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Women's Health Australia

Stop the Shame Game

When Jennifer Pastiloff was eight years old, she got into an argument with her dad over smoking. He’d promised to quit but wasn’t following through. She flushed a load of his menthol cigarettes down the toilet. “I told him he always broke promises and I said, ‘I hate you!’, the way young kids do in those situations,” she says. “It wouldn’t have been that big a deal, but it ended up being the last thing that I said to him.”

He died from a heart attack shortly after, aged just 38. “I thought I had caused the stress that killed him,” Jennifer says. “I was so ashamed that

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