Final wish granted

By LANE DeGREGORY

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 29, 2000

He wanted you to know Bryan Curtis started smoking at 13, never thinking that 20 years later it would kill him. In his last weeks, he set out with a message for young people.

ST. PETERSBURG -- A consumer group in Canada posted his deathbed picture in dozens of schools and factories. Web sites in Germany and Poland and Brazil featured the frightening photo. Time magazine published it, too: a skeletal face sunk deep in a pillow.

And at least 300 people across the United States wrote the man's mom, saying they had been inspired by her son's story.

More than a year after Bryan Lee Curtis died, he's still saving lives.

"His last wish worked," Louise Curtis said of her youngest son. "He said he'd be happy if he even reached one person. I have no idea how many people that picture has touched. But I bet it's been thousands. I'm still getting cards.

"Bryan has helped an awful lot of folks. I'm so proud of him."

Bryan Curtis was 34. He was a mechanic, a roofer, a construction worker. He smoked two packs of Marlboro Reds almost every day, for nearly 20 years.

In early April 1999, the robust blond man with the wide moustache started suffering strange pains in his side. His mom insisted he see a doctor. He died of lung cancer nine weeks later.

He left a wife, a 9-year-old daughter, a 3-year-old son.

The day before he died, he asked his mom to help him get the word out. If others see what smoking did to me, he said, maybe they would stop -- or never start in the first place. So Louise Curtis called the newspaper.

The story ran June 15 under the headline: "He wanted you to know." The color photo -- snapped hours before his last, labored breath -- was disturbing. It showed a shadow of the man Bryan Curtis had been just two months earlier. Bald from chemotherapy, unable to lift his hands or his head, he lay on his back in a black T-shirt.

His wife, Bobbi, and son, Bryan Jr., were crying beside his bed.

"Bobbi's still smoking. But she's down to no more than a pack a day now," Louise Curtis said of her daughter-in-law. "And that poor little boy. My poor grandson. He still misses his dad so much."

Bryan Jr. turned 4 in August. His mom and grandmother planned a big bash. "All that day, that poor kid kept asking, "When's Daddy coming to my party?' "What'd Daddy buy me for my birthday?' " Louise Curtis said. "His mama told him, "Daddy's got a special seat on a star in Heaven now. He'll be watching you. But he won't be here for your birthday.' "

So little Bryan asked to go see his dad. His mom and grandmother took him to the graveyard. "And he went right over, started pulling up the grass with his hands. "I got to get Daddy out of there,' he kept saying."

Louise Curtis started smoking even more after she buried Bryan. She upped her intake of Winstons to four packs a day. "I was so depressed," she said. "Seems like I just ate them cigarettes and kept needing more."

Then, just after Christmas, Louise Curtis thought she had a heart attack. An ambulance carried her to the hospital. Her heart was okay, but her health was fading. By the time doctors discharged her a few days later, she had quit smoking -- cold turkey.

"I can breathe better now," she said. "I don't have that rattling all night in my chest no more. And I don't hardly cough any anymore either."

Bryan Curtis' older brother and nephew have quit smoking, too. His sister, Judy, carries his deathbed picture in her wallet, to show people she sees smoking. "They couldn't stand to look at him, just before he died," Louise Curtis said of her other children. "But that sight is what changed things for them."

This year, the American Cancer Society estimates, smoking will kill 156,900 Americans. The sooner smokers stop, the more chance they have of saving themselves. By the time Bryan Curtis found out he was dying, it was too late.

His mom has gotten cards from mothers saying they posted Bryan's picture on their refrigerator to shock their teens out of smoking. She's gotten letters from children thanking her for saving their parents' lives. A lawyer in South Carolina quit after discussing Bryan's situation on an Internet chat room. An Orlando woman put her packs away after she saw the story online.

"See, when I read the story, I finally (after 16 years of fighting this damn addiction) used the anguish and pain and sickness of this poor guy and family as my resolve to never light up again," Jennine Brandon wrote in an e-mail. "We are the same age . . . and I would like his family to know that he saved my life."

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