I wrote this almost exactly a year before my dad died. It is amazing to think about how oblivious I was to what alcohol had done to his body:
I am in awe how for a split second I hated my life today.After getting off the phone with my dad who has been in a hospital in Santa Ana for a few days being monitored due to alcohol withdrawals, I had multiple flashbacks of every horrible memory I had from childhood of him being drunk. How my mother and I were left in TJ one night - how I was forbidden to see him for months when I was 9 because he passed out when he would watch me - to the rage he went into when my mother served him the divorce papers.
Then I think about how I joined him. How we would drink and drink, bottle after bottle. How I would polish off the bottles he had around the house - how I would ask him to bring a bottle home for us at the end of the day if there was nothing left -how during high school I eventually couldn’t think of a weekday that I did NOT drink. How bottles of Jim Beam, Tequila, Smirnoff, Bacardi, became the default answer to “What are we going to do tonight?” I remember picking him up from the police station when I was 19 because he had gotten a DUI. I remember him passing out on the floor regularly while I drank more. I thought about the horrible ways I treated people who loved me and trusted me. I thought about how many times I almost died from reckless decisions because I think sometimes maybe I did want to die. I would feel the same way as I used to as a child when I was trapped with my dad when he was drunk and I wanted to be the person who had the upper hand. It was a feeling that the one who was supposed to protect you is not in control either. I thought back on breaking things and destroying property. I remembered my ex-girlfriend crying hysterically when we had to carry my dad out of a restaurant bathroom because he had passed out. I could not understand why she was so upset. She cried “He is supposed to be the PARENT!”That is what a parent does, right? I remember the pride I had in drinking as much or more than him and MAINTAINING. I proved that you could drink bottles of alcohol and NOT pass out. I wanted to BEAT him at his own game. I thought back to my DUI classes and how I was shown that drinking wasn’t my problem, it was my solution. Life was my problem. I thought back to when the doctor told me in his office my liver wasn’t functioning correctly and asked if I needed “help.” I remember thinking about the warmth of that first double shot of vodka and how I felt like anything could happen, even as anything DID happen.
I remember waking up in jail the first week of a sentence in tears. I remember staring up into the covered fluorescent lights as I waited to be counted by the deputies,wondering how I got there. I remember the day when I said I was never going to drink again, and I MEANT it. Then I thought about having a few years of sobriety behind me by 2009 and still getting calls from the hospital that my dad’s liver was failing, that he wasn’t eating, that he was destroying himself.I remember finding him in his apartment in shambles on a binge. I remember cleaning his house for him and picking him up. I remember smelling the alcohol coming out of his pores and how I was disgusted but at the same time it was almost calling me to get blasted.
And now today, after I struggled, beating my head against the wall for a decade and a half, I was still there, that little kid picking his dad up off the ground trying to not blame myself and not hate my life. I felt robbed today being 35, 7 years of sobriety, and still struggling with this. Despite all the amazing and wonderful things I have been able to do; I feel like that my life is a story of a hamster wheel of addiction that never stops. I have very important people around me whom I love, who I feel like I am neglecting because booze is still robbing me. I feel robbed and for a split second, I hated that this was my life. Isn’t there any way to move past this? It is like I am Prometheus; I defied the alcohol gods and gave myself a gift of sobriety and my punishment is to have my internal organs eaten every day as a reminder of what I did. My objective mind tells me the truth though, this “curse” is a call to arms. It is what it is. All there is to do is stay sober. That is all I can do. It is who I am now. It is the only thing that can bring me solace.
