I just put my wife on a plane to Amsterdam today. I’ll be a single parent for a week, and it's all because of smoking. She is going for a last visit with her Aunt Gerda, who at the age of 75, was recently diagnosed with Stage-4 lung cancer, which is basically a death sentence. Aunt Gerda is a wonderful person, married to a charming man, whom I had the pleasure of visiting a few years ago in her small apartment outside Amsterdam. She is about to lose 10 years of her life expectancy due solely to smoking.

We talk about the number of deaths from smoking and are numbed by the statistics, until they come back to haunt us in the face of an individual we know. And the numbers are so large (440,000 deaths a year in the U.S. alone) that for most of us the pain and suffering will become personal at some point in our lives.

As I work hard to juggle taking care of three children and work over the next week, and as my wife struggles to fly halfway around the world to have a farewell conversation with a loved one, I am reminded forcefully of all the unmeasured ripple effects resulting from the deaths and chronic diseases caused by smoking: grandchildren who will never know a grandparent, wives and husbands who will not enjoy retirement together, co-workers who will not have the benefit of a colleague's presence, music unrecorded (George Harrison) and movies unmade (Humphrey Bogart). Literally millions of “might-have-beens” cut off by the seemingly simple act of smoking cigarettes.

I am proud to be working for a company offering a tobacco cessation program that every day is helping people who know they “should” quit, and who want to quit, but haven’t previously been given the tools to actually help them succeed. I only wish we could do more, so that people like Aunt Gerda didn’t have to die early for such a ridiculous reason as smoking cigarettes. And so that the rest of us didn’t have to suffer the loss from their unnecessary early exit from life.