Sober Thoughts
Today would have been my father's 92nd birthday. My father was a kind man and a brilliant one. He was an actuary (a very specialized kind of mathematician). He was also an alcoholic. He would give anyone the shirt off his back if he thought they were in need. He was very fond of bad puns. He was elegant and handsome. When he was sober. When he was drunk - which was almost every night - he got stupid. When he drank he underwent a kind of bizarre metamorphosis. He stumbled around and said and did stupid things. He became a different person. It took me years in therapy before I realized that even though he wasn't mean, I was afraid of him.
Amazingly, it never occurred to me that he was an alcoholic until I was quite old - in my late teens or even my early twenties. I don't know if I would have ever figured it out if my sister, in an extremely rare burst of temper, hadn't yelled at him one night, "You're drunk." It isn't that I didn't know before this that my father was drunk all the time. I knew better than anyone in the family and I even knew how he got that way because I was the kitchen help when he mixed drinks. I would watch him make "a couple of martinis." This meant a large beaker of booze from which he would pour a drink for himself and one for my mother and then rapidly slug down the rest, probably the equivalent of another three or four martinis. Amazing how he got so drunk on only one or two drinks... Hmmm. Just as amazing is that until my sister said those words, I simply avoided registering what the problem was. I had always thought it was me. But my sister's two simple words crystallized the truth in the magic alchemical way that truth sometimes comes to us.
Oddly, though, I was the only one in the family to ever really accept the truth about my father. I was the one who fingered him to my mother's doctor and I was the one who confronted him.The way we handled it was that the doctor suggested to my father that he might have a drinking problem. My father reported this to me and I told him that the doctor thought that because I had told him it was so. And then I told him as kindly as I could how his drinking was impacting me, how I never called home after a certain hour and how when I visited I always left early in the day because it wasn't safe to be in the car with him after he began drinking. He took it very well. With my mother no longer there to fill in the gaps in his memory, he had begun to realize himself that he had a problem. I can't say that he recovered completely, but he did well on the whole.
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