Tobacco.org

• Watching his mother's life go up in smoke  

Aaron Gray chronicled his mother's death from lung cancer in a heartbreaking short film that can be seen on YouTube titled, "Thanks Tobacco: You Killed My Mom." . . .

And he remembers hiding her cigarettes. Breaking them in half. Doing whatever a child could do to try and make things better. But it wasn't until his mother died of lung cancer at age 56 that he could do something to make a difference.

He told her story.

"If I didn't do this, she'd just be another nameless grave," said Gray, 37, of Redondo Beach. "I wanted to do something to make her life matter." . . .

Charlotte Patricia Gray was born Aug. 21, 1950, and took up smoking cigarettes in 1963 at age 13 - long before the public knew about the dangers of smoking. A single mom, she tried numerous times to quit but couldn't beat the addiction.

"She had tried hypnosis. She had tried acupuncture, the patch, Nicorette gum, candy. She had tried going cold turkey," said Gray. In October 2006, she was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. A month later, she suffered a stroke that put her in the hospital, where she died four months later.

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