My mother was a smoker all of her life. She died three years ago of lung cancer. This is the most difficult thing to go through as a family member watching your loved one whittle away in front of your eyes. We only knew for two weeks that she had stage 4 lung cancer. Within a week she stopped talking, then she stopped eating and drinking. I not only lost my mom to lung cancer, I also lost two aunts and four uncles to this horrible disease.