[majewsky]

> My mother is dying of lung cancer from smoking right now.

I would like to say something encouraging, but can't think of anything fitting given the relative anonymity of this conversation.

> she would smoke around me despite it causing me and my sister to have asthma attacks

For me it was mostly my father. There was a time when everyone in my family (except me) smoked, but my siblings and my mother quit before or around the time when I got asthma. My father hung onto it for another 15 years. Then during a checkup, his doctor theorized that he may have lung cancer. The tests came back negative, but just visualizing this fate vividly caused my father to quit smoking from one day to the next.