Sue Ontiveros: Take care of yourself and Mom will thank you

Hey, instead of fretting about Carrie Fisher’s mom, think about your own mother.

I wouldn’t let myself post that sentence on social media as news of the death of Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds was breaking. Too harsh then. Not now.

It was startling to hear that the “Singin’ In The Rain” star had died just one day after her daughter, author/writer Carrie Fisher, lost her life. If social media could physically move, I think we would have felt the reverberations. The masses speculated that the mother’s heart was so broken after losing her daughter that she herself died. Maybe.

But it really would do all of us — particularly women — good to consider the facts. It’s too easy to call the year 2016 a particularly vengeful angel of death and leave it at that. (Personally, 2016 was a harsh one for my family, and yet I don’t think the calendar gods had it in for us. It’s just the way things happened.)

But, the social media world wailed, the always witty Fisher was so young, just 60. And a heart attack, so shocking.

Really, a woman in her 60s having a heart attack surprised you? Too many women think their biggest foe is breast cancer. In actuality it is heart disease. Cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 killer of American women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Some 267,000 American women die from it annually, which is six times as many as those who succumb to breast cancer, as the Women’s Heart Foundation website reminds us. Yet it’s the fear of breast cancer that motivates women to take action, while ignoring the dangers of heart disease.

Heredity and age are two risks for heart disease that you can’t control. But then there’s smoking. Stats show some 15 percent of American women continue to smoke, and photos show us Carrie Fisher was one of them.

I don’t know what Fisher’s reasons for smoking were, but for a lot of women it’s a way to keep their weight down, to handle stress. Bad move. I’ve spent a lot of my time as a journalist heading up sections/pages/blogs dealing with personal health. One thing I’ve learned is that a lifetime of smoking more often than not comes back to haunt a person. Yeah, they might look fine physically; that’s something many people have observed about Fisher and 53-year-old singer George Michael, again someone often photographed smoking who surprised us when he didn’t wake up on Christmas Day. But that outer shell can be deceiving.

We associate smoking with lung cancer, but we forget what a number it does on our hearts. It really shouldn’t surprise us when the heart of a smoker fails; instead, marvel that it was able to withstand so much for so long.

As for Debbie Reynolds, the entertainer was 84 and news stories say she was in ill health in recent times. She already was frail. It appears that losing her beloved daughter was just too much.

Which brings us to mothers everywhere. (And dads too, of course.) All parents really want is for their kids to be OK. And when that doesn’t happen? What a heartbreak. As my cousins reminded me, our fairly healthy grandmother died a mere 11 days after their mother/her daughter did. Outliving your children takes an unimaginable toll.

It’s a new year; clean up your life. Ditch the cigarettes, eat well, move more, drink less. You don’t want to break your mama’s heart now, do ya?

Email: sueontiveros.cst@gmail.com

Follow Sue Ontiveros on Twitter: Follow @Sueontiveros

Tweets by @Sueontiveros

Send letters to: letters@suntimes.com