It's funny how it seems so difficult for me to envision my parents when they were kids. As if they somehow decided to live and automatically spawned from nothing into full grown adults. There are moments when I picture my Dad in high school; shaggy black hair, mouth full of cold sores, ruggedly handsome and hopelessly awkward, casually walking into his house in St. John, New Brunswick. He saunters into the living room. A different energy saturates and invades his senses, each step feels awkward, unnatural; something is not quite right. The silence is something that transcends a normal perception of quiet. He peers past the sofa; the one that is covered in cigarette burns, crumbs and urine, entrails and evidence of total disillusionment and mutiny. There on the floor is a convulsing figure.... his father; an empty pill bottle.... he's full of medication, a lifeless clammy shade of white. He shakes. My father paces, he tells my grandmother what is happening. The ambulance arrives; blurred apparitions in uniforms occupy the room. It was too late. An overdose. An intentional one. Emptiness, nothingness, a life wasted, a family deeply wounded. My Dad without a father from that moment onward; trauma left branded.
You see my Grandfather was an alcoholic. He drank four quarts, seven consecutive evenings a week to escape the mental madness. He also smoked two packs a day, something to keep the hands busy and the mind occupied. The stigma around alcoholism in the sixties and seventies was obscene. If you were an alcoholic you were rotten, immoral... you lacked character/drive and were vacant of any sort of dignity and self-respect. People thought of you as weak. The disease destroyed him. It consumed him slowly and without solace, until finally it rotted his soul; piece by piece it gnawed away at a hope that was systematically and repeatedly broken to its figurative knees, until fractured and irreparable.
There is a Native American belief that after a person consumes alcohol their soul leaves their body for a period of four days. In this respect my Grandfather was almost permanently empty, a shell of his true self. It's terrifying for me to envision what it must have been like to get to that point. Where you wish to end your life. Envisioning the vacancy, lack of purpose; where the agony of living is so great that suicide seems like the only release. I myself have been close, oh so close, but hope always seemed to find a way.
I see myself in my Grandfather. The toxic environment, the hopeless state of mind that comes with the insidiousness of the disease. Alcohol and nicotine invading my brain daily. Nowhere to turn. Judgment. Self-hate. Shame. Guilt. Destruction of family. No way out. The cyclical cunning nature of addictive behavior and something far reaching beyond self-hate. A bottled-up anger with no seal that bursts open into a fury that masks the desperation of a waking sadness. The compression expands with nowhere to go until the bend becomes a break, and then... Death.
Alcoholism, this disease was entrenched in both sides of my family. My Maternal Grandmother suffered from alcoholism for years. She was often deemed an embarrassment to the family and sent to their family cottage in Martins Point, Nova Scotia. Basically, she was sent there to continue her debauchery away from the public eye. What is wonderful about her story is that she eventually found recovery and was sober for the last twenty years of her life. Her strength gives me hope that recovery runs in my blood as well.
The purpose of outlining these histories is to give the genetic argument a certain level of merit. Do I believe that the sole reason for my alcoholic tendencies is hereditary? No..... but I do consider it to be a fair piece of the pie. To blame the entirety of addiction on genetics in my opinion would be a cop out. Certainly genetics plays a part in one's personality traits/brain chemistry that make the addict predisposed to this sort of self-destruction, moreover; the reason why I believe that genetics has a significant part to play in alcoholism is because of the circumstances surrounding my childhood.....