Perhaps That’s What Heaven Is…A Place Without Alcohol

Published in Woman’s World (March 27, 1990)

I was terrified of the respirator. Bright red numbers clicked loudly and changed constantly as my father lay motionless, his pale yellow body a human extension of the machinery lining the head of his bed.

His mouth would open. His lips would move in a futile attempt to speak. He would motion with his fingers and plead with eyes filled with terror and pain. No one could help him now.

One year earlier, doctors had told him that if he continued to drink it would be the same as putting a revolver to his head. Still he could not, or would not, stop. After years of denying his alcoholism and an eight-hour operation to save his life, my father died with only 1/5 of a liver.

It seems unbelievable that eight years have passed since his death. Yet it's taken that long for me to want to talk about it and to understand it.

What I recall now is the day I got the courage to confront my father about his drinking.

His disease had put him in the hospital, where for the first time he couldn't get a drink. There, I thought, he would surely not ignore the seriousness of his problem anymore.

We were alone in the room. He looked like a lost child, ashen and forlorn, hiding under white sheets. The man I had been afraid of my entire life no longer seemed intimidating. “Dad will you give up drinking this time?” 

He turned to face me. My question had surprised him and his eyes filled with tears. “I'm sorry,” he said in reply. “I failed.”  He turned his head away from me toward the hospital window, ending a conversation, I'd waited for most of my life. My father felt he was a failure, but I never really understood--- nor did my mother--- understand why he was never happy. No matter what anyone said, it didn't seem to please him. He was an artist, a painter who became a commercial artist to support his family. He made excuses as to why he couldn't paint, why he wasn't appreciated at work, why the world wasn't as it should be.

We all tried to love him. We were afraid of his wrath if we spilled our milk at the dinner table, if we failed to wear socks or left the lights on. We didn't tell my father anything we thought would anger or upset him. I was nine years old the first time I ever saw my father drunk. It was the only time I know of that he hit my mother.

We were leaving my cousin's wedding. My father had been very, very happy dancing at the wedding, and I was too young to read the anguish and embarrassment on my relatives’ faces as he tripped over his feet. I thought he meant be funny.

We were hurried to the car before the party was over. My four sisters quickly got in the back seat; I sat between my father and mother in the front. As my father pulled the car out of the parking lot, my mother begged him to stop, screaming that we would all get hurt. She was crying and my sisters were in tears as well. Then my father began to strike my mother.

The car was swerving and my mother fought him for the keys. He kept hitting her and while they were struggling, I somehow managed to get out of the car while it was moving and flagged down a passing motorist. I stood in the middle of a dark street telling a stranger that my daddy was drunk and hitting my mommy. The car sped off and left me alone to save my family.

While I was still trying to get help, my mother got the keys away from my father. Everyone was crying and holding on to my mother. I watched my father wander away in the darkness, alone, angry, and I wondered where he would go or what my mother would say to him when he came back. 

What my mother did was to love him and forgive him and believe things would get better and for a time they would.

My happiest childhood memories-- and there were many-- are of the Saturday night family sing-alongs. My father would play the ukulele, banjo or guitar and we would sing songs. It was then that my father seemed proud of us, happy he had a family who appreciated him.

In my high-school years, my father went to a job that he hated every day and came home to dinner tired and ready for a drink. My mother would empty the ice cube tray at the precise time his car pulled into the driveway. This always made my father happy, which in turn made my mother's life tolerable.

Sometimes I miss my father terribly, and it hurts that he doesn't know my children, his grandchildren. I’m angry at him for leaving my mother to live alone. I'm able to understand that his drinking prevented him from ever being happy or well, and so our families suffered, some of us more than others.

Two years after my father died, I admitted one of my sisters into a hospital for detoxification. She was, at that time, drinking a fifth of whiskey a day. We tried to reason with her. I'd taken her to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but she still denied she had a problem.

Her phone call came at 10 o’clock one night, just as I was going to bed. “If you can take me to the hospital, I'll go,” she said.

When I got her to her apartment, she was drunk, but she knew what she was doing. I drove her to the hospital and told her how proud I was that she was going to get treatment. 

“I don't want to die like dad did!” my sister cried.

Four years after my father died, another sister was admitted into a psychiatric ward and diagnosed as a manic depressive. A third sister spent four weeks in a hospital for compulsive-eating disorders. From my family, the problems didn't go away when my father died; they grew worse. But they forced us to confront the reality that all of us are physically and emotionally connected to a man who drank himself to death.

When I read articles about alcoholism or accounts of alcohol related deaths, I wonder if the disease hasn't become an epidemic. I wonder if there is any family that hasn't, in some way, been touched by this disease, and I fantasize about living in a world without alcohol. 

Perhaps that's what heaven is… a place without alcohol.

I imagine my father is in heaven, at peace with himself and happy, holding a paintbrush-- and there is no drink in his hand.