It Never Stops

Good news first, then everything else: I made a road trip without breaking down or colliding with car-killing quadrupeds. My grandmother looks good and she feels better, more so than anyone but her expected- she may even be allowed to return home in two or three weeks if she continues to do well with her therapy. It's a cause for celebration.

At least it should have been.

I didn't get home until late last night and when I did, I had a phone message from my brother. Call him right away- it's important. So I did.


It turns out that the man who got our mother pregnant has started drinking again. If I had taken the time to visit him, I might have been able to stop what happened from happening, but I didn't do that and as a result , things at home have gone from better to worst in less than a day.

Yesterday, dad apparently fell down the stairs at the family house and tumbled into my grandmother's most precious piece of furniture - her glass China cabinet. He completely destroyed it, along with many of her most cherished and fragile items...a porcelain doll that Granpa carried back from Okinawa after WWII...plates that belonged to her parents...glassware gifts from relatives no longer with us- I don't yet know the full list of losses or all the details of the accident. I'm sitting at work waiting for and dreading more information.


Here's what I know:


Sharon, who is a friend of Grannie's from church, had stopped by the house to feed the cat and check up on my dad, who can't be trusted, him having a long history of relapsing and fucking up. Sharon used her key to let herself in and saw blood and broken glass everywhere- but no dad. She was calling 911 when my blood-soaked parent returned from the store, carrying more beer. According to my second-hand info, he had a number of serious cuts but refused to seek medical attention- he was more than a little abusive to Sharon, who really does not deserve such treatment, and she left him to stew in his own demise.


After talking to my brother, I actually tried to call my dad. Of course, there was no answer.


I hate myself for making that call. I need to stop caring.


I have tried to care- I had fooled myself into thinking it was possible- I had thought that I had reached a sort of peace with my father and that this peace might possibly lead to forgiveness.


Instead, I am humiliated for wasting so much time and energy on such a lost cause- and my grandmother not only feels disgraced ( it's a small town and everyone knows about my dad) but when she heard about the accident her blood pressure sank like a stone. My father is killing himself and he's killing his mother at the same time- she has undergone weeks of grueling therapy; tests; rehab sessions and life-training classes just to learn that her adult son has smashed what few belongings of hers he hasn't already stolen and sold and is currently lying in a puddle of blood, piss and beer. The puddle he is occupying is on her new carpet where her china cabinet used to be.

When he relapses, her health fails. It's a cycle that's been going on for decades and I have done everything I can think of to break it but I can't. He has to stop drinking or he will die and he knows it - but he doesn't care. He doesn't care if he kills his own mother in the process.

He told his mother that he wants to die.

She has been fighting for her life and her son tells her that he wants to die, that being dead is better than having to take care of her.


If he lives, his actions will kill his mother.


If he dies, his death will have the same result.


I have once again given up all hope for my father. My brother, who has been considerably more loyal than myself, has also given up. My father's younger brother is hardly any better than my dad, he's a daily drunk in a deep state of denial, so there's no help to be had from him.

So the cycle starts again. My dad is a wounded fugitive from reality, a menace to every noun he can reach , and my grandmother is literally worrying herself to death over him and there isn't anything that can be done. The local police don't care what dad does as long as he keeps it off the road and dad has repeatedly turned down our Pastor's very generous offer of a church-funded 28-day rehab clinic. He needs to be locked up and forced to change- it is never going to come from inside him.
I don't know if there is anything left inside my father at all. I don't think he can come back from the place he has chosen for himself and that's where the pain really hits- that he has has chosen this life for himself.
People like to say that alcoholics lack willpower, but that is incorrect. It takes a lot of willpower to cut yourself into ribbons and still manage to limp to the store for more beer.
That takes serious determination.

You would think that no store would sell beer to a man covered in blood, but obviously that is also incorrect. After I hit a deer on Independence Day, I was forced to buy paper towels and cleanser at a crowded gas station and I had deer's blood all over me. Deer blood, for those without large-scale roadkill experience, looks exactly like human blood; over the course of an hour or more, only one person bothered to even ask why I was covered in blood.

Why should they care? Why do I care?

I am trying really hard to not care. I don't want to care. I am tired of the pain of caring and I am weary of the burden of false hope, but what else is there?

It would be so easy to start drinking again. Soon, all my problems would become other people's worries- on top of the frantic phone calls about his father, my brother would also start getting emergency calls regarding myself.

I like to tell people that it's fear that keeps me sober, and in a large part this is true. I know what will happen if I drink and it involves pain , bleeding and a slow death by self-torture.
That scares me away from the booze, but there's more to it than just that; this never-ending trauma with our father is having terrible emotional effects on my brother and I love my brother too much to inflict any more unnecessary, tragic alcoholic bullshit on him. I can't say as how I'm especially fond of myself right now, because I am not- but I love my Twin and the thought of causing him any more pain makes me feel as broken and torn as the deer that I killed two weeks ago.

So I'll add love to my short list of reasons to stay sober.
It will be enough. It has to be.