The Elephant vs. The Blogger

“Hi, my name is Kathy and I am the wife of an alcoholic.”

I have never actually voiced those words to anyone, except to an empty room or to the hydro towers neatly placed in the green space that joins two walking paths near my house.

I have, over the last 50 years, reflected on who else dwells in the face in the mirror.

“Hi, I’m Kathy and I’m a battered wife,” 30 years ago.

“Hi, I’m Kathy and I have anorexia,” 25 years ago.

“Hi, I’m Kathy and I am so the unluckiest bitch on the planet between Post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.” Pick a time.

“Hi, I’m Kathy and despite all of the above, I AM a writer and that’s what kept me from putting a gun to my head.”

 Like the family nobody wants to be born into (but I was), they are all related.

 I have often said to myself, “my husband is an alcoholic,” transferring the patient and his dependence to the pages of fictional third person where I have always felt it belonged. I have never really sat down and reflected on how my husband’s disease relates to me.

 It’s not like the measles or a cold where I can contract it on contact. However, I am a carrier. I was born with the ‘alcoholic gene.’ I come from a long line of drunks! I know this because of the 24 funerals I have attended over 52 years, half were the result, directly or indirectly of alcohol.

 In AA (Alcoholic’s Anonymous) the disease is referred to as “The elephant in the room.” Growing up, it meant the heavy drinkers sit at the end of the table where they can booze it up, smoke and play canasta.  I was born into it – and the wars as a result of it. I saw my first knock-down-drag ‘em out, donnybrook-cum-brawl when I was three. I remember most of it, despite being injured in the process. Most of all, I remember the Picton county cops showing up on a sultry summer evening in Rossmore, Ontario. Lights flashing, a few neighbours standing in their housecoats at the edge of my grandmother’s property at her small country home, pointing, whispering, shaking their sleepy heads. It’s such grand entertainment, after all. Overturned picnic tables, lawn chairs, broken glasses, loud voices, yelling and screaming. It wouldn’t be the last time. It would be just another story to tell 20 or 30 years down the road just like all the other drunken brawl stories I grew up hearing of the ones that had taken place 20, 30, 40 and more years behind me. Those stories even featured some of the main characters I’d seen in my first brawl. It made those stories absolutely real and not at all enhanced by heresay or fiction. That’s just the way it was in my family. It was accepted.

 I used to wonder if it was because we were Irish. My great-grandmother blamed the vice on the Irish side and not her Scot’s side. I once asked my grandfather if it was true about being Irish. He said, “shut up and eat your whiskey.”

 He died in 1969 of a cancer for which he’d been drinking to deal with the pain prior to resorting to useless surgery and faithful morphine.

 My great uncle, Aaron Babcock, was the brilliant out-of-touch with the world type who worked on developing the first U.S. Air Force Univac (that’s old school for ‘computer’ for those of you who weren’t born back in the day.) Life, however, and it’s day-to-day problems were something a drafting board and a mathematical equation couldn’t solve. But neither could the bottle, but it was – as all addictive substances are – cheap and available. He died of a massive alcohol-induced hemorrhage in 1977, on welfare and of no fixed address. Literally, or so my mother often said, in the gutter.

His sister, my grandmother, an evil piece of work by any description was the raging type of morose alcoholic. Verbally abusive. Self-destructive. Materially destructive. A sociopath who had to cut through the swath of thick blue smoke that surrounded her 98 pound frame as she consumed dozens of stubbies of Carling Red Caps and filterless roll your own cigs starting about 11 o’clock in the morning and carrying through until the wee hours of the following day. That in itself was enough to label her one tough old broad, the kind you’d imagine you’d find camped out in the local bar, wearing a faded silk blouse, tweed skirt and babushka. Her pale skin yellowed by smoke and broken only by a smear of Elizabeth Arden No. 6 Red lipstick. Yep – Mary-Gene – road hard and put away wet. The stench of stale smoke and warm beer clung to her skin to the point that I nearly vomited anytime I was forced to give her the mandatory holiday hug. Shabby. Anemic. Drunk. Hard to believe she used to be same beauty whose photos I have buried in the bottom of the sideboard drawer. Proof to me, I guess that however I remember her for all of my childhood until she died, she was once a person, a woman, with soul and a family. In the end, however, all she had was her booze. Fittingly, she died alone after a breaking her hip from a fall. I understand she lay at the bottom of the stairs in her condo for days before she was found. Not the same stairs she had once pushed me down as a child during one of her drinking binges and then blamed it on Sandy, my grandfather’s dog. In the end, it wasn’t the hip but alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver that took her.

 Born into it? Damn right. From the moment of conception.

 But the grand daddy of historic and renown drunks in my family was my great-grandfather Babcock. The true raging alcoholic. Driven to the bottle to cope with the horrors of WWI, he was, as legend has it, one of the nicest, sweetest people who ever trod behind a plow – when sober. Then he took a drink. The stalwart, God-fearing farmer-turned soldier-turned farmer unleashed a destructive storm of violence that included beating the shit out of my great-grandmother, their children, the shooting of firearms, small animals, threatening anyone and anything that got in his way to the point of spending a considerable amount of time in and out of the Picton jail. He was also a bootlegger during the Depression. Needs must and all that. Another brilliant man, self-taught, for whom reality was too cruel. He believed he had only one true friend. And it too deceived him in the end, ironically, on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1955. Dead of a number of alcoholic comorbidities.

So here it is, my resume into the world of AA. Luckily – very much so – I don’t have the head for binge drinking, or for any drinking for that matter. My stomach rejects anything more than a couple of glasses of wine. The rest of me doesn’t react all that well either so the bottle and I tend to steer clear of one another, in light of my excellent references.

But now I have a different battle. Someone I love has been snatched away by this obscene disease. Harming only themselves, so they think, I see a different kind of alcoholic. One who was led down the path to the slippery slope of ‘casual-social drinking’; the friendly guy who jokes and laughs easily, the life of the party and the straight up guy everybody wants to be friends with. The ‘sure, I’ll have another one’ drinker who started innocently enough only to be abducted and pushed into the vast pit of ‘I NEED another one…and another one…and a few when I get home from work and a few before I go to bed.  Make that a several, but only after my wife goes to bed.’ Obviously, I sleep too soundly to hear him get up and go to the kitchen cupboard where 2, 3 or sometimes 4 60 ounce bottles of vodka live every week. Yes, every week. I am also too deep in slumber to feel the mattress sag as he gets back into bed an hour or two later, kisses me on the cheek with a mouth tasting of vodka and whispers, “I love you” before burrowing into the blankets for the night, safe in the knowledge that I am seemingly oblivious to the dangerous game being played out in my own home – one I swore I would never have to face because I thought I had a choice. Because I thought I had closed up all the scars of my past and left them all behind in my bad memories and sometimes nightmares.

How wrong I was. That “elephant in the room” is now firmly lodged in my house. In my bed. In my life. For whatever reason God has chosen to place this affliction in my life once again, at least I know what I am facing. I can look deep inside its ugly heart and face it head on. Because this is one family member it’s not going to get. I know its tricks, its false promises, its weaknesses. It’s going to be a long, hard fight. I might not win every battle, but at least I know my enemy.

Because my name is Kathy and I am the wife of an alcoholic. And this is the beginning of my story.