Death and Its Abusers

A brief essay on the effects of substance abuse in relation to the grieving process

It’s funny, you know, when someone snaps. It’s like a whole life they’d never quite deemed possible suddenly becomes real. They see things differently. Their values, their experience, are broadened… or narrowed. It’s like a complete personality split formed in the presence of defiance, anger. Life- the act of living and what it means to live, is changed, altered indefinitely. That’s what it was like when he died. Life just… changed.

My uncle was an adventurous man. He spent summer after summer throughout most of his adult life as a river runner, taking on the monstrous rapids of the Colorado River with what can only be described as an honest display of a courageous and unnerving connection with the flowing waves of nature. To say he loved the outdoors would be an understatement. He lived for the warm, enlightening feel of sunlight spreading across his softly freckled cheeks and the chilling sensation of sweat cooling on his neck as wind gently caressed it. He was friendly, leaving a pleasant memory with anyone he connected with. And, as my mom would come to write in his eulogy, he had a hard time turning people down- always letting his river rat friends crash on his couch when they had nowhere to turn, despite the numerous possessions still missing from their previous visits. However, as with any person, my uncle had his flaws, and he had a hard time turning away not only his mischievous friends, but also the ever famous Jack Daniels, Captain Morgan, and Richard Hennessy.

            It was warm outside- a typical October day for Phoenix. I could feel little beads of moisture forming on my shoulder blades underneath my oversized t-shirt as I made the long trek back to my dorm. I’m okay today, I think. Everything is going to be okay. I told myself this everyday though; because, during the day, things are okay. You have obligations, responsibilities. You can pretend it never happened….That you never received that horrifying voice mail in which your mom is yelling at the nurse through her sobs mumbling something about her brother being dead. That you never stood at the alter above the casket, sternly reciting the Hail Mary during the rosary of the funeral.

 I turn my key in the doorknob and stumble groggily into my dorm room where the birthday card he made me for my 13^th birthday is presented before me. He made it while in prison for his third DUI, and it’s the only thing he ever gave me. Most days, I ignore the presence of this item- pretending that this too does not exist. But today, I pause for a few seconds before removing the tack holding it in place and open the card, taking in the words I try so hard to forget. “I’m healthy now” it reads. “When I’m home we can go skiing and play scrabble”. Tears well up in my eyes but they are not tears of sadness.

 When someone special dies, one goes through five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They don’t necessarily go in order, and last varying amounts of time. They can look different on everyone, yet most people exhibit common behaviors within each stage. However, when someone’s death is soaked in volatile liquids or substances that take a person from you mentally before slowly killing them physically, these stages are exaggerated, for now you no longer just have chance or God to blame, but also the substance, the person, and even yourself. These stages are broadened. Especially that of anger.

I stare at these words, rereading them over and over in my head until I slowly fasten them back to the corkboard. It’s then that I feel my entire mind comes to a halt and before I know it everything feels different. I’m no longer asking myself why he was taken from us or whether my family will make it through. Instead I’m internally shrieking at the top of my lungs, cursing him for every time he pulled the tab on what was supposed to be his last beer, for every time he said looked up as us from the all too familiar hospital bed and mumbled some bullshit about stopping for good, and for every time he looked my grandmother dead in the eye and said “No mom, I’m sober. I swear”.

I turn away from the spiteful board and find my way to the black, stiff office chair facing my desk. I sit and stare blankly at the white wall, sensing nothing- as if daring the world to exist around me. “How could he?” I think. Over and over again I repeat these three words to myself. “I mean seriously, how could he?” My breathing is shallow and quick, close to hyperventilation and reeking of the betrayal I feel emanating throughout my body. We were there. We were the ones who sat at his bedside as doctor after doctor marched the many hospital rooms in their stiff, unforgiving white coats, each with the same reminder, the same verdict: stop drinking or die. We were there. We were there on the good days- the ones where he stood a little taller, a little prouder, with clear speech and a strait walk. And we were there on the bad ones too- the ones where he would work so hard and make so much progress only to reach for that one last flask hidden in the darkest corners of his supposedly sobriety ridden home. We were there, to love, to encourage. We were there. I was there. Judgment free… Or at least I was for a while.

When you’re little, really little, it’s easy to be close to an alcoholic. You don’t know what it means be drunk. You don’t know what it looks like- what it sounds or smells like. You take the person for who they are right there in that given moment. As you get older however, this blinding childlike innocence is stripped away and you begin to see things as they truly are. You smell that unmistakable stench of stale beer leaking through the pore of your loved one. You hear their words bumping and sliding into one another, forming piecey and sometimes vicious statements. But above all, you see wave after wave of disappointment wash over the faces of those who want nothing more than to see this person, their friend-brother-son-cousin-uncle, themselves again.

I continue to sit in silence while my thoughts bellow so loudly I can feel them echoing against the walls of my skull. “He should have tried harder.” I shriek. It’s his fault. It has to be. But what about me? What role did I really play in helping him get better? This man used to my best friend. He was the one who rocked me as an infant, who punished me when my dad wasn’t around a whole lot, who spent hour after hour in the burning sun starting and restarting my beat up 1968 clunker when I finally was old enough to drive. And how did I repay him? I turned my back on him. I saw what was doing to my mom, to my grandma, and I turned away. I stopped talking to him. I stopped seeing him. In all honesty, I even despised him. “How could I?” I think. And just like that, my head goes silent. The pounding, loud forceful anger becomes quieter, deeper and much more deadly. What if I had tried to help him? What if I voiced, just once, how badly it hurt me to see him choose his precious Smirnoff bottle over us, over me, time and time again? “I should have tried harder,” my mind whispers. I blink away a few tears, pull my legs up on the chair against my chest and wrap my arms tightly around them- a feeble attempt to hold myself together despite the agonizing guilt ripping apart my insides. The world feels cold, and I feel different. Unrecognizable. I’m to blame. He is to blame. Everyone is to blame, and I don’t feel like facing any of them. Not even myself. My mom says this in natural, and my grandma says not to think this way, and I know, deep down, that I’m being irrational, but really, I just want to escape this world of addiction induced grief.

 

Many months later, I again return to my dorm room where I come face to face with that same birthday card. I pull it from the cork board and take in the words that never fail to make my head spin just a little bit. “I’m healthy now,” it reads. “When I’m home we can go skiing and paly scrabble.” I close my eyes and loosely fumble these words around in my head, but I don’t feel angry or betrayed. I’m not really even all that sad. Instead I feel okay. Really okay. I feel… acceptance. Because, when all is said and done, when you’ve fought through those other four brutal, agonizing steps of grief,  you learn that terms such as liver failure, serosis, sobriety, and AA will always have a greater meaning to you. You learn that hospitals, churches, and river rafts will never look quite right or feel the same. But most importantly, you learn that they tried. That they did their best with the life they were given, and that their addictions didn’t determine who they were a person. You learn, you remember, that they loved you, and want you to be happy. You learn this. You learn it; you know it and you feel it. You feel it in every scrabble game. In every ray of sunlight that grazes your face as you glide along the snow covered mountain. And in every butterfly pulling at your insides in the seconds before you plunge into the heart of the treacherous rapid called life.