This is a reader story. We believe in providing our readers with a space for them to share their story however they see fit. The thoughts and views expressed are that of the author and should be treated as such. If you wish to share your own stories please see here for more information.
The author who sent this story to us chose to remain anonymous.
Since as far as I remember, alcohol has been a delicate topic in my family. All my life I’ve heard how I should never drink in an excessive way, how alcohol can destroy someone’s life and how it hurts both the drinker and their family. It was a kind of rule all while I was growing up, reserving alcohol only for very few moments in our life. At first I thought it was due my family’s religious beliefs (Christians, with heavy opinions about alcohol abuse or any other type of substance abuse), but while I continue to grow up into the woman I am now I figured out that while religion indeed had a role in our family opinion about alcohol, it was mostly related to the trauma and suffering we all had to experience due to it.
My uncle was an alcoholic. And sadly, he died from it, unable to recover from his addiction.
Unlike others my story doesn’t come from my own addiction or from my parents’ addiction but my uncle instead, and it wouldn’t be that much of a deal in my life if it weren’t for the fact that I lived with him for more than decade of my life, having a role of a second parent in my childhood, therefore affecting me severely in ways I couldn’t even understand.
Apparently, it all started in his teenage years, but since I was nonexistent at that time, I can’t talk about things I didn’t experience, but the same wording was always said when I used to ask about the topic: “it was casual”, “nothing serious”, “we don’t even know when it became that bad”.
I’d guess everything became worse around the first years of the 00’s, when I was only six years old, and saw how my cousins (around the same age as me) had to stay with us because problems were happening in their house. I was thrilled about it because I was a kid, my cousins were with me for days, what else a kid could ask for? But eventually the problems began to come to our house – when my uncle and aunt divorced, and his alcohol intake increased drastically.
My first direct interaction with him in such an intoxicated state was on Christmas in the same year as the divorcing. I remember my parents having to attend a police call someone made on him, and me coming with them because there wasn’t anyone to take care of me at home. I still remember vividly the fear that took over me when I saw him in front of my cousins’ house, drunk, insulting and threatening my aunt with a gun. He was a collector of different types of guns and rifles, and it wouldn’t be the last time he’d use one of them against someone.
At that age I associated alcohol with violence and danger, with fear, to the point that even now, in my young adulthood, I get severely anxious when anyone drinks near me or when the smell fills my senses.
Everything from there was a rollercoaster in descent, and it was decided that the best help he could get was to live with my parents in order to control his addiction. Of course, I have to note that in the middle of the chaos there’s good memories I can recall of me and my uncle together (he was a better uncle than a dad, according to my cousins) and it took me years to understand that all the things he did was because he was addicted and ill, acting caring and lovely in the very few moments of sobriety.
With the passing of the years his addiction got worse, as well the relationship between him and us, and the attempts to help him ended with violent fights and insults, and with me hiding under my bed scared of hearing a gunshot coming from the living room. It happened almost every night to the point that my parents gave me a signal for me to know I should go to the safest place of the house and hide there no matter what, waiting for them to come and tell me it was safe to come out again.
I started to have mixed feelings about my uncle from a young age asking myself a ton of different questions in order to understand what was happening in our house: why did he act that way with us? Would he hurt my mom and dad in the middle of a fight? Why did he yell awful things about us and my cousins? How come I can love someone that treats us like that?
I didn’t get the answers to those questions until years later.
I had to live with the shame of having an alcoholic family member part of my teenage years as well as with the fear of him doing something dangerous to us. To the point that I started to actually hate him for everything he made me experience. I stopped giving him affection when he was sober, I didn’t like to talk to him or even look at him when we were in the same room. I wanted for him to feel like I was feeling, something awful to do, I realize right now, but that made sense for a kid of my age.
There was also a threat that if any of my cousins or my aunt came to visit us/call us he’d shoot at them and us for ‘betraying him’. Those words were spoken while drunk, and he had no memory of them being said the next morning. He would also start to punch and break things when he’d come home drunk, anything (and sometimes, anyone) that would get into his way. Family portraits, decorative objects in the room, I remember I’d get out of my room to discover broken pieces scattered on the ground, and my parents or even my grandma trying to clean them.
On one occasion, I can’t remember at what age exactly, I got tired of the situation. Tired of crying myself to sleep hearing the screams outside my room, tired of being scared of the thought of him finally killing one of us; that I decided to write him a letter addressing the problem. It was short, and basically explained how I felt since he moved with us.
Eventually I started to get depressed, around my early teenager days, coinciding with the moment in which my uncle started to get less and less violent and tended to drink to calm the sadness within him – he also used to write about his feelings and somehow we both bonded in the way the alcohol made us feel miserable about life. There were also other factors involved in my diagnosis (I was bullied in school, and had problems related to my self-esteem and weight), but according with a therapist, it was like all the pain and sadness that I experienced since a kid found a way to get out of me in my adolescence, like if it were a type of ‘excuse’ to explode.
It continued for six years, with a short period of peace when he bought a small apartment to drink alone there (he told it to us in a fight, arguing how we didn’t let him live the life he wanted). That didn’t last long as he was back to live with us after he was unable to pay the rent.
That was probably the moment when he realized he had a serious problem, asking my mom to go with him to therapy sessions (the therapist I used to go to knew someone focused on treating addictions that worked in the same building).
The alcohol made him depressed as well, but even when he was in numb and sad states there were still moments when the violence would come back to take control of him – like when my dad had to park his car near my aunt’s house and he thought they both were having an affair. Or when my cousin’s boyfriend proposed to him and I saw, entering home from school, how my uncle shot at him and his mom with his gun, alerting everyone in the neighborhood. There would also be days in which he wouldn’t leave his room at all, refusing to eat completely, and when I would silently sit near the door to see if I could listen to any sound coming from inside- there were none. I feel like in some ways I wanted to check on him, for him to be safe despite everything.
Everything changed drastically when, one day, he was diagnosed with hepatic cirrhosis, and everyone in the family realized that the bad experiences of the past weren’t big enough to leave him suffering alone in that condition. I started to feel bad for him too, but those feelings were mixed with confusion as it took me a lot to give compassion to a person that never had that type of feeling for us.
We (my parents, his ex–wife and I), used to take him to his medical sessions every week and we saw how even in the middle of his illness (when his own life was at risk) he refused to take the treatment or did it with extreme anger. He told us that he would prefer to die as an alcoholic than live the rest of his life cured but connected to a machine. I don’t know if his words were driven by his addiction to drinking or by his depression, all I know is that when I was pulling his wheelchair and I saw him I realized that you must be in such a precarious position to come to a conclusion like that. To prefer to die over live, and to die preferring the thing that killed you slowly.
Eventually our relationship improved because he eventually stopped drinking (he could no longer drive or walk without assistance, making it hard for him to get liquor), and slowly but surely we started to spend more time together, bonding in likes and interests we both had such as TV cartoons, and music (he was a saxophonist and violinist, I got his musical instruments by his personal desire). I also started to feel a little bit safe in his presence, never truly feeling fully safe because there was still the sense of being alert to any sudden reaction from his part but I could understand that he wanted to spend time with me and get to know me more (after his death my parents told me he always used to talk about me in a good light, and ask how I was doing in school, I feel it also had an important role in my own healing process).
It was like that for two years; we took him to the hospital, dealing occasionally with the abstinence syndrome in which he used to feel angry over not being allowed to drink. It was hard for everyone, especially for me because I had to take care of the entire house while my parents were helping him with his treatment. Our entire family dynamic revolved around him, and I even noticed how the relation between my aunt and him came to a healthy point.
My entire life was a cycle of adapting to whatever circumstances came up due to his addiction: learning how to adapt to the fights, to know what to do in cases when someone was severely drunk since I was a kid. Then adapt to the good times between us and to take care of him and show compassion in his illness. But I never adapted nor expected for it to come to an end so soon.
On August 5 of 2014 I woke up around 7 am hearing some violent noises and a very soft voice. I didn’t know what it was so I got out of the bed to follow the sound, standing in front of my uncle’s room. I found him having a heart attack related to his physical illness.
I was the only one that heard him due to the proximity of our rooms, and he’d probably have died if I were late to assist him. My mom applied CPR as an ambulance was called and we waited for it to come – he didn’t die immediately from it and seemed to come back around but was still delicate and in shock over what had happened.
After the ambulance took him to the hospital it was the last time I saw him in a conscious state. We all said our goodbyes and I spent the next hours figuring how to feel about what just happened, and figuring out what to do next.
All the confusing feelings came back to me, almost to tell me that even if he did awful things in the past – severely traumatizing me and my cousins – he didn’t deserve to die, much less to die alone because no one could hear him asking for help. He didn’t deserve to be blamed for something he didn’t have control over, he had tried to get help, tried to be sober and, in his last years, fix the relationships he broke due his alcoholism (some with success, others without it).
He died that same day around 8 PM (the doctors declined to treat him, because it would kill him anyway, and decided to let him die naturally).
I didn’t cry. At least not immediately, at least not until months after I went to therapy to talk for the first time about the relationship I had with him. That was when I understood everything I’m aware of now (that he was ill, that alcoholism is an illness that took over him like any other illness would do).
Six years have passed since he died and while there’s things I wish I could have done differently or better, there’s also things from my past that I’ve healed with time. It took me a while to understand that I have PTSD due to the trauma related to alcohol, and to make peace with the person that while sober was the best uncle ever, but while drunk was a total hell.
I don’t drink myself; I didn’t like the taste of it when I first tried it and because I remember all the things I had to experience due to it and how it can break a person from inside. I do still flinch when someone is a little tipsy and make sure to have a plan in case it gets violent. I feel that is something that will be with me forever. When people ask me why I refuse an occasional beer or alcoholic beverage, in a society where alcohol is the most common thing to everyone, I simply ignore the question or drive the conversation to a different topic, not wanting anyone to know all the things I had to experience and that traumatized me in my early years.
It’s hard, and it makes you suffer a lot and fill yourself with anger due to the alcoholic’s behavior. But as you grow up, and decide to heal yourself from it, you’ll learn that it was also hard for them, and painful.
And that’s a thing I understand now.
Leave a Reply