He Ain't Heavy

He could shoot the daylights out of a basketball hoop, design homes and kick your butt at Jeopardy. He was a math whiz, and played a mean guitar. He loved the Three Stooges and Eric Clapton and Warren Zevon. He was a nice looking, sharp witted, easily hurt and desperately, unbelievably insular. He was searching for something I'm fairly sure he never found and may not even have really been able to define himself. I lived with him for the better part of his life, perhaps 40 years or more, and his personality was still largely inaccessible to me. Our conversations, unfortunately, never progressed much past daily mundanities like the weather or the latest sports scores, what was going on in the neighborhood. Everything and anything but what we SHOULD have been talking about; family issues, the health of our parents, how we felt about each other, the world around us, his children, our jobs, our dreams. None of that was ever allowed. Maybe "allowed" is too strong word; maybe "tolerable" is a better one. I don't know. All I know is that because my brother WANTED to keep those topics at bay, they were kept at bay by everyone who came into contact with him, for decades.

And now, since he died 13 days ago, it's too late to ever bring them up again.

What an utter, pathetic waste alcoholism can cause. It's so insidious and ephemeral. Where does that demarcation start? One drink, two, four? Is it when you hit the whiskey? Is it when you lose your job? Or your health? At what point are you "too far gone"? Or is it never really too late? Is there hope right up until the bitter, awful end, if only you could see it, a shining bauble of light hidden deep within the dark, thick woods?

And who exactly is the villain in this tragedy? A bottle has no consciousness, nor does a can of beer. The alcoholic himself? A likely candidate, but science now informs us that alcoholism is a disease not a matter of "weak will" or "low moral character". So how can we really blame the person who is suffering? We don't yell at a cancer patient for having a malignant tumor; we don't assume he WANTS to get sicker. Of course, once one knows they are an alcoholic, if they choose not to pursue a remedy, it begins to fall a bit more into their lap, but even then, the chemical component of the disease is apparently so strong that "free will" begins to become a fuzzy issue. How about the ready horde of enablers that help the victim stay sick? The family, the friends and bar buddies that continue to contribute to the atmosphere that promotes the alcoholism? I guess they all take their share of the blame, but ultimately, there isn't anyone to truly pin this on, and that's one of the most frustrating aspects of the disease. There's no easy target for our well deserved rage. Oh you can yell and scream at the alcoholic but they aren't really listening anyway and ultimately all it does is make yourself feel guilty for being so negative.

Adding to the general misery that alcoholism causes is the absolute sense of helplessness you feel when confronted by it. There is nothing you can do, period. You can watch your loved one degenerate from a fully functioning human being into a chalk outline of a person, alive only to get to the next drink, whatever true passions and interests they had totally subsumed by their need for alcohol. The awful truth is that no matter what they say, they really don't (maybe can't) care about anything else beyond that. They don't care if your feelings are hurt, if their reputations are shot, if their health goes south, if they lose friends, jobs, family, money or respect. All of those things are secondary to the overwhelming need to numb everything and they are going to drink, somehow and somewhere. None of us like to think that there are unsolveable conflicts, and truthfully, there is an answer to this one too. But it's not one that we, the loved ones of the alcoholic, can provide. And that is a terribly hard and bitter lesson to learn. We are all raised to think that family is a unit, a group that becomes one in a crisis, that lives and breathes and sometimes dies, together. Our fates are intertwined. If one of us hurts, the others hurt. If one of us feels joy, likewise the others. We exist on two planes, as individuals but also as a sort of collective emotional consciousness.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that feeling. It gives us strength in hard times, and provides comfort that we aren't alone in our daily battles. Their is strength in numbers and Heaven knows we all need all the strength we can get.

But there's danger with this dynamic as well. What happens to the family that is utterly enmeshed in each other's lives when one of their number falls prey to a disease that is killing them and that can't be addressed by the others? The others get sick. And getting sick doesn't help the alcoholic at all. In fact, it ensures that he or she will STAY SICK. Because we feel guilty and by our very nature, somewhat responsible for our loved ones' happiness, we don't want to disconnect ourselves from them. We think this is abandoning them, or betraying them. Actually, the "letting go" is an acknowledgement of how serious the situation is. It's a behavioral alarm that should send a strong signal to the sick member; your behavior is hurting yourself and the group and in order to save the group, you need to be disconnected until your behavior changes. We owe family many things; love, support, loyalty and aid in times of trouble. But we don't owe them our happiness and our health. Even for the martyr wannabes among us, this is an illogical proposition. We can all let the loved ones' disease KILL us, and they will STILL be sick.

At some point, I chose to distance myself emotionally from my brother. It wasn't easy. He was my hero as a young boy. He was handsome, smart, funny and talented. He had a good job, a nice wife and a nice house. He had good friends and a very good future. And in my mind, somewhere back behind all the hurt and disappointment, that man is still there, waiting to be set free once again. But it became necessary for me in order to survive myself. About a dozen years ago he began having seizures, most likely alcohol related, and he refused to seek treatment for them. Moreover, he continued to wantonly neglect his own health. Poor eating habits, no regular doctor visits, massive consumption of alcohol, no regular exercise, most likely drug abuse as well. He retreated further and further into his own private world where none of us could reach. He shunned family occasions, stayed in his room most of the time. His mood was generally sullen and bitter. He would lash out at petty, inconsequential things. He resented women in particular and was verbally dismissive and insensitive to my mother, who after all, was keeping him alive. He wasn't a person I liked to be around, though I continued to love him.

I know that my distancing myself from him was hard on my mother. She and I had always been very close, but as she said, "he is my son, too". And I respected that. I just made the decision to not continually give to someone who gave little or nothing in return. He was not THERE for us, emotionally, spiritually, and usually not physically. While he was an excellent "do it yourself" guy, his plummeting health and mindset more or less ending that part of his persona. And I realize it is harder for a mother to "love the person but not the act". There is always the sense of needing to protect your child that overwhelms every other impulse, even logical ones that ultimately will help but are very hard in the short term.

Maybe now he truly is free. I'm left, unfortunately, with so many questions about so many things. How did he really feel about me? Why was he so unable to reveal himself to the ones he loved, or to anyone for that matter?

I was at his bedside when he died. He was practically gone when he got to the hospital, having been "down" (without oxygen; his heart stopped) for so long. But the nurse told me, as I've been told before, that the hearing is "the last to go" on dying patients, so I talked to him for a while, maybe a half hour. It's funny how things come out of you at times like that that you don't expect. Usually we all sort of plan out what we are going to say in our minds (or at least I do) but stress and tragedy tend to make us a lot more spontaeous, and probably, more real. At any rate, I found myself saying "I know you loved me". I don't know where it came from, and I'm not sure if it was more for him or for me. But it was true; for all the bad aspects of Dick's life, and there were many, I know he did, in his own way, love me. As contradictory as it seems, I have found that life is full of hard to swallow contradictions. Selfishness, stubborness, spiritual decay and emotional neglect do not by definition rule out the possibility of love. Dick actually asked me if I needed money in one of the last times I visited him; he was practically dead broke, living off the proceeds of a life insurance policy my folks' started when he was born 55 years ago, barely able to make his bills. He hadn't worked in 11 years or really even had an income in that time. He had no health or life insurance. I had a job that didn't pay that well, but I owned my own home and car and was doing OK. So that's a memory I'll carry with me a while.

And in the end, all those other questions can wait I suppose. I had the answer to the most important one.