A visitor out of the past and the spectre of alcoholism

I must confess the reason I had to leave the party so fast was because I detected the smell of alcohol on my youngest son Dan's breath and so feared that he too might become a bad alcoholic as my oldest son Gary is, and my second son Raymond has been, that I had to go home at once. It isn't that I am not familiar with the smell of alcohol. I smell it every morning on Doc's breath, the whole time in fact that I am ever with him. A person can only take so much.
But still my association with Doc is from choice and conviction. I see him not as much as he would like but as many hours in the day as I can stand, which doesn't consist of more than an hour or so in the morning at this point. But I consider communication with the alcoholic of paramount importance. Nobody is going to change if the people who are trying to help don't invest some time in this person.
I speak from the experience of being the daughter of an alcoholic and the wife of an alcoholic who became violent when he drank. My second husband was also an alcoholic who became violent under the influence. In fact, I would say that most alcoholics become violent when drinking. That goes with the territory.
I have had long associations with other alcoholic men, one of the reason being that people who will spend the necessary time interacting with an alcoholic are in short supply. The rest of the people tend to look on from a safe distance, thinking they will not be contaminated that way or their children, but a society with too many alcoholics in it is not really safe for anyone.
This is the reason that I act from religious convictions about such beliefs as pro life at a distance from churches. I still smolder with resentment when I think of how inadequate the churches felt in teaching their members how to deal with alcoholism. I have barely begun talking to my father in the spirit world who inflicted so much pain on his wife and family with his alcoholism, this is in preparation for going to the same realms he has inhabited since his death when I was 37. I thought then I must stay alive now because I don't want to run into that old SOB for at least 30 years.
But I still haven't brought myself to talk very much to his two sisters who were not alcoholics but devoted Mormon church goers. They absolutely shunned their wayward brothers and therefore the children living in their homes.
After I was rescued from the home of the alcoholic at the age of 13 lest I go mad at such a young age, my one aunt in the northern part of the state provided me with the safest home I had ever lived in. I had been excusing myself each meal at home by that time to go out and see if the house was on fire, plus going out numerous times during the day to check for fire. I know my behavior was irrational, but I could not help myself, my anxiety had become so overwhelming. Within a few months at my aunt's house, my fire phobia all but disappeared. I could see very clearly what I had needed.
But my aunt never mentioned her brothers. I did kind of get the idea that she HATED them, although if pressed she would tell me stories about when they were smaller and did not drink, probably before they were 8 years old. Anyway, they had disgraced the family with their alcoholic behaviors for sure, all four of them. She was a good church going lady, too. But when I decided I had to move to Salt Lake in two years time she never forgave me. She barely spoke to me again. You would have thought I had become an alcoholic, but as the daughter of one I engaged in behavior she did not approve of, including keeping company with alcoholics. So I guess in her mind I just as well have been one.
Last night there was a visitor to see Raymond out of the past. He was the son of his dad's brother who did not drink. I really appreciated him coming by to see Raymond. We talked about Gary, too, and he wanted his phone number. He comes to Phoenix quite often on business and he was trying to help the family get a memorial headstone for Dean, my boys' father who disappeared into the desert and whose body has never been found. It will be 5 years since his disappearance in a few days. I talked briefly with this cousin whose mother was from my hometown of Boulder. She was a very pretty woman always kind and nice to everyone. She and this boy's father, Dean's brother, were devout church goers, and the fact that Dean never attended church nor did I too often seemed to keep us from ever being friends.
Although I thought it would be a very good thing if we could be friends, and at first I tried quite hard to bring that about, but I suppose my experience with my dad's sisters made me distrustful. I just did not think that non drinkers, good Mormons, were going to understand what alcoholism was all about. At that time, I did not find that Dean's non drinking brother or sister had too good of understanding of what Dean might be capable of doing when drunk.
I remember going to his sister's once to try to talk to her about the suicide threats Dean was making, even after he came out of the service where I thought he had been at high risk for suicide. Of course everyone knew I had been incarcerated in a psych ward, and in my attempts to get help for Dean, I had gotten incarcerated again for a week in Washington where he was in the service.
I remember Dean's sister threw off my warnings with an angry response, "Dean is all right. You are the one who has the problem, not him!" And there Dean was at home getting drunk and cursing God for hours, muttering to himself, and telling me he was still going to get hold of a rifle and kill himself!
I was furious and went home and told Dean I was going to have to leave him. I couldn't take him getting drunk and threatening suicide one more time, when his sister would not even believe he was mentally ill! He begged me to leave off with my packing, he knew I was capable of leaving him, and said he would never mention buying a rifle again.
I had called his brother, this boy's father, while I was in Washington and told him that I had just got out of the psych ward myself due to Dean denying what he said and did, but I did not dare stay with him and was leaving. I told him I thought he was a high risk for suicide and I wanted his family to know before I left with Gary, who was a baby at the time. I advised them to write to him, because I knew what had probably triggered off his suicidal impulses was the death of his grandmother, the woman who had virtually raised him after his mother died. He had not even asked to go to her funeral and now he was paying for it with I thought suppressed delayed grief that could find no outlet. I had done everything I could think of to try to get help to him. Now I had to leave.
I really did not want to point the finger of blame at anyone which is why I withdrew from the Mormon church to a distance where I thought I could be objective. I hoped that their cousin would persist in his attempts to become friends with my sons. All efforts would be appreciated. I just did not want to get into any arguments about what I did or don't do, in regard to church. Dean's sister was still alive and had been very good to Raymond. She was too old and too long out of my life for me to get in any discussion with her about my past with her brother.
Alcoholism is such a scourge anyone's efforts to understand it, try to help the alcoholics in the family, even sending them messages of good will would be appreciated. But from long experience I knew that a little bit of the blame game went a long ways. Might not do any good at all, in fact. So we needed to stop short of that.
I prayed for my sons, seems like I always have a prayer in my heart for those who drink, that alcohol will not become their master, will not wreck their health, and in fact kill them when they are too young to die.

My nerves tattered on a Sunday morning

I went this morning and got the Sunday paper and coffee and a donut and went to the patio to read as I have taken to doing since I decided to stop having any meals at Doc's in the interest of distancing myself from him. I encountered my neighbor Daniel, and a friend Betty already out there along with Suzanne who has taken to coming to the patio more lately. I told them that I had gotten up in the middle of the night to write a message to Camille Kimball, the author of "Sudden Shot" about the Phoenix Serial Killers case to see if she might suggest people in Arizona who might support my writing my memoir which involved a crime perpetuated against me as a child. Suzanne said she did not want to talk about such a subject, especially on a Sunday morning. I conceded that it was a difficult subject so did not object when she introduced another topic of conversation. Another gentleman who has expressed he does not like my loud laugh, had already ostentatiously gotten up and left when I arrived. My philosophy of life is that not everybody is going to like you, so I did not allow that to ruin my good mood.
Suddenly I looked up and saw Doc approaching our table in the patio in a very rare visit out to the complex's main outdoor gathering place. Doc said he was looking for me as he thought I was dead! He explained I had not answered my phone either the night before at 10:30 pm or in the morning as he wanted to ask me to purchase some donuts along with the Sunday paper which he always pays for when I drop it off to his apartment. We sort of wrangled around a little bit, but I quieted down to give Doc the chance to mix and mingle with his neighbors. He made a reference to his alcoholism and Suzanne who has known him a long time said that he was a civilized drunk. Doc was grateful she was looking at his alcoholism in a good light. So we were kind of gingerly getting along when Suzanne moved a chair in closer to the table just as another gentleman was approaching it to sit down. He thought that she did it on purpose so he could not sit there, saying she was saving that place for her husband. He told her her husband was in a scooter.
This somehow caused Suzanne to lose her temper. She went off to this elderly gentleman and he did not take that quietly. Pretty soon there was a raging fight going on with Suzanne throwing a book at him twice which fortunately did not go far enough to hit him. This quarrel went on so long, I got up and left.
Doc followed me hollering back to those still seated, "And you wonder why I don't come down here!"
I pointed out to him once we got to his apartment that he was almost as unstable as Suzanne who has quit drinking but might be bi-polar, and one never knew when he might turn nasty when he was out of his apartment interacting with real people. I did what he requested I do on the computer, checking his mail and FB for messages. I did not want to wrangle with him long, so said I was going to leave.
I went back down to see if things had quieted down in the patio before I went home, and talked to some other residents for a little bit until my tattered nerves could not take the possibility of any more outbursts.
I came home and finished the memoir I had been reading the night before when I decided to write a message to Camille Kimball. It was written by an alcoholic and described how she fell to the bottom, got a DUI, had to serve 12 days in tent city. Boy, that was rough. She said the food was as bad as it has been reputed to be since Sheriff Arpaio has even bragged on serving such cheap meals. I was a little shocked at what she had to go through. But in a court session she listened to the testimony of a man horribly injured by a drunk driver, probably in a blackout as she had been when she got her DUI. His son was also badly hurt but the drunk driver escaped with only minor injuries. He was, however, charged with the full responsibility of this bad wreck and sentenced to 17 years in prison. She knew she had lucked out driving when she was in a blackout by just hitting the wall instead of wrecking another car.
She described in her book "Angels in my Path" people who had helped her when her family had given up on her. Her husband closed all the bank accounts and left her with no money, kicked her out of the home, and took full custody of the children. A friend who was a lawyer took him to court after she had stayed sober a year and the judge forced him to divvy up some of the assets and also to give her some time with her children. This woman had been molested by her step father on a regular basis as a child. Her mother wrote a letter published in the book saying she was sorry she had not left this man after she was told he had sexually abused her daughter. The woman felt this had contributed to her alcoholism with a feeling of being worthless.
She described meeting the woman who helped her publish her book in Arizona. Since I was the daughter of an alcoholic I had also suffered damage as a child due to my suicidal father's heavy drinking and thought that experience, too, should make my memoir valuable to other children of alcoholic parents. How I had dealt with his alcoholism and what some of my conclusions were about having alcoholic parents. She also described meeting a man who had been in prison several times due to alcoholism and drug addiction as well as dealing, and was staying straight and sober by helping others like her. He was a brilliant man who had studied law in his years in prison and helped her to face her trial on the DUI charge. She credits him with saving her life.
In the patio I was once again chided by some for seeing Doc at all, and I said that I always wished that people would have interacted with my father more in his years of drinking. I said people make a mistake not to interact with an alcoholic because as long as he is affecting children, could hurt others, as well as kill himself as he is fighting a terrible disease he should not be ignored. That is not going to do anything for him. That is the easy way to deal with an alcoholic.
My father got drunk, crossed the yellow line, and hit a car with three young men in it, head on, in the last year of his life. He was very lucky that only one of the young men was hurt badly. He suffered a broken leg. He was going to have to go to court where his driving license would undoubtedly be taken from him for life and a heavy fine laid on him. A month before the trial he died of a heart attack at age 64. He was hit so hard in the chest when the steering wheel of his Cadillac nearly impaled him, I always thought it might have contributed to his heart attack.
I became my father's caretaker for the last two years of his life and got him off sleeping pills as well. He needed family intervention to try to help keep him straight.
He had gotten married which I tried to talk him out of, and his wife left him two months after she married him. He went to her home in northern Utah to try to persuade her to come back to him, she refused, and on the way home he got drunk and wrecked.
I thought she acted irresponsibly by marrying him as I was pretty sure she did not love him. I could not help but feel his assets, as a brand new Coupe de Ville Cadillac, a new home, money in the bank, stocks and bonds, played some part in her decision. She hardly knew him. But there was really nothing I could do about that. I moved out as soon as they got married. I soon had to move back in and help him to try to get over his aches and pains caused by the wreck. Trying to see that he did not get upset enough to get drunk again. He was already in enough trouble as it was.
We daughters did not want our father to be responsible for hurting any more people than he already had. In order to keep track of him, some of us had to intervene in his life, either live with him, or check on him all the time. We daughters kept him from doing a lot of stuff. He would sober up and go for long stretches when he was older not drinking, but he needed help and emotional support to stay straight.
I have since I was young intervened with alcoholics whenever I thought I could help, befriending them if that was possible without hurting my family, and so on. I believe in keeping the lines of communication open when a family member is doing too much drinking, father, brother or sister, or sons and daughters. I have done a lot of thinking and tried a lot of different things when my sons were drinking. I still have one son who is an alcoholic that I do not let go long without a phone call to tell him I care. If I think I can say something that will be effective at all about his drinking I do. So does his brother who has become a staunch believer in the AA program and other ways to control a drinking problem. But I just never give up on an addicted person, whether it is someone else or myself, above all if he is one of my children. I have always thought mothers should never give up on their kids. I don't think you can ever give up fighting any kind of addiction, whether it is alcohol, drugs, cigarettes or food. Or gambling. Losing your temper. Whatever.
You just have to keep trying something!

Visitors from the spirit world.......

Connie sent me the dark lady in the graphic at the top, the caption of which, "Oh Lonesome Me" almost makes me cry for I have been thinking all day about what terrible pain Debbie must be enduring to leave her family. Debbie was dark like this woman and must have been very beautiful when she was young. She will find healing for her affliction in the other world, I know, but her heart is not going to stop hurting for a long time with the pain of leaving her family. I finally called for my sister LaRae in the second photo who was 51 when she died and left her her two daughters to miss her so much, and her grandchildren and now two great-grandchildren, to come and talk to me about Debbie. I always feel that those who die away from here after they have lived here so long will come back and mix and mingle with all the others who have passed from this old hotel-dwelling place. When I watch old videos of parties we have had, I feel as though I am watching ghosts dancing and walking about because most all of them are dead.
My Aunt Nethella in the last photo died around the same time LaRae did only she was 95, nearly 45 years older than my sister LaRae was in her passing.
LARAE: Yes, you don't get over leaving your family very easy. So you just come back as much as you can and spend time with them anyway.
GERRY: I felt sadness today when our sister Ann reported on the funeral she went to for a woman who was incidentally around 94 when she passed, and she saw a woman there you always called your best friend, you spent so much time with her in high school. When Ann mentioned your name Lois shed tears, so she has not gotten entirely over your passing so young either. I will never forget over 20 years ago seeing her at your viewing sobbing as though her heart was breaking. The hardest deaths are too soon. I talked to our sister Linda quite a long while this afternoon, but now I am feeling lonely because there is no one to talk to in the long evenings. Doc is getting more and more impaired by his alcoholism, so it's been a long dying for him. Limiting his ability to participate so much. Today I went to breakfast with Chad's Mother and Dad who spent time traveling all around the country now they are retired. I said it must be wonderful to have a companion to go traveling with when you are old. I explained that my companion was too impaired to travel anywhere. He is very reclusive right now. He has almost become a ghost while still alive!
LARAE: Yes, he will probably feel more alive when he is gone than he does now. His burden of alcoholism will be lifted from him.
GERRY: I heard today that Jack had been seen camping out with other homeless around the library but surely he did not winter there. He would have frozen it has been so cold and rainy. He's still drinking, too. When you fall homeless and have to sleep on the ground, you are really down and out, but he is alive!
LARAE: Desperate people living desperate lives. I did as you asked and checked on Debbie. She is resting. As you guessed, she is devastated at leaving her family. She still has many ties to people here so she will be back and forth and all over the place checking on her family. Praying they will be able to get through her passing without worse happening.
GERRY: Her daughter was so close to her. Debbie told me about her serious illness. In a coma for two months I think Debbie said. So she almost died. That is probably who Debbie is the most worried about. Debbie lost her son though, not too many years back, through substance abuse, so she will be joining him. That was a big tragedy for the family. And so Neta has come to join the other old folks. She lived to a ripe old age as did Aunt Nethella
NETHELLA: I have been waiting to get my two cents worth in. I am very pleased, naturally, with all the history writing you girls are doing. Your Mother, LeNora, and I did our part, now it is you girls turn to write the history books. I am very pleased that so many younger women decided to write for the festival this summer about older women they admired who lived and had to work so hard in the old Boulder, back in the days when there was no electricity, or running water in the houses, and bad roads. I rode a lot of horses to get there in my time. Now I know I am not up to date in talking to the living as I did not know I would be doing it, so I will step back and let LaRae speak, as she seems to be very good at it. I think I can learn something from her!
LARAE: When you don't live to be an old lady you learn to do a lot of things you never thought you would, like try to get the attention of the living who might be lonely enough to tolerate a visit from the dead.
GERRY: I feel as though I was preparing for my passing, too, as I meditate each night, my older eyes unable to take the TV and its fare, although I am praying tonight that the health care plan has passed with restrictions on abortion funding as they claim. I felt cutting down on those deaths was so important, and I was heartened to see Congressman Stupak demanding the restrictions before he and other hold outs would sign the bill. Some are very cynical and say the democrats don't mean what they are agreeing to.
LARAE: The pro life people will have to hold them to their promise not to include abortion funding. We in the spirit world as much as anyone want to see abortion deaths cut way back. I was pro choice there. Now I am pro life, couldn't be anything else once I was saved, lifted out of the grave to live again. You literally have to be reborn if you don't believe. You can't believe that everyone is saved. What that means cannot even be comprehended there, but it was a huge change in my thinking. Actually I was not really thinking before because I did not believe in life after death or that I would be saved. We are celebrating Raymond's commitment to a higher power here to conquer alcoholism. Doc is lost because he cannot believe. Jack is lost because he cannot believe. He needs help. He needs AA, too, enough men to help lift him up. If he could find them, he could sober up again, but without intervention of some sort he is not going to make it. Gary, your son, needs help. He needs AA, too. AA could help him a lot more than he thinks it would. Because those men would understand a lifetime of drinking.
GERRY: Alcohol takes such a toll of human lives, does so much ongoing damage to so many. I am hoping now that Raymond will get strong enough to help others.
NETHELLA: AA saved my son Richard from sure death from drinking. You know he became an inspirational speaker for AA, known in the northern part of the state. He says these programs are badly needed in the southern part, and I know they are. He says he will come soon with a message for Raymond and Gary. He says to pray constantly for intervention. He and others will put men there who can help Gary in Phoenix and Raymond in Utah. They will be there to to help inspire work for alcoholics in southern Utah. I am so sad when I realize what Clyde's drinking did to his family, what my brother Glen's drinking did to his, and to our brothers Reed, and Max, and my nephews Stuart and Park and Ray. I wish I had been more aware, but I wasn't. Now I have learned to pray for the family. Tell Raymond and Gary and Dan and Scott, tell all of them, they will get help from a higher power, and from all of us. I feel like praying now for the King family. And for all the alcoholics and lonely people everywhere.

The alcoholic as abuser

I am reading "Alaska" by James Michener written in 1988 and what has shocked me is how big of destructive role alcohol has played in Alaska's history and is no doubt still affecting its native people, especially, just as it does our native-American population in the southwest.
Unscrupulous American ship captains and traders introduced barrels of rum to the natives with a disastrous effect. I just read about two villages in particular that depended on the sea for food, but when the men should have been going out to sea to bring in the sea animal food supply needed for winter, two villages, men and women, too, stayed drunk until they were wiped out with hunger, and starved to death. When people went back to these villages they found them all dead.
Missionaries and some ship captains who were more scrupulous attempted to run these sea captains out of the territory. Of course when the natives were tempted with barrels of rum they would give up their valuable fur collection to them, with nobody benefiting but the trader. Alcohol was a problem when the Russians controlled Alaska, but after they sold it to the Americans, their ship traders came north and wrecked even more havoc on the natives than the Russians had done. I about quit reading this novel when I got to this part, I was so disheartened.
I saw a documentary on doctors not long ago and this one doctor who worked in emergency all the time said that the biggest problem there is in medicine, the one that causes the most damage to the most people is alcohol. I believe it.
Doc pushed me into making another DVD yesterday which ended up being a rant on alcoholic abuse. I was surprised at how much anger I still retain over a childhood filled with worry and strain because of my dad's drinking, and the cousins, children of his brothers, had to suffer the same upsets.
Every once in a while I tackle the problem of alcohol because it takes such a huge toll, is always with us, always doing more damage, taking more lives, crippling others. It is a subject that haunts me, you might say.
I try to interact with alcoholics because I am familiar with the problem and what it does to people. Doc was perfectly willing to play the self destructive drunk in this home made movie about the toll of alcohol on my life and on his. I said I wish I could put this in all the theaters. I am sure many people whose lives have been devastated by alcoholic abusers would like to put their stories out there. Countless women have been killed by mates who were abusing alcohol. Countless automobile accident victims have been literally crippled for life by alcoholics. To say nothing of all thoses who have been killed outright.
I used to feel growing up that people did not tackle it enough, but if they didn't they were in danger of being one of the 'innocent' victims of drunk strangers who careened into their lives with the impact of a bullet or a bomb.
Children born into the homes of alcoholics cannot escape, so I think the least adults can do is tackle the horrors of living with alcohol once in a while in an honest attempt to do something about the problem, rather than just ignore it.
If you drive on the highways there is no place to hide that you will not encounter it, that you will not risk being forever impacted by it. A drunk man goes down a freeway road the wrong way and causes a giant crash. That's a possibility we are up against on our highways constantly.
My dad never hesitated to drive blind drunk down a highway, and at one point in his life he hit a car head on on the wrong side of the road. Only by the grace of god did those people in that car escape with their lives. Both cars were totaled.
So I am sorry to give you this bad medicine today, the subject of alcohol and the toll it takes on people's lives. But if we grapple with it together, sharing ideas, we just might come up with something that will affect somebody.
Doc asked for this rant so I gave it to him. He is the best judge of what might help him. If you have spent years of 'social drinking' what is it going to take to affect you? Just remember you as an adult without the problem might get tired of talking about drunks, but a child cannot get 'tired' of a father who drinks. That's the hell of it. You are sick to death of it, and he is still going to come home drunk and upset the household. I used to pray for him to go to sleep, but I knew from experience he was going to have to rant and try to continue the 'party' with my protesting mother. She just as well not have been so impatient, because here was her chance to tell him what she thought, if she did not lose her temper too badly, which she often did and then the fights would start. To her mind, it did no good whatsoever to 'talk' to a drunk because he was drunk.
Well, he was still trying to function as a human being, and when he sobered up she sure couldn't talk to him. He would be short tempered and defensive and would be rushing off to catch up the work he had neglected while on his binge. So I talk to Doc while he is drinking, because he is always drinking, but I try to do it before noon, even though everyone is always expressing impatience at my still trying to affect this drunk.
I say it is a privilege not to have to interact with a drunk. My kids have got very little patience when it comes to interacting with Doc. They feel they will be indulging him by even exchanging a few words with him. I say bah! Try having a father as a drunk. I wanted my kids to be spared that as much as possible, but now they are a little too determined never to rub shoulders at all with these problem alcoholics of the world.
What better thing have I got to do, stay in my apartment and watch TV? No, I have to do what I can to affect the drunks of the world, too. I know Doc will not sober up with no intervention. To me this is called intervention. I find that my kids don't know what to do with ME, so they are not prone to spend a lot of time interacting with me either. And I am not a drunk. You see, sometimes if you try to save yourself from all these unpleasant experiences perhaps you will lose the ability or not develop it to interact with anybody, drunk or sober.
My dad was a hard working man when sober who accomplished a prodiguous amount of work, so when he was drunk, I found out he could still work hard analyzing and arguing and so on. Later on, I felt we daughters were keeping him sober only by interacting with him. Some of these big arguments we had were unpleasant, but they were a lot better than coping with him drunk. My mother was not nearly as hard a worker when it came to analyzing problems as he was. He could have taught her what keeping on the job could do had she been able to think of him as still a man inside the slcoholic who could teach her a thing or two, even if drunk! It's a complicated thing trying to intervene. That's what I am talking about.