IT’S THE nightmare scenario.

After years of long-term cigarette addiction, a loved one is diagnosed with cancer. Years of chemotherapy, surgeries, attempts at quitting and relapses, and bone-deep exhaustion follow. Meanwhile, the statute of limitations to bring a personal injury lawsuit against the tobacco company ticks down, then passes. Eventually, the patient does, too.

The patient’s family members finally turn to the courts, thinking they have a few years to bring a civil suit for wrongful death, only to hit what seems to them like a contradiction in law. It may not matter if they sued within three years of their loved one’s death, as the wrongful death statute seems to set out, because the statute of limitations on personal injury claims expires three years from the diagnosis. Cigarette manufacturers say the wrongful death statute doesn’t reset the clock, since that would open them up to being sued multiple times for the same underlying harm to the same person, on the hook before and after death with possible decades in between.

In oral arguments scheduled for Monday, the Supreme Judicial Court will step into this gut-wrenching issue, hearing two cases – Cuddy v. Philip Morris USA Inc. and Fuller v. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. – asking whether family members of people who died from health complications connected to long-time cigarette smoking can bring wrongful death suits if their relative’s right to sue for those injuries expired before death.

The wives of Ralph Fabiano and John Fuller, lifelong smokers who died in the mid-2010s after the statute of limitations to sue for personal injury connected to their smoking elapsed, are appealing lower court rulings in both cases. They argue that the state Legislature clearly meant to allow wrongful death lawsuits for up to three years after a person dies.

On the other side, cigarette manufacturers and sellers argue that the high court’s own past rulings say that wrongful death suits extend from rights that a person should have had at the time they died. If the person couldn’t have sued for the injury if they were alive – because their chance to do so had passed – their surviving relatives can’t either.

“There is, admittedly, logic in this outcome,” Associate Justice Brian Davis wrote in the Superior Court’s dismissal in the Fabiano case. Allowing people to sue after death when there was already an expired statute of limitations would mean defendants could be sued for the same harm “on a staccato ‘on again, off again, on again’ basis,” he said. “The irrationality of such an approach is obvious.”

However, Davis acknowledged, “there is, at the same time, also a potential for unfairness in this outcome,” because this interpretation of liability timelines “arguably changes the law governing wrongful death actions in a way that could deprive actual or potential litigants – who reasonably believed that such an action could be brought, in all instances, within three years of the decedent’s death – of the right to sue.”

A lifelong smoker since the age of 15, Fabiano died from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) that he contracted from smoking L & M brand cigarettes made by Philip Morris USA, Inc., distributed by Garber Bros., Inc., and sold by Shaw Supermarkets, the first complaint says. He was diagnosed with emphysema in 2004, and state law gives people three years from the time of injury to bring personal injury lawsuits.

“When a ‘creeping disease’ such as COPD progresses as slowly as it did here, the sufferer may have little reason to pursue a personal injury claim during the early stages of the disease when symptoms can be mild, damages could be minimal, and the sufferer may have no way of knowing that the disease will prove fatal many years later,” the Fabiano complaint said.

Fabiano died 10 years after his diagnosis, at 67 years old, without bringing the issue to court.

Fuller died from lung cancer in 2016, at 63 years old. The cancer came from smoking Camel cigarettes manufactured by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and sold to him by Cumberland Farms, Inc., according to the other suit.

Fuller’s suit says that he fell into lifelong smoking habits as a teenager, influenced by the rugged marketing of the Camel brand, even dressing like the “Camel Man” model.

He was “a victim of the decades-long conspiracy by R.J. Reynolds and the other major tobacco companies to hide what they knew about the dangers and addictiveness of cigarettes,” the complaint says.

A 2012 diagnosis of lung cancer led to the removal of his right lung and years of painful treatments as cancer went into remission and later spread throughout his body. Four years after the diagnosis, Fuller and his family sued in 2016, but only under the state Consumer Protection Act because the time to bring a personal injury suit had  elapsed by then. He died eight months later.

Grace Fabiano and Mary Fuller sued for their husbands’ wrongful deaths within three years of each man’s passing. They argue the plain text of the law sets out that period of time to bring suit.

Wrongful death generally means that a person died because of someone else’s negligent or reckless behavior. In the context of cigarettes, this often involves suits referencing years of misleading campaigns that downplayed the dangerousness and addictiveness of tobacco use, which can lead to cancer and other ultimately fatal health conditions.

A provision in the state’s wrongful death statute states that there can be compensation for the death “under such circumstances that the deceased could have recovered damages for personal injuries if his death had not resulted.” It also says the suits must be brought “within three years from the date of death,” or within three years of finding out that there may be a basis for a wrongful death suit.

The cigarette companies and supermarkets in these cases do not grapple with the cause of these men’s deaths. Rather, their argument turns on whether the language and history of the statute gave plaintiffs a three-year-window after their loved one’s death to sue regardless of a personal-injury statute of limitations.

The Massachusetts Defense Lawyers Association and the Product Liability Advisory Council submitted “friend of the court” briefs in the Fabiano case arguing, in line with the defendants, that it does not.

They point to recent SJC wrongful death cases concerning people who waived their rights to sue before they died. These cases concluded wrongful death is a “derivative” action in Massachusetts, because the law considers whether the person could have sued while alive.

The same logic extends to expired statutes of limitations, the defendants said.

“Mrs. Fuller’s attacks on this straightforward approach depend on ignoring this Court’s precedents and the statutory text and resorting to policy-based arguments for a statute-of-limitations-only exception to otherwise settled and generally applicable law,” the defendants in that case said in their brief.

The Product Liability Advisory Council, a non-profit trade association of corporate product manufacturers, said that  “concluding that plaintiff has a viable wrongful death claim would violate the important public policies underlying both the personal injury statute of limitations and the Legislature’s foundational goal in creating a derivative wrongful death statute – to allow the decedent to control whether and how claims arising from his own injuries may be asserted.”

Put simply, the defendants and their supporters argue that, since the two men wouldn’t have been able to sue on the underlying cigarette-based harm by the time they died, neither can their relatives.

But the Fabiano and Fuller estates say that there are also strong policy reasons why a person might decide not to sue over their injuries during their lifetime.

Manufacturers’ and stores’ “choice to continue selling products that cause these diseases has inevitably deprived thousands of similar Massachusetts families of their loved ones long after the time to file a personal injury action had expired,” the Fabiano plaintiffs said in their brief. “A smoker who is slowly dying from one of these diseases could reasonably decide to forego filing a personal injury action, so as not to deprive his or her loved ones of the right to pursue a wrongful death claim and recover the compensation they’ll need after the decedent expires.”