cw: graphic description of alcoholism at its worst, mention of body fluids, blood, and personal neglect. Adapted from a personal experience.
I took her another one. A glass bottle, a fifth, with VODKA written in Cyrillic, adorning the label beneath a popular brand’s logo. It was a gorgeous bottle, too. I recall another grandparent using a soldering iron to carefully cut the top portion off and round off the edges, and affix them to cut and cleaned branches from the pecan tree outside, and make little aquariums for her two beta fish, and even bottled lights, lamps, and even soap dispensers. It’s where I got the inspiration to make a soap dispenser of my own back when I was active in my own drinking.
I parked my car in front of the house and made my way to the door, its intricate designs freshly polished and cleaned, a sign of my attempts to help her with the upkeep of the property since I’d reconnected. Using a key, I unlocked the door and opened it, and was immediately met with a most revolting stench, sending me back out of the door in a fit of dry heaves. I went back in after going to my car for a winter scarf that I sprayed with spearmint breath freshener to cover my face with.
This was a chimera.
The intricately-tiled kitchen, designed with hues of peach and lemon, was well lit by the sunroof, shining God’s light upon weeks-old chicken bones, empty bottles of what I carried, and food-covered plates that hadn’t been touched in so long that they were covered in sheets of dull powdery green. There were spots on the floor where her three dogs decided to go instead of going outside, or maybe it was just spilled lemonade and roast beef – I couldn’t tell, and I certainly couldn’t tell from the smell that still found its way past the super potent breath freshener that was on my scarf.
Seeing it used to make me angry, because it took so much work to clean all that up, over and over and over it was me who was tasked with cleaning it up, and she would find a way to blame me for something missing or lost, and get another relative to be angry at me, too. After passing through it every day, sometimes twice, for the past week, I’d become numb to it.
She lie in her bed, a lavish walnut four poster with little gold embellishments all over it. On either side were matching nightstands. The entertainment center and dresser also matched. A thick-piled red Persian rug with colorful floral designs took up most of the large space between the foot of the bed and entertainment center. The furniture alone in that room was more valuable than everything I own put together, including my car.
Yet there she was on the bed, which was only covered by a mattress protector, her chin covered in dried blood, surrounded by empty lemon lime soda bottles and more empty vodka bottles. She herself was lying in a wet spot, which I did my best not to look at. The sheets and blankets were shoved off to the side of the bed, partially covering molded paper plates, broken ceramic bowls, and golden silverware, all with leftover food that her three dogs didn’t take the liberty of finishing. Also in the pile were at least a dozen plastic gallon containers of the liquor, mixed in with the well-over two dozen glass bottles, all empty. Who knows how much more were hidden under the blankets.
She explained to her parents that she was tapering off, yet we both knew she was in a state of maintenance, consuming a fifth a day at this point. She needed it so it wouldn’t devolve into withdrawals, delirium tremens, or even worse: a gran mal seizure. According to the first responders I called in at three in the morning last week, she’d proven herself alert and oriented enough to decide on her own if she should go to the hospital, and she refused. We knew that she would die without the stuff, but we also knew that it would kill her if she kept it up.
My own traumatic past with alcohol was on high alert, even leading me to feeling ill at even the idea of drinking my own favorite non-alcoholic brews to relax. On the drive home, I was agitated, nervous, confused, and even guilty, both from my own history and from the uncertainty of whether I’ve been an enabler or a life-saver.
It’s difficult to detach my own history and understanding from her present decision to put herself in this place. I could have said “no, I won’t do this anymore,” but she refuses medical help. I can’t let her die that way.
So I got in my car the next day, and I took her another one.