eyes smouldering flirtatiously behind iconic 1960's geek glasses; the smoking accessories – lighter swinging from its leather thong, cigarette holder clasped jauntily between excellent teeth – as much a part of him as the nose on his face.

Meanwhile, my mother, with her classic pixie crop, fantastic bone structure and inherent sense of style could have given Moss a run for her money any day, except that mum wasn't narcissistic enough to even realise that she was stunning. On nostalgic days I gaze at photos of my handsome parents taken back in the day and a vivacious, chic couple with an infectious lust for life grin back at me.

The images are swiftly hijacked by flashbacks of mum in hospital: her head stubbly and bald; four deep indentations on her skull from when her head was screwed into a metal helmet for Gamma Knife surgery; her face bloated by steroids, eyes sad with regret and confusion.

She gave up cigarettes – easily, ironically, after a lifetime of failed attempts – the moment a sinister shadow on her lung was discovered, but one of my most enduring memories from that time is of other cancer patients shivering in their dressing gowns outside the hospital, connected to portable drips, smoking – still slaves to the habit that put them there in the first place.

And I think of dad, attached permanently to a new set of accessories, no longer the leather thong, but an alarm around his neck in case of medical emergency, a thermometer clenched between his teeth, an inhaler being puffed on rather than a cigarette, while the nasal tubes from his oxygen concentrator rub raw the inside of each nostril.

When things are really bad he is forcibly adorned with the tight fitting BiPAP mask, the COPD patient's ultimate accessory, which cuts painfully into his face and blasts oxygen into lungs so kaput they can no longer inflate themselves.

Had Kate Moss strutted down that Paris catwalk modelling one of those, she might have provided her legion of adulatory fans with a less puerile point to ponder and a more potent image to gasp at. I hope for her sake she doesn't find herself being fitted with a BiPAP mask in the future … or having her head screwed into a Gamma Knife helmet. Hotpants or no hotpants, not even she would look good in that.

I began writing this article on 2 March this year, just as dad's health took a dramatic turn for the worse. Since then, a lot of my time has been taken up visiting him either at home or in hospital, so this piece has been on the back burner.

He died on 25 June. Right up until the end my father retained his love of life. He didn't want to leave and if he hadn't smoked I reckon he would have partied on until he was 150 at least, so strong and effervescent was he in his prime. He never once moaned about his condition, but accepted it as an inevitable consequence of his freely made decision to enjoy smoking – which, it has to be said, he did.

Whilst he didn't do regrets or preaching, he would occasionally hold up his hands and say: "Look at me. This is what I did to myself. Will this be your choice too?"

I haven't smoked since Rosa's birthday.

I've been here before, though.

In spite of everything, when it comes to cigarettes, I can never say never.