How Our Alcoholic Brother Died

He looked tired in a way I can't describe as I told him.  It was hard to know if he was listening until he said, "Oh, a handle a day."   As if it decided something.

I'd never heard the phrase "a handle" used that way and it took me a few seconds to understand what he meant.   Then I remembered what I'd just said about my brother buying a half-gallon of vodka a day and drinking it until he either passed out or it was gone, sometimes not sleeping to finish it.

He was staring at me in the silence,  his eyes more focused.  Then he said,  "Go on."

I told him as many details as I could in that short time,  he hardly reacted.  None of it surprised him, he'd seen it scores, hundreds of times.   He didn't have to tell me that, it was in his face.

He finally said,  "I'm going to tell you straight, he's not going to stop.  He knows all the lines and if he's at the vodka stage like that, he's going to drink until he dies of it.  I'm real sorry, but it'll only make it worse for you if I lie about it."

He was the first alcoholism counselor I'd gotten that much time from.  They don't tend to have lots of free time to talk to the brothers of alcoholics not their clients.   My brother wasn't about to become one.  As he said,  he knew all the lines.   The guy had a lot more than he could handle and, I guessed, a waiting list.  All with a large percentage who wouldn't stop either.

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It wasn't like when our father died of liver cancer.  He was diagnosed four days before he died, his year long decline a mystery to doctors who couldn't be bothered with an old man on medicare and VA insurance. They finally found out he had hepatitis C.  That led them to the hepatoma they wrote on the death certificate within a week of making the diagnosis.  We knew what it was when my brother turned the too familiar sickening yellow bronze color, we'd been dreading it for years.

The ascites had developed before, his horribly swollen abdomen a peculiar contrast to his wasting arms and legs. That's not something that happened to our father. That certainly must have been obvious when he joined the 10 o'clock club at the liquor store for opening. Sometimes six days a week, if he was especially thirsty. He went there when he was undeniably yellow too, undeniable except to himself.   He had to hear it from three of us, independently, before he stopped denying it.  We tend to be a skeptical bunch but we can be convinced.

The clerks at the state store must have seen it and must have known what it meant as they saw him, a familiar sight, walk to the wall of cheap vodka and to the cash register.   I never saw but he only shopped at the one store, right across the bridge in Somersworth.  I'd seen his fellow club members often enough, though not close up.  Sitting in their cars, some smoking, anxiously waiting for the clerk to unlock the door, the meeting usually over in less than ten minutes as they drove away, all on their best behavior, not wanting anything to delay their first drink from the new bottle.  I don't know how many of them bought handles but apparently that's a well known thing.   The people who make rot gut vodka and put it into those jugs with a handle must know as well as the manufacturers of "bum wine" who their customers are.

After he lost his job and he began liquidating his retirement money things gradually lapsed.  His insurance, his mortgage, his property and income taxes.  His car was the last thing he lost, his lifeline to the liquor store.  He certainly couldn't have walked and we weren't about to bring him.  Looking backwards that probably would have been the best thing, he was already in the early stages of death.  I hadn't realized that cirrhosis was irreversable and progressive, neither did my sisters and brother, he didn't.

Our mother knew, she'd worked in hospitals, she'd seen it.  She didn't tell us what she saw, she never talked about it.   In her nineties, with all of her faculties, unlike every one of her children able to read the paper without glasses.  She'd seen her uncle Jimmy die of alcoholism, brought on by shell shock, she was told back then.  From WWI.  I never saw him, he died long before I was born.   It was when the jaundice developed that she admitted what she knew.  Thinking back, that was when she stopped encouraging her other sons to try to talk to him about his drinking, urging us to try to get him to try another treatment.  Only one of my sisters was directly involved, she'd seen something similar with one of her daughters, similar but not alcoholism.

Our brother had been seeing a psychiatrist for eight years before he lost his insurance and then that was the end of that.   The shrink had had him on Xanax, mixing it with liquor for a good part of that time. He was probably addicted to it, though I'd think he was an alcoholic before then. Then there were the three day dry outs, I never did know how many of those he tried, some of them at the insistence of his supervisor at work.  They were useless.   He had gone to one 28 day spin dry too, only he didn't manage to stay even a week.  "Spin dry" was another phrase I didn't know, apparently designed to last for the term an insurance company will pay, known to be generally ineffective.   He flat out refused to go to AA, he knew all of the lines provided by self-declared rationalists, tailor made excuses for the desperately addicted to not try to stop.

The end was the horrible punctuation of a horrible, years long horror.  Increasing disability and progressive death of his liver and other organs even after his immobility  forced his sobriety.   He had no income, no money, no insurance, no ability to care for himself, a total loss of dignity and, finally a horrific, agonizing and terrifying death as the ascites caused a blood vessel in his esophagus to burst.  His horrified look and inarticulate, choked cry for help the last thing we saw of him.  It was the only blessed thing about this that our mother wasn't there to see it.

And that's that.  How it happened, or a little of it.  There isn't any way to tell most of it, just to say it was awful.   I wrote the first version of this the day after he died but didn't post it until now.  In the education that something like this affords, I found out that it's a more common experience than we have been led to believe. Since then, I've heard people who had it a lot worse.  My brother never got into an accident.  He didn't kill anyone that way.