Bottled up.

My Dad’s been drinking himself to death for a while. It’s going to take a miracle to bring him back.

A little over a month ago my Stepmother called to tell me my Dad’s drinking had gotten out of hand.

He was about 4 months into unemployment and job-searching at the bottom of a bottle of R&R wasn’t working. I decided to book a flight that week to go down, assess the situation, and hopefully put him on the path to considering rehab and recovery.

Or—and I know this for a fact—he’d be dead very soon.

In the weeks leading up to the trip. I did a ton of researching and soul-searching on what I’d say, what might get through to him, and what I was prepared to do to make this happen. Which opened up wounds and windows into parts of our family history that I hadn’t visited in some time.

When you grow up poor in East Texas, especially during my father’s youth, you’re taught to group your trauma. You tend to say things like “well that’s just how it was back then” in some twisted apology for what society accepted. And when it comes to trauma, let’s just say my Dad’s life was pretty hard.

That’s what we do right? We take all of life’s good and bad things, seal them in a bottle and label them “life was tough,” “pretty good,” or “can’t complain.” Unfortunately, that’s the only bottle my dad left on the shelf.

So I opened it.

For a lot of men who grew up in that time, the only way trauma is communicated is in pieces. A drunk story after a family get-together. A break in the long silence of a fishing trip. A sibling or family friend fills in a blank or two. You sort of just listen. Bottle it up, like you’re trained to. And you come to your conclusion.

“Wow, Dad’s life was pretty hard.”

We’ll it’s pretty hard to treat “pretty hard.” You have to unpack all the events. All the emotions felt. All the feelings ignored over time. Because each one is a reason to drink. And he has plenty.

1. Dad grew up in an abusive home. He was one of five children of a nurse and a man with extreme anger issues (probably PTSD), and regularly witnessed it being taken out on his mother, his siblings, and often himself.
2. His older brothers left as soon as they could. One in-and-out of prison, the other going as far away as he could. It left the three youngest siblings to deal with his growing rage.
3. This culminated a bit later on to my Dad helping my Mamaw get away from his father. I believe the local police called his father to say he’d found them. He chased them down. Threatened them. Then he pulled a rifle out of the back seat causing my Dad to step in front of my Mamaw. And he shot him. Through the hip. Thank goodness his mother was a nurse.
4. That of course signaled the complete separation of my grandparents. Nothing happened to his Father, legally at least. Because “that’s just the way things were.” A while after all family had abandoned him, Carol Macomber, a man I’m thankful to have never met, was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
5. A little bit later he got married to my mother and had me. And the relationship was so bad, her trauma was so bad from growing up, that she was simply not prepared for motherhood. They divorced and the judge granted Dad full custody. Pretty rare for the time.
6. He raised me on his own working odd jobs and running sign shops. Sign painting, I think was the only real joy he ever found through work. Then the rise of computer-aided work made it difficult.
7. He found another partner after about 10 years of raising me on his own. They got married. Things were fine until they weren’t. I went to college. They got divorced.
8. He reconnected with the woman he was dating right around the time he had all the trouble with his father. Which ended back then because of it. They met one another at a perfect time, each having dealt with a lifetime of challenges. Each having survived. They confided in one another. Mostly over a drink or two.
9. Dad was trained in life to go someplace else when he hit a wall. And this isn’t how my Stepmother worked. She was a fixer. She was the matriarch of her family long before her mother passed away. And with this family, there was a lot to deal with: addicts, prison, divorces, health issues, financial issues. Anything and everything, she would try to support. And this was probably the first time my Dad saw this level of connection in a family.
10. But they dealt with things between one another over a drink, or two or three, for many years. And what begins as fun when you’re younger, turns into (or hides) health issues when you’re older.
11. My Dad got colon cancer (which successful surgery corrected). It slowed his drinking down but didn’t stop it. Then my Stepmother had a major stroke. Which completely erased her desire to drink. So he was alone with his bottle. And it was only then she realized how bad it was.
12. He lost his job, he lost his drinking buddy, he lost his way. And to be fair, no one ever showed him the way.

“Wow, Dad’s life was pretty hard.” There isn’t a label big enough for that bottle.

There are plenty of reasons for my Dad to have found comfort in his poison (and I’m paraphrasing with the above). But what’s important is to know that to stop drinking is to stop repressing. To cope with addiction is to cope with the causes of addiction. And none are so simple.

It’s important to note that we’ve been climbing to the cork of this bottle for some time. And he would get angry with us for asking him to take his life seriously. He’d shut us down when we ask him to slow down. “I have this under control.” Until he couldn’t anymore.

I got into town about 10 days ago. I sat with him and asked him what was going on. How he was feeling. He said he knew why I was there. He said he was ready for treatment. And committing to it. I should have felt joy. I should have felt relief. But I felt nothing.

I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to open up in the way I’d prepared to. He wasn’t in treatment now, so I felt like he might back out of it. A piece of me believed he would somehow find some way to not deal with all this trauma that had built up over so long. A piece of me still does. And I didn’t get to tell him how, despite everything he’d been through, that he gave me a great life. That because of his ability to carry a burden, I grew up with so much less of one.

Then I stayed with him for a few days. I got things out of the way. I cleared his headspace. I mowed the lawn. I cleaned the garage. I drove him around. Like a twisted chauffeur helping someone get their affairs in order before a big trip.

And the last day, because the scheduled reckoning was approaching, he began to drink like he’d never get another taste again. Like he was trying his best to kill himself before dealing with real pain.

I couldn’t take it anymore and I exploded. Everything I prepared to say I said to a person who wouldn’t even remember the conversation. I left. Drove around the block a few times and came back to a man who raised me crying in the middle of the carport.

I apologized for yelling. And said I’d be back in the morning to help him with his final paperwork.

That morning, we finished the consent forms, and they called to say everything was in order. And again, I felt nothing. Just accomplished. Exhausted and still drunk, he went back to bed before noon.

I hugged my Stepmother, got in the car, and drove away to be done with it, just for a few days. And again, I waited for him to back out. Until the morning of my flight. I texted him, “hear anything yet?” No answer. Later on, I texted back “Hello? I’m about to board.”

At that moment my Stepmother called me. “I dropped your Dad off this morning at the facility in Tyler. He’s checked in, and won’t be able to use any electronics or his cellphone. He’ll only have access to their landline and he can only call me.”

And that was the point — at gate 23 in an Austin TX airport — that I felt something. I burst into tears in front of everyone. Relief? Joy? Release? The feeling of some life-long wound beginning to heal? And I couldn’t stop for a bit. He did it.

“Wow, Dad’s life was pretty hard.”

And it’s going to continue to be hard. But it will open so many doors toward building a better life.

He chose to start the process. He chose to let it out. The pain that goes with it. The anger that comes from it. He chose to put down one bottle and open something he knows will be filled with terror, pain, and a thousand other emotions he’d never been ready to deal with. From this point, it won’t ever be easy. But he did it.

And I couldn’t be more proud of him.