Living with Alcoholism

“He died last November,” the little boy said through the storm door. He was home alone and didn’t want to say anything more to the strange woman who had knocked, asking if he knew where the man who lived next door went.

Every year when the new phone book came, I looked him up. One year there was no listing, so I drove over to the last known address and started knocking on doors. That’s how I learned my ex-husband of 17 years had died.

And I felt nothing. We had been separated for 10 years and there had been no contact for the last eight. They say you only remember the good things, but none of those memories came, just the bad ones. And when a tear finally came, it was a tear for me. Selfish to the end, he would have said.

My husband had a drinking problem. Even now I find it difficult to say he was an alcoholic. He so vehemently denied it. He did not hit me. He was not a violent drunk. He did not drink and drive. He did not embarrass himself in public. He did not miss work because of his drinking—much.

He just missed having a life. He was a secret drinker. When I first met him, he did not have a telephone even though he could afford one. Telephones enabled people to call him at home and catch him drunk. He did not drink in bars. He did not drink with friends. We didn’t have friends, because a secret drinker cannot start drinking until they leave.

I associate him with sounds, the click of the cigarette lighter as he lit up as soon as he woke up, the pop of a pull tab as the first beer was opened as soon as he came home. Then another beer, another cigarette, another beer. Pop, click, pop, click.

He did not drink for pleasure, but for purpose, as if there was some emotional pain he had to anesthetize. But his life was no more miserable than anyone else’s. His father died when he was young. There was a first failed marriage. He had given up music and the military, two vocations he claimed he liked, for a tedious job on the night shift, which gave him all day to recover from his drinking the night before. There was happiness to be found, but he didn’t look for it. It would have interfered with his drinking.

He bought the cheapest beer the 7-Eleven had, Milwaukee Best, a six-pack at a time. Sometimes that would be enough to get through the night. Sometimes a second trip was necessary. Sometimes tall cans were called for. He could not buy a case at a time because if he bought a case, he would drink a case at one sitting. We could not have a bottle of vodka or whiskey in the house for special occasions because it would not be there in the morning. It would be empty, and he’d still be in his recliner, too stunned to go to bed, his head hanging, his fly open because the mechanics of pulling up the zipper became too intricate.

But he could quit anytime, he said, so he didn’t have a problem. And he did quit, several times. And started again.

When I was very young and first married to him, I believed what he said. It wasn’t until after I left that I finally understood the disaster we had lived. He had me believe the drinking was my fault. I had come to our marriage with a child, placing the burden of having to pay for another man’s child on him. I did not make an adequate income. Even his failure to progress in his job was somehow my fault. His bosses didn’t like me.

When I accidentally put a dent in his new car, he called in sick and drank 18 tall beers in one sitting. I had destroyed all the joy he had in his new car, he said, and that joy could never be regained. He left the dent in the car as a rebuke to me.

He embraced any and every excuse to justify his drinking. The responsibility, the guilt, belonged to everyone but him. His mother liked his brother best. His first wife made him quit the military. A co-worker was promoted over him. His car was not the best and newest at the stoplight.

I was younger than he was, and he never took me seriously. When I became upset about the toll his drinking and smoking was taking on his health, it became a field of battle between us. I was the enemy, not the concerned wife.

And just as serious as the physical toll was the emotional price. There was no affection extended to my son or me since it was vital to the drinking scenario that we remain the root cause of it. We did little as a family. Days off were spent sleeping it off, and the waking hours spent in front of the television, putting the liquor back in.

It wasn’t until after it was over that I realized the psychological damage we had sustained from living such a dry existence in his wet world. I had no sense of confidence or worth. I gave my son a biological father who had run off and a stepfather who withheld love, praise and approval.

I kept a fill-in-the-blanks father’s day card my son wrote when he was 13. At the time we thought it was funny, but looking at it now is heart-breaking and tragic. “I think my dad knows how to sleep better than anyone in the whole world,” he filled in the blank. “I think he likes to spend his time worrying most of all.” The best thing they did together, he filled in was “watch TV.”

For what his dad does to make him feel better, he wrote, “Nothing. He never makes me feel better.” Under why he liked to hug him, he wrote, “I never hug him.” On another page, he honestly recorded that he didn’t want to grow up to be like his stepdad. This strange card ended, “Happy Father’s Day.”

Even after I finally left the marriage, I felt like I was at fault, that I owed him something for not hanging in until the end, and I continued to do his banking, pay his bills, buy his groceries and do his laundry. When he called me to ask if it was 8 a.m. or 8 p.m.— a disorientation he felt when he was on vacation and the drinking, sleeping, working patterns dissolved—I called an ambulance. They found more than 120 empty beer cans in his kitchen and a man who did not know who the current President of the United States was. It cost $14,000 in IV fluids to sober him up in the hospital, just in time to discover he was about to die of an abdominal aneurysm. He had masked the pain with beer.

As they loaded him into the ambulance that day, he yelled, “I’ll get you for this,” to me. I had brought strangers into his apartment and revealed his secret drinking. Never mind that I had saved his life. His work place found out, although I suspect they knew.

He was put into rehab and counseling after that, and his therapist must have told him he needed to get control of his own life, pay his own bills, do his own shopping, wash his own clothes. I did not hear from him again except through a lawyer who served me with divorce papers, and took my son and me out of his will. The lawyer talked to me like I was dirt.

Despite all this, you’d have a hard time finding anyone to say my husband was a bad guy. People he worked with liked him. He was easy going and quiet. As he often reminded me, he never hit me. He went to work and earned a living, supported his family. He provided us with a house, food, and clothes. Even now I feel like I am the bad one to say anything unkind. I am the traitor.

I thoroughly bought into the disease of alcoholism. If I had been a better wife, if I had been prettier, if I had made more money, or had a better personality, he would have stopped drinking for me. That’s what they want you to think. That he didn’t means I failed. I could not save him.

I know now none of that was true. I know I wasted many years of my own life living in the shadow of his drinking, and I sacrificed my only child to it by not looking for something better for both of us. But even that realization is accepting the blame. It always comes back to me. I am the guilty one.  And he would have drank to that.