Unfashionable Cancer

This is a photo of my mother on her wedding day in 1957. After a life of NOT smoking and not living with a smoker and not allowing smoking in her house, she was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in the summer of 2000. After a long courageous battle with this horrible malady, she passed away in November of 2003.
When you tell people you lost your mother to cancer, they are immediately sympathetic. When they ask what type of cancer and they hear it was lung cancer they react in a shocking manner, immediately the say, "Ohhhhh, lung cancer." As if having lung cancer no longer makes their death a tragedy, as if they deserved to die from this disease. When you then explain that your loved one never smoked, their faces show immediate confusion. Almost like you suddenly began to speak a foreign language to them.
People die from lung cancer everyday and their loved ones are made to feel as if their loss is less important or less sympathetic because it was, in their opinion, self inflicted.
After living with the stigma of losing a family member to this 'unfashionable cancer' I truly believe NO victim or their loved ones should be made to feel this disrespect, no matter what their personal habits, it shouldn't matter if they smoked five packs of cigarettes a day, or none, they suffer horribly enough through the disease, they shouldn't have to suffer from the stigma as well.