by Emilie Pine
It is hard to love an addict. Not only practically difficult, in the picking up after them and the handling of those aspects of life they’re not able for themselves, but metaphysically hard. It feels like bashing yourself against a wall, not just your head, but your whole self. It makes your heart hard. Caught between endless ultimatums (stop drinking) and radical acceptance (I love you no matter what) the person who loves the addict exhausts and renews their love on a daily basis. I used to push myself to reject him, to walk away, failing each time. I oscillated between caring for the man who was afflicted with this terrible disease, and attempting to protect myself from the emotional fallout of having an alcoholic father. It took years of refusing him empathy before I realised that the only person I was hurting was myself.
When I was in my twenties, Dad moved to Greece. I put him in the taxi that took him to the airport, aware as I waved him off of the irony that it is usually children, not parents, who leave for a new life elsewhere. As I waved, I smiled, but I was heart-sore. Since the break-up of my parents’ marriage when I was five, Dad has always seemed happiest when he was as far away from his family as possible. It’s not an accident that he moved to an island that is so hard to get to for so much of the year.
And now, as he lies in this hospital bed, wasted and yellow with sickness, a sickness which he has deliberately and consistently sought out, as his heart and blood and kidney functions are minutely monitored by these machines, I look at him and wonder: how I can love him, how I can save him, when I can’t even reach him?
I NEED TO GET DAD’S PASSPORT and insurance papers from his house. For two hours I sit on a bus, travelling to his village in the north of the island. Halfway down the village street I’m spotted by a neighbour and I’m not sure how it happens but soon I have a concerned circle around me.
‘Where is the English man?’
‘We saw the ambulance come and take him away. Is he alive?’
The ambulance was clearly a major drama. Much of what’s asked is in Greek and I can’t answer. I say that he’s in hospital. They cast up their hands and wail. In hospital, to them, is practically the same as dead. ‘He will get out of hospital. I will take him to Ireland.’ They brighten. I am waved off, with much smiling and arm patting.
I let myself into Dad’s ramshackle bungalow and walk through the rooms, wondering where to find a single passport in the chaos of books and papers piled on every surface. In the bedroom there is blood all over the bed and floor, and blood and other fluids cover the bathroom floor, sink and toilet, crusty and stinking. I’m shocked. I know that I have to do something, to clean it all up, but it is beyond me. Through friends I get in contact with an ex-army couple living in a nearby village. When I show them the house and the state of the rooms, they don’t bat an eyelid. They assure me that having cleaned up after the army, they can handle anything. They seem so capable and so solid that I give them the keys and leave them to it. When I come back a few days later, the house is spotless, as if the nightmare of blood and sickness could not have happened here. After three weeks, Dad has stabilised, though he is still too weak to travel. My sister and I want to return to our lives. When we say it to Dad, he panics at the thought of us going, and we’re both torn. My partner offers to fly out, but in the end I make the pragmatic decision to leave. I feel that Dad will be safe in the clinic’s care – he feels that we are abandoning him.
Because it takes so long to get home, I have only been back for a day when I get a call summoning me once more to Corfu. Out of the blue, the clinic administrator says that Dad needs treatment at a hospital with a liver unit. And, once again, it feels like my heart is pumping pure adrenaline. I book more plane tickets, this time to bring Dad to Ireland. A friend of his helps us out, collecting the patient from the clinic and flying with him to Athens, while I go through the Dublin-Heathrow-Athens relay again. I meet them in the bar of the Athens airport hotel. Dad is wolfing down a chicken sandwich and a glass of orange juice. The sandwich is salty and the orange acidic, both of which the doctors have advised against. I’m relieved and irritated, a familiar combination of emotions. That night we share a room. Dad is only able to shuffle from the wheelchair to the bed. He bleats requests at me. I try to find the energy to be nice. I wonder to myself when it was that I became his parent.
In the morning, the airport staff are very kind, picking us up at the hotel and delivering us to the gate. The plane ride is uneventful, I watch a film and Dad sleeps. At Gatwick we wait a long time for the wheelchair and when it comes, and when I start pushing it, I realise just how big an airport it is. Dad insists on being wheeled around the terminal, peering from his seat. He wants to go into the pharmacy, but the aisles are too narrow. Instead I buy the supplies, then I manoeuvre him into the disabled toilet so he can freshen up. It’s a brief, eye-opening introduction to the world of disability: people are very sympathetic, smiling at me, while treating Dad as if he were invisible.
Then Ryanair insists that he walk up the outdoor steps to the plane. He looks defeated, as this is totally impossible for him. Ryanair is adamant that he can only board if he is able to do so by himself. The stalemate finally ends when the airport staff put us on the cherry-picker lift they use for loading food deliveries. It’s a short flight, but Dad is now exhausted. We arrive in Dublin and are met by my sister and her partner. We drive straight to A&E at St Vincent’s Hospital. I register him at the desk, able at last to speak the right language. In the triage room, the nurse asks him questions. Then she says she wants to take some blood. She reaches for the blood-test tray. And without her really looking, or pausing in what she is doing, or even particularly noticing that she is doing it, she takes a fresh pair of gloves from the box on the wall. And I exhale. It’s going to be okay, I think.
Everyone is confused when Dad is discharged from St Vincent’s later that night. He is so evidently ill, and barely able to walk, that we are shocked he is not being admitted for treatment. When I appeal to his nurse, she tells us that there are beds lying empty in the liver unit, but the hospital is so understaffed they can’t open them. When I complain to the A&E manager, she tells us that he’s better off at home than on a trolley in a corridor. She seems blithely indifferent to the fact that he has nearly died. Or maybe she just sees it all the time. He is given an outpatient appointment to attend the liver clinic the following week.
The days out of hospital give Dad time to rest, and to eat normally again, but at the liver clinic, as we sit and wait, I realise that he is not much improved. He is hunched over, breathing shallowly, and groaning every so often. The consultant insists on seeing him alone. When Dad emerges from the office, he has a sheaf of prescriptions and a follow-up outpatient appointment for two months’ time. I cannot believe that this is it, that there will be no medical treatment for a man who is so seriously ill. I ask at the desk if I can discuss it with the consultant, but I am refused.
Still, Dad dutifully takes his pills, stays off the drink, and slowly seems to regain some strength. After several weeks he is recovered enough to feel restless. Armed with his medication, and full of promises to look after himself, he goes back to Greece. Writing that statement now, I can’t quite believe it myself, but he did go back. Though still far from recovered, he was desperate to be at home, among his books, and away from doctors. And away from daughters.
But predictably, within a few weeks, though he is resolutely not drinking, Dad’s health is again at breaking point. He flies back to Ireland, unaccompanied this time. In the airport I barely recognise him. He is emaciated, with a hugely distended abdomen that makes him look – as he says himself, shakily – like he’s having triplets. I hold his hand as he gasps for breath. We take a taxi to A&E where he is admitted, but still without a bed to go to, he is put on a trolley in a corridor. People come and go around him. The noise is constant. Even at night they don’t switch off the lights in the corridor. In prison this is called ‘white torture’. Though he was already in a bad state when he arrived, over the
next couple of days his condition visibly deteriorates.
My sister and I go back to spending our time sitting by his bedside, badgering nurses and doctors for information, for treatment, for a bed. By the third day, Dad is hyperventilating and can barely speak. He grips the handrail of the trolley, and looks at us beseechingly. When the consultant finally appears, he refuses to address his remarks to me, demanding that I go away so he can hold his ‘confidential’ patient consult in the hallway. As I skulk around the corner, I count five patients within hearing distance of Dad’s trolley, and countless staff and visitors. To make things even more farcical, Dad is so delirious by now that he has no idea what the consultant is saying. He is taken upstairs ‘for tests’.
When Dad gets back to A&E, the registrar is kinder, explaining that the ultrasound scan shows that Dad has ascites – a build-up of fluid in his abdomen, leaking from his organs and other tissues, and putting so much pressure on his lungs that he can barely breathe. Simply put, he is at risk of drowning. Now that his case is urgent, Dad is finally admitted to the liver ward. It takes two days to drain twelve litres of fluid from his abdomen. He phones to tell me this astonishing statistic. I am in the supermarket. I think about what twelve litres looks like as I reach for a carton of milk.
The draining process stops with about five litres left to go. To drain anymore might precipitate kidney failure. The procedure has been successful though – Dad’s belly has shrunk and he is now able to breathe properly. Then the consultant tells him that he is on a transplant list. Dad says, ‘Absolutely not.’ The consultant says it’s not up to Dad. Dad says, nonetheless, he would rather die. I’m shocked by his refusal. But with the fluid drained, the threat of death, which has been so ever-present over the past few months, seems to recede. I don’t think he’s going to die, not this time. Prescribed with strong diuretics to stop the fluid building up again, Dad is discharged.
He moves into my sister’s house, but after weeks of his brooding presence, she suggests he stay with me. My partner and I live in a one-bedroom apartment, so we buy a folding bed and he sleeps in the living room. We try to get on with our lives, to go to work, to live normally, but it’s impossible. This can’t continue. Neil offers to help and together we talk Dad into renting a room elsewhere. He does not want to go, and he acts as if he’s being sent to Siberia. I overrule him. There is a power to running someone else’s life when they are not able to do it themselves. I arrange his hospital care. I book the flights. I pay the bills. I tell him what pills to take. I decide where he will live. But, in reality, it is Dad who has all the power. Because he is the one who decides if he’s going to stop drinking. Or not.
As the season turns to autumn, Dad is stable enough that the doctors grant his only wish: permission to go back to Greece. He hasn’t had any alcohol since he got ill, and he says he plans to stay dry. Maybe we can all return to normal. On the radio I hear reports of young men who have died from binge drinking, of an older man killed in a drunken fight. It is the death toll of a drinking culture. The list is a long one but though my father’s name is not on it for now, the awareness of that inventory, increasing daily, is always with me.
WHILE DAD HAS BEEN RECOVERING, his best friend Neil, who had been such a source of strength for me, so concerned about every step of Dad’s illness, is on the receiving end of a diagnosis himself. Suffering from a persistent cough, Neil goes for tests and, though outwardly active and healthy, he is diagnosed with cancer. It is terrible. The two men meet in Dublin between their various treatments, and both are shocked, I think, by the other’s physical state. When Dad returns to Greece, Neil continues to phone me, weekly now, to discuss Dad’s prognosis, always upbeat and encouraging, with a generosity of spirit shown by few, I imagine, who have such substantial concerns of their own.
In November the news comes that Neil’s cancer is terminal, that it will be only a short time until the end. Dad flies back to Ireland, so that they can see each other once more. He is so nervous and on edge as he sets off to see Neil that my sister and I go too. We have a few moments with Neil first, and his face lights up as he tells us that he thinks Dad has rediscovered himself. ‘He wants to live again.’ And Neil is right: somehow facing death has pulled Dad back into life, with all its struggles. Dad spends some time with Neil, alone. We stay in the kitchen, waiting and trying to lend a bit of comfort to Neil’s daughter. A week later, she rings to say that Neil died that morning, 11 December 2013. It was – it is – a great loss.
One of Neil’s last wishes is for Dad to speak at his funeral. With the winter flight schedule, however, it is too short notice, and we can’t get Dad to Ireland in time. Instead, he writes the eulogy and, in his absence, I read it at the crematorium. I hope, as I read, that people hear Dad’s words as if they came from him, as he salutes his closest and dearest friend of forty-six years. In his eulogy, Dad describes his grief that the joy that Neil found in the world, ‘a joy far greater than most of us will ever know,’ was taken from him, too early. He writes that the trust, respect and love he shared with Neil was something he never knew elsewhere and will never know again. After the funeral, Neil’s son says to me, simply, ‘They were brothers.’
In that last meeting, Neil gave Dad a map marked with places in Greece that Neil had loved and thought his friend would love too. After the funeral, Dad learns that Neil has left him a financial bequest to enable him to visit these places. Dad takes great comfort from this and starts to plan his trips. I listen to him describing these plans and I am relieved. Drinking was always Dad’s coping mechanism and I have been afraid that, faced with the hardest farewell of all, he would try to find some consolation in alcohol. But, although he is distraught at the loss of his best friend, he stays sober. I like to think that this is another part of Neil’s legacy.
IT IS THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of Dad’s haemorrhage. On a visit to the liver clinic in Dublin, the consultant tells him that his organ functions have significantly improved. He is no longer on the emergency transplant list. After the appointment, as we absorb the good news, I ask him how he feels about what he has gone through. He says he remembers very little. He says he thought he was dying, but when he goes on I realise that it’s not that he doesn’t remember, but that he actually misremembers. ‘At least I was never in any pain,’ he says. I am astonished. I insist on recounting to him how he spent one entire day roaring in agony, as three doctors clustered around his bed, and we were banished from the room, reduced to listening anxiously from the hallway. He looks sceptical, as if I’m making this up; it doesn’t match his memory of the experience. This happens again and again as we talk over our different versions of this recent past, with Dad claiming not to remember any of the pain, or our interventions to save him, to care for him, to help him and us to survive the crisis. I initiated this conversation, but now I hate myself for asking.
He’ll never have the memory of my sister and me trudging through the rain every morning and evening to and from the hospital and our hotel; of the long hours and the physical tension of waiting for the doctor to come; of the disappointment that there were no straightforward answers. They aren’t his memories, they’re mine. And so he’ll never know how it felt for the two of us to sit next to his hospital bed, constantly checking his breathing, his heart monitor, his transfusion bag. Or that as I sat there, I cursed him for always acting in a way that forced us to make these sacrifices. What was the other option? That winter morning, when I woke and saw the text message that said he was bleeding, I lay in the dark for a few minutes, knowing that I would get up and respond, knowing that I’d been preparing for this moment for years, but also wondering what it would take to do nothing.
As he talks, I am incensed that instead of asking how we felt – perhaps through shame, perhaps through the same narcissism he has always manifested, or perhaps because he just wants to move on – Dad has chosen to remember a different version of events. In his memory, he is a stoic hero. In his memory, we figure as only occasional characters. In
his memory, our feelings do not count. Perhaps I’m the narcissist here, wilfully reminding him of my presence, reinserting my sister and myself, with a word, a gesture, a story, back into his version of that time. Because his memories are not good enough for me.
He tells me that I am a bully. Maybe he’s right.
IT HAS BEEN FOUR YEARS since these events. It has taken me those years to write this, to collect my emotions and gain some distance. Dad has been faster at all these tasks.
In late 2014, Dad writes a piece for the Irish Times on his life with alcohol, and his life afterwards. He sends it to me and my sister for our approval. One line stops me in my tracks: ‘I am totally impenitent in the sense that I do not regret any of my drinking life.’ Though part of me admires the honesty he shows in this declaration, I cannot let it pass. In an email, I tell him that I have problems with his characterisation of drinking. For a start, I find it strange that the piece doesn’t acknowledge any of the brutal hurt inflicted during his career as an alcoholic. Later, on the phone, he says that he is taken aback by my reaction, that he didn’t realise he was hurting anyone. For a man with so much time and space for self-reflection, there’s pitifully little actually done. I explain it to him. ‘Oh,’ he says.
The next day, when Dad sends the piece to the editor, he copies me in on the correspondence, a tactic he consistently uses to include me, but also implicate me, in transactions where he feels he needs a witness. (I should point out, in case it is not already obvious, that he is adept at getting into arguments.) To the editor he says that he is anxious that his daughters will accept the piece but that one of them (that’s me, then) has pointed out that a drunk father is a destructive parent. However, he says, he does not think that the piece should be a ‘breast-beating apology to the world, or my daughters in particular’ and so he is happy to publish the piece as is. Throughout this back and forth I can see that Dad is concerned not to hurt me or my sister. That he does not change the article in light of my objection is not, however, completely unexpected. He may have discovered a new emotional sensibility, which had been anaesthetised for decades by his drinking, but he is still himself: still self-centred, still obstinate, and still unrepentant.