Letting Go

NOBODY UNDERSTANDS that sitting in a room with twenty or so other recovering drunks and facing the cold sober truths of life without drinking is tragically beautiful.  Looking around and seeing all these people and knowing that they have taken the same route to nurse their frailties and failed just as randomly as I have is always amazing to me.  And I see myself mirrored with all my excuses and delays and reasons and explanations.

I am grateful I am not yet forty and have come so far along the alcoholic journey and have this deep history of failure and some modest success in living with the voodoo magic of alcoholism.    Appreciating that although oblivion is only a few tantalizing skips away, I am not alone in maintaining a quiet dignity and patient resolve to stay sober.

So here's to group therapy and quiet listening and being patient and just nodding and taking it all in instead of thinking of something to say.  Of truly connecting and experiencing for a moment while he shares or her lip trembles that whilst I have lost many things to alcohol I still have so much to treasure.

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AFTER A FEW days in a mental health unit, the routine becomes oppressive.  I found myself loitering at 'busy corners' where it was likely I would bump into either another patient or a staff member and might be able to spark some sort of interaction.  Out of loneliness or boredom or even some sort of predatory nature, I was up and about trying to get some sort of action or stimulation.

In the meantime (because all time is a sort of meantime in the unit) I planned my exit strategy.  I strategized to be at my lucid and beguiling best for the next psychiatrist interview, so I could be re-classified down the ladder - closer to being "recovered" or "ready to go" or whatever it was.

The Psychiatrist had a South African accent and asked what were becoming the same standard questions.  I answered them as professionally as I thought was appropriate and made reference to the new fit out of the unit, which curiously enough had bunches of grapes as part of the design pattern, and I brought this to her attention as a joke.  She smiled and looked sideways to the med student who hovered by her and he shook his head and snorted, but in a good way.

It was another day after that, I think, after breakfast, at the morning meeting, I was told to wait behind.  The social worker said gravely that I was going back to the other unit sometime that day, probably after lunch.  I didn't know if this was closer to release or what - but after a few more hours of waiting around, touching my toes and rolling my neck, I was in the back of a van rattling down the highway.

We were unloaded into a waiting room and the other patient paced the room and did some what I have come to know as textbook "agitated and distressed" behaviours - banging the window, trying to get staff attention etc.  I sat sombrely reading a gossip magazine and hoped someone was watching how "normal" I was through the thick glass partition.  I also had a pen in my hand in case he tried anything and I could use it as a weapon.  It's unsettling how being scared and hyper-vigilant I found myself sort of getting armed for a patient on patient incident.

After another long wait, I finally got to see another medical type, who asked for my story, which I had abridged to "I'm a complete alcoholic and need a rest" without any other embellishments.  He talked with that stumbling, almost stuttering errs and ahhs dialect that some professionals seem to think distinguishes them as ever so thoughtful and terribly overwhelmed with the immense gravity and power of the knowledge inside their skulls.  I found myself finishing his sentences and wishing he had the crisp concise and economic language of Orwell.  Eventually, I deciphered that he was willing to let me go home - or go somewhere else.

Then, floating at the window, like a doe eyed dream from another world, I saw my wife talking to  someone - and she turned to look at me, dispassionately, coldly, like she was looking at the ugliest puppy in the window.  And me, seated,  leaning forward with my elbows on my knees encouraging the medical buffoon to loosen the constipated conversation so I could wipe up his crap and get on with my life.

"I'm not sure if he's right to come back yet - I've got three girls to look after and I just can't risk it with him anymore - " She said, placing a large black overnight bag next to me.  It was filled with my clothes and some books and shavers and shampoo and chewing gum.  It was clear she was planning on my stay being a bit more permanent.  I felt the ground shift and for the second time since being admitted felt that terrifying feeling of no control and my fate being in the hands of others.  She looked at me with a resigned, grim shake of her head, as though the decision had been made - as though she had spent her love for me and was finally, after all these years of neglect and outright alcoholic contempt, leaving me to whatever...