Today’s post is about ALCOHOLISM. Unfortunately this subject is all too familiar to me as I had alcoholics on my mother’s and father’s side of the family. My mom’s alcoholic brother did not directly die from the illness but my father’s 3rd older brother did. Uncle Al passed after serving a lifetime in WW2 – he saw every major battle and was involved in the infantry where he served on the ground for BATTLE OF THE BULGE.

After Al returned home he worked in a bar as a bartender and learned how to drink. He also smoked a lot of cigarettes which he used to fall asleep holding a lit one. His mother used to wait for him to fall asleep to take the lit butt out of his fingers. One year after her death he passed in a fire of his own making. I only met him once when I was 5 years old and he was standing on a street corner talking with my father who took me and my mother out of the car he had rented to drive upstate so we could meet him. Al was 5’6″ tall, long black beard down to his shoulders, hair wild and totally out of his mind from alcohol. I was scared to meet him and I remember my father practically dragging me from car to shake his hand. When I started to cry my mom pushed me behind her as if to shelter me from him. Al just laughed and poked my father in the shoulder and said “she’s scare of me little brother”. I remember that incident because it scared me so bad. I had nightmares for days after meeting him.

My mother’s brother was a vicious alcoholic who broke his eldest son’s arm when he was drunk by throwing the kid, then in his teens, down the stairs. His elbow was never quite the same and stuck out from his elbow down because the doctor who stitched him up did a very piss job of it. So he was forever disabled on that arm even though he could still move it it always stuck out when his arm was extended at his side. His father, my uncle and my mom’s brother eventually died from lung cancer as he had quit drinking after that incident with his son.

My partner has a younger baby sister about 1.5 years younger than she who came into this world unexpectantly and was born into a family which she made 5. Their older brother was 6 years older and bordered on the autistic spectrum who also suffered from learning problems in his youth. He never aspired to be much of any kind of success in life loving only to drive trucks and be his own man. After marrying in his 30s settling for a woman he didn’t love he had two girls and kept drinking. He had met his wife in a bar which was fitting. In his 50s he was told by his doctor that he had to stop drinking or he will die. He ignored this doctorly advice and continued his illness buying boxed wine and occasional drugs to keep his habit alive. Two years after losing his father, he lost his life to alcohol. From what I heard he died on the table where he was supposed to get a new liver but when they opened him up his organs were gone. All dried up from his habit. My SIL took my Father In Law in when he got sick in his late 90s and cared for him in her house until he died. When he went into the VA hospital they thought HE WAS AN ALCOHOLIC because SIL was feeding him wine for the better part of the two years she cared for him in her home. A doctor that knew him and knew he wasn’t suffering from that disease came to the ER and corrected the doctors who didn’t know him and he passed peacefully into the ether while his daughter continued her downward spiral locked into the disease. Later that year she found out she also had Cirrhosis of the liver and before her brother passed away they used to talk on the phone and call themselves “the Cirrhosis twins” as a joke but it is NOT A JOKE. In fact it was a disgusting thing to call themselves. What a waste of life!

Alcohol was a big thing in their family being Irish/English from the Isles – he was the youngest of 11 kids for most of them lived in the attic of the family home where the father went blind working on the railroad and the mother a homemaker stayed and watched her children’s slow sufferings and deaths. Alcohol does have a pronoun – IT. Alcohol is an IT. It can bring a high when you first encounter it, later IT can bring you into another mood but basically it is a depressant. IT does not motivate you to do get things in life. IT has the opposite effect on people. For me, I tasted beer when I was 5 years old – I thought it was gross. Wine when I was 10 also thought that was weird tasting. Never really liked either.

When I grew up in the 70s as a teen I was in several rock bands where others around me were smoking dope and pot and speed and popping pills – I took up smoking cigarettes. Awful habit – smoked from 20 to 48 years old – hated it. Went cold turkey 3 times continued to smoke so I went to a hypnotist named WENDI and completed her STOP SMOKING PLAN ANOTHER 3 TIMES and finally stopped when my father died. I am very careful about what I put into my body and frankly any kind of mixed drinks are not my thing.

My SIL has been drinking since she was an early teen (13 yrs old) and she was also extremely promiscuous at that age even up to her current age – she has no sense of self, she has low self esteem and it’s a mind fuck because she was a beautiful woman with so much to offer, creative and smart but she always chose the wrong path. Her journey has been a pile of confusion and some of the worst decisions I have ever seen in my entire life. She causes her own trouble, her own trauma and brings everyone around her down with her or at least tries to without knowing she is hurting other people. Without realizing how much she is hurting herself. When she got her divorce she could have sued that bastard for alimony but she refused and said she didn’t want any of his money. Crazy! He had millions at that time because he came from a rich family who adopted him when he was a kid. She never took a dime from him and continued to suffer losses. Lost of her kids (empty nest), lost of self, lost of boyfriends who beat her up and fed alcohol and pills. She is a gifted photographer. She could have started her own business if she had sued the bastard for alimony. Never did it – lost interest in everything then she lost her house.

She chose to live in an 18 year OPEN MARRIAGE which was great for the hubs but when she fell in love with the same guy her hubs loved – that’s when the hubs started beating her up. Then he threatened her life and the life of his children when he promised her that if she left him he would track her down and kill them all. She never went to the cops about him. This was a deadly family secret for years until the boys grew up and left home. That also was a problem for my SIL – because when the boys left she had problems adjusting to EMPTY NEST SYNDROME which sent her drinking spiraling in a whole different direction.

My SIL has gone to a hospital ICU for 5 years straight EVERY CHRISTMAS WITHOUT FAIL due to her excessive drinking habit she was also addicted to OXYCODON pills and was detoxed from that and then put on a lower dose recently. AND she has lied about drinking even when asked. In fact every time she says something it is mostly a lie. She is lost in her lies and in her drinking.

When she got divorced from her alkie hubs who used to beat her and her kids up – he is rich and she did not want any money from him so she never asked for alimony. He walked out on the house they owned together and she got really ill from her habit and found out that she was allergic to cocaine which her then boyfriend, a recording engineer for a big record label, used to give her. She was taking that drug with a constant supply of beer and vodka. Not the good vodka – the rock gut vodka that can make you sick. When we went up for a visit during a Christmas we got stranded in by a huge snowstorm where SIL went completely bonkers and threatened to kill us. We were stranded in that mess of a house and couldn’t get out all week so we locked ourselves in the bedroom with our dogs occasionally going down to get food while she was sleeping off in another part of the house. There were cheap half filled VODKA BOTTLES

stashed all over the house including the toilet and the bath tub where she would take baths. We eventually got out of there between Christmas Day and New Years and swore we’d never go back to that house. We haven’t but we did have to go up to see her for 2021 Thanksgiving.

When she lost her home she got a voucher from her state for a Section 8 Apartment. Because of her house going into foreclosure she was awarded a fast voucher and she was shoved into a home that did not Aline with her status in life. It was a total 360 degree difference of living conditions that would have screwed with the head of anyone going through that experience. She went from a beautiful part of the state she lived in – a rich area to a slum in a building that housed the worst of any ghetto people you can name. Her habit was under control at that point and her liver was growing back healthy. The year after she moved into that apartment building she started her downward spiral of drinking heavily.

My SIL moved into the worst building with the lowest type of people you can get in a project building which I believe now was culture shock for her. After living there in this hovel of an 1 bedroom apartment – She got into a bad crowd of drug addicts, alcoholics, rapists, pedophiles and drug dealers. She lost her cell phone to a drug addict who asked to “borrow the phone to make a phone call” who sold her phone to a low life woman in the building who wiped her phone clean and resold it to someone else by taking out the SIM CARD. Then the woman, who is also a drug dealer gave the addict who stole her phone drugs as payment. Meanwhile my SIL has no phone and just a land line. We were told there are wild parties in her apartment and for some time she wasn’t locking her door when a married Greek resident in that building came in while she was sleeping and did a BILL COSBY on her several times. I know because every time she went into ICU the hospital staff noticed black and blue marks around her privates and the same guy was caught red handed by my SIL new beau, a 35 year career criminal drug and alcohol addict whom she now claims she is in love with??? All of this happened without any mention to the police that any of this was going on in this awful building. The Greek resident got his ass kicked by the other scumbags in the building who are my SIL’s so called drinking buddies. Again, the cops were never called and a rape kit was never taken. I wonder if anyone really gives a shit about these people who are poor in America?

This year was no different – SIL entered the ICU on Thursday 12/22/22 and was unconscious until today – the day after Christmas. They did have to restrain her since she woke up several times and was viciously combative wanting to go home but not knowing where home is or who she was. My empathy for her has waned considerably and the last time she was dying from this illness was Thanksgiving 2021 where all of her family had to fly up to where she was in hospital to see her for the last time – she survived that time too – and it looks as if she will survive this time as well. SIL is like the roach who can’t die. She keeps coming back for more and suffering more and this time she is in a great deal of pain due to the fact that her kidneys are now failing. When that happens you have constant memory loss. Just recently she had kidney stones and one couldn’t pass and she had to have an operation.

During that last Thanksgiving; she had the opportunity to stop drinking and go live in California in her younger son’s big house with his wife and kid…but she didn’t want to go. She talked her way out of rehab and she lied to herself and her family by constantly saying she wasn’t drinking when she was. Her son’s kid – her first and only grandkid was with them when they came to see her and she doesn’t remember that – she said quite clearly that “I don’t want to go to California. I don’t want to live with anyone and I don’t care about meeting my grandson”. She said that when she was detoxing from her long days journey into trauma. She did not realize that any of us were actually in the ICU with her. She later told my partner that she thought she was hallucinating. My partner left her sister her ministry card (my partner is an ordained minister) and my SIL didn’t understand how she had gotten the card because she didn’t remember squat.

She just wants to go back to her shitty apartment and drink with her Friends who are stealing from her and poisoning her to death with booze. Problem is she is out of control and now the building wants to evict her if and when she gets back into that apartment. Meanwhile all her lowlife “friends” have keys to her apartment and are eating her food that her son buys her on his credit card and they are busy taking her heirlooms and selling them to the other scumbags living in that building. Supposedly there is nothing the building can do about as per the ridiculous property manager because SIL gave out her keys to the scummy neighbors. Even when she is not in the apartment they are all in there drinking and eating her food. How is that allowed? How is that not an infringement on her rights?

So today she needed a blood transfusion and the hospital needed an okay from one of the people on the CALL LIST of which my partner is along with her nephew; SIL’s oldest son. This is ridiculous – alcohol is a gateway drug and should be illegal – yeah they did try to do that with prohibition and that didn’t work.

Alcohol can slowly kill you if you let it – people will own IT and live with it even though it is dangerous and they could easily die from IT. There are soooooo many alcoholics in the world especially in America and there are tons of ALANON groups all around our nation. In fact, in the state we live our governor made a point of allowing liquor stores to stay open during covid because people were freaking out.

So now SIL is facing a hard harsh reality. She has to stop drinking and will be sent to a DETOX DUEL DIAGNOSIS CLINIC that will treat her for alcohol disease and PSYCH. We have been telling her for years to go to a shrink but she always said NO because “I know what they are going to tell me”. She knows everything – she is the dumbest woman on earth right now and she had every advantage in life to be something else. She is a very creative person – a brilliant photographer and pianist with a photographic memory which is now shot to shit from drinking. She has always loved the bad boys – the worst they were the better she liked them. Even for her this is a new low-the guy with no legs who is slowly dying and has keys to her apartment. None of us live in her state so it’s hard to mandate anything but this time we have leverage and we are all determined to put her into a conservatorship at her age.

She has always gotten over especially with guys just by batting her eyes at them. She makes Blanche Dubois (a streetcar named desire character) look like a trained monkey. Nothing she does now makes one bit of sense – NOTHING and it’s all because of alcohol, which is a disease that takes over your body and convinces your mind that you NEED TO FEED IT – IT WANTS YOU – IT WANTS ALL OF YOU.

ALCOHOLISM has it’s own PRONOUN – IT. It is a monster that is unyielding and IT will kill you if you allow it to take over your life.

Just warning everyone out there reading this – You need to understand that ALCOHOL ADDICTION IS REAL AND THE STATE NEEDS TO ANSWER TO WHY THEY PUT HER IN THE WORST HOUSING BUILDING IN THAT STATE.

Again, I will reiterate, this blog post is from my own experience dealing with Alcoholism and its victims. These are my opinions based on my experiences. I am sure there will be others reading this who will disagree and tell me I have no evidence – you can bite me. These observations are mine based on what I experienced. We will be going to Al-anon meetings soon.

I wish you good health and a happy life.