I’ve just moved this blog post from our more public blog where friends and family know who we are. We’ve both found that we have to censor alot of what we say because of this. On this anonymous blog we can post what we like. This post is about my sister who is an acute alcoholic who is also dependent on pain killers. She is very highly functioning as in she is married with two kids and until recently had a very big job with a big company. Mostly she is a very beautiful vibrant person who when she is sober is a joy to be around. Increasingly though her alcoholism has been worsening and every time she falls off she seems to fall harder and deeper. This post is about being the family member of someone who is self-destructive.
I’m not sure if it’s six or seven years that we’ve been drawn into the black hole of my sister’s alcoholism. Who knows. The years start to blur into each other. What I do know though, is that this time, I am planning on keeping my distance, this time I don’t want to get involved in the daily drama of phone calls even at 3,000 kilometres away. I am firm in this. I am, afterall, not the first line of defence. I might not even be the second line of defence. This person has their own immediate family who can deal with it. This is what I tell myself , anyways. So when I get a call early this morning with the latest bad news update, I don’t say what I had prepared to say which was, I can’t talk about this anymore. There is nothing we can do and there is nothing I can do. I can’t do this. But I can’t say this. And the reason I can’t is because it feels too much like giving up and not caring and I’m not there. Not yet anyways.I am still hoping that somewhere in this downward spiral that she will somehow find a toehold to pull herself up and out of it one more time. Only then will we all breath a collective sigh of relief to see this beautiful person come back to us. Only then will we be able to move on with our lives, at least for a little while. It doesn’t seem to matter. Even though I’m not as close to the fire as others are I still feel the tenuous reach of this terrible disease spread like a cancer across the 3000 kilometres that divide us. So in spite of myself, and in spite of all of ourselves, we as a family are still drawn into this black hole. Not as black as hers. Not as big, not as dark, but it casts a long, deep shadow.Tonight at dinner we sit and talk about the day’s events and of course the conversation turns to “it” and like a slow hard burn I can feel the fury start to rise in me. Against her. Against everything. Against all the criminals in this situation. I hate them all. We dredge up memories of her ’stay’ at our house where like Alice in Wonderland our world was turned upside down. Her craziness became our craziness. Her captivity in this disease became ours and after a few days all of it started to feel ‘normal’. Demands for more alcohol had us running to the wine cellar and store for more until we realized that we had lost complete control. The road to sobriety is not earned by giving into demands for more alcohol and the secrets and confessions told by someone who is drunk don’t validate anything except their drunkeness. And when you finally say “no” you wait for the monster to appear. So then you call around for help and this organization tells you this, and the other that, she has to be sober to gain admittance, waiting lists, ambulances, withdrawal. And at the end of it, you still don’t have any answers. And every time we get here, we still don’t have any answers. You’re exhausted and you can’t even begin to imagine how the first line of defence feels. If it’s this exhausting for me so far away, I can’t imagine how hard it is for those closer to the fire. I can’t imagine how hard this struggle is for her. Have you ever tried to get someone sober who doesn’t want to be sober?
