Looking back on the last two years of chaos and decline, a life suddenly thrown into freefall, it’s tempting to pinpoint the moment where it all began. A missed phone call was all it took to set in train a concatenation of events, compounded by alcoholism, from which I’m only just starting to recover.
The first thing I noticed about the missed phone call from Part 1 of this post, was that it came from ‘Peterborough, United Kingdom’, which is where I’m originally from and where my family have lived for generations. I didn’t really receive calls from my family there, no real need, we keep in touch by Facebook. Phone calls are for Christmas, right?
But one of my mum’s sisters lives in Peterborough still, so the moment I saw it I knew what had happened. Sure enough upon returning the call, the news was delivered – my mother Polly had died suddenly at her home just outside Cambridge. She had a drinking problem too, so it was with some dark, universal irony that I should learn of her death, at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.
My sponsor was at the meeting too, so I told him what had occurred, he gave me a hug and we talked about what might happen next. He told me later that his first reaction was to think, ‘Don’t go back’, as he was worried that having enjoyed so much time up, I would relapse at having to confront the reality of my mum’s death. But time was up for her in the most final sense, and there was simply no way that I wouldn’t be there.
So in due course I boarded a flight back to the UK, ordered wine at the earliest possible opportunity and by the time I arrived at Heathrow 24 hours later I was quite drunk. So much for my four months up.
I stayed in Britain for four difficult weeks, but we laid my mum to rest in a dignified manner and it was then that the relapse really kicked in. My long-suffering friends were haunted by my shade, which spent its time flitting between bed, bottle shop and pub, before finally ending up half-dead at my friend Kath’s house, where I used a rapidly reducing supply of Valium to detox myself and get straight, ready the long flight home. Of course by the time I hit the airport, I was strong enough to immediately start drinking again. Upon my arrival back in Australia I found, amongst other things, a marriage ending and the business I owned going down the pan. I stayed sober for about two weeks, and then simply let my mind dissolve into drunken insanity, the gory details of which I’ll save for the book, or something.
And so, with the exception of a few months here and few weeks there, it continued pretty much until about a month ago, when I was dragged by paramedics (again) into the Tweed Valley Clinic detox centre, where everyone knows your name. Or mine anyway.
Making light of these things in the way I do is just one way of coping, of course. But it’s worth remembering that, along the way, a lot of perfectly decent people got hurt, often quite badly so. An alcoholic in full rage is a force unto himself, quite unhinged from the guiding mores of society. It really is the worst drug in the world when it comes to anti-social behaviour, rivalled perhaps only by methamphetamine in the damage it does to both user and the society that passes by. Psychosis, raging anger, blackouts, self-harm, outbursts of violence, frightening hysteria, paranoia, pathological dishonesty, an almost psychopathic selfishness, all this I exhibited and worse. I am, and again I’ll save the details for later, outright lucky not to be in jail or dead.
But throughout this period, I clung onto something that’s genuinely hard to pinpoint. Some value or defining sense of self that simply wouldn’t let go, even when it seemed everything around me was hopeless and destroyed, I felt something calling me back. Call it what you will, God, the soul, my spirit, a biological survival instinct, it doesn’t really matter. Whatever it was didn’t once leave me, even when I thought – as I did on any number of occasions that maybe this was all too much and it was time to give up. I’d hardly characterise my struggle as the triumph of the individual over the odds, as many, many people helped me along the way be they professionals or friends, but one thing I’m trying to learn is not to underestimate my – or our – ability to pull through.
Some months after my return to Australia, I went back to the same meeting where I’d found out that my mum died. The room, very familiar to me by now was always one of the meetings I’d gone to first, looked as it always did, as it did on the night I missed that phone call from my aunt. How would things have turned out if none of that had ever happened? If my mum hadn’t died when she did? If her own problems had affected me more than I could ever have fathomed? If the universe had come together to find me and her that night and join us together in one last symbolic bonding, at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, that she always refused to attend in life? In death, somehow she had finally made it. I couldn’t save my mum from her own problems but I’m glad to say that, in this spiritual sense at least, I was finally there for her.
One day at a time.
Photo by Fabrizio Verrecchia on Unsplash
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