{"id":12187,"date":"2012-04-02T14:22:59","date_gmt":"2012-04-02T21:22:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/?p=12187"},"modified":"2013-11-15T13:01:49","modified_gmt":"2013-11-15T20:01:49","slug":"letter-sister-grief-alcohol-addiction-0402125","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/letter-to-my-sister-0402125","title":{"rendered":"Letter to My Sister"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"CloseThe following is an open letter to my sister Andrea Haber, who died from complications due to alcoholism on 10\/31\/11. <\/em><\/p>\n

Dearest Anj:<\/p>\n

Just a note to let you know how much I miss you. It\u2019s still so bitterly ironic to me that what killed you is the very disease I\u2019ve devoted my life to battling. But in a way, your alcoholism never gave you a chance.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sorry we never talked about it, although you can\u2019t say I didn\u2019t try. There was a time, a few years back, when you told me you wanted to talk about it, and my heart leapt. But that talk, like so many hoped-for moments, never materialized.<\/p>\n

I believe when I first got sober I wrote you a somewhat long-winded, pompous letter about the perils of drinking. I\u2019m sorry again that I preached at you like that. You handled it with grace but I cringe now at the thought of my presumptuous rambling. Newly sober people often think they can save the world with a few well-chosen phrases. I guess I thought there was really something I could do. Na\u00efve, yes, but even at the end, and maybe even now, I often feel the same way.<\/p>\n

I miss your letters. They really made me laugh. You were a fabulous writer and I think that you, as with so much else, underestimated yourself. Their absence has created a very loud silence.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure you\u2019re thinking, \u201cGee bro, nice cheery letter!\u201d I only wish I could be more cheery. This is an occasion I never wanted\u2014 that even with the grim medical news coming from Pittsburgh, I never really saw coming. There\u2019s just no good way to spin the loss of someone so young, so beautiful, so amazing. Part of the tragedy for me is, I don\u2019t think you ever truly understood just how loved you were. Mom told me you were shocked when she said to you, near the end, how much you\u2019d be missed should the worst happen. This too, is another symptom of addiction: the disbelief that we matter to people, the certainty that we\u2019re really \u201conly hurting ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hard to be cheery when feeling so cheated\u2026<\/p>\n

Of course, denial is the hallmark of this loathsome affliction. We grew up with rationalizations and minimizations aplenty when it came to Dad\u2019s drinking and the family\u2019s Nixonian \u201ccover up\u201d\u2014i.e., \u201cDon\u2019t talk about it, too embarrassing\u201d (Dad\u2019s favorite) and \u201cIt\u2019s not that bad\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t exaggerate,\u201d all repeated like mantras. Even I, near the end, felt that chances were good you\u2019d come around; see the light, get sober. Your disease made a mockery of my optimism.<\/p>\n

So hard to sit on the sidelines and simply try to accept. I\u2019ve struggled lately with, \u201cDid I really do enough?\u201d Should I have gone all out and planned an intervention, John Wayne style? Should I have demanded you listen to me until \u201cthe truth\u201d sank in? I already felt like a stick in the mud, the voice of gloom, whenever you called or wrote me and wanted to laugh or kid around; I loved the jokes but was so terribly worried about your well-being. We had a trove of inside jokes, a bulwark against the despair of growing up in that chaos and emotional violence. I cherished the humor but wondered what might be going on underneath. There is a pain we can\u2019t hide from, I have found, no matter how clever or humorous we are. When your doctor handed you that grim prognosis last year, that you either stop drinking or die, I thought \u201cwell this is it, she can\u2019t ignore it any longer.\u201d Wrong again, bro!<\/em><\/p>\n

Of course the clich\u00e9 is that there\u2019s nothing you can do to get a person to stop; no amount of begging or pleading or coercion will ever do the trick. Maybe briefly, superficially, but it\u2019s an \u201cinside job\u201d (as they say) when it comes to lasting change. We can give someone just about anything, except motivation to do the hard but necessary thing. I kept thinking you\u2019d finally \u201chit bottom\u201d when the doctors told you your liver was shot\u2026until mom told me this wasn\u2019t the case, that she feared nothing was changing. I backed off a bit because I know how she hounded you. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe hearing it from me would\u2019ve got you moving.<\/p>\n

I cringe when I see the pride and ego in that last sentence. Yes, you should have heard it from ME, your big brother, sober white knight on the West Coast, brandishing a master\u2019s degree in psych., saving souls and fighting the good fight. I wonder if you\u2019re chuckling as you read this.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s pretentious of me to think I had the slightest idea of what might be good for you. I had no idea what was really going on in your life, and I suppose it was none of my business. Maybe the long, hard climb back to sobriety might have been too difficult; perhaps too many skeletons, whatever they were, had accumulated in the closet for any one person to face.<\/p>\n

But saying \u201cThere\u2019s nothing I could have done\u201d doesn\u2019t seem to help. Maybe that\u2019s why I\u2019m writing you now; perhaps, in my Jewish neurotic guilt, I struggle towards some kind of absolution. Doubt has always dogged me; so hard to not<\/span> look over my shoulder in almost every instance. This is no exception. Could I have somehow said more, done more, pushed harder to help you \u201csee the light\u201d? (Am I hearing that chuckle again?)<\/p>\n

Just this morning I advised the mother of a patient that there was nothing she could do to \u201cget\u201d her daughter to stop using and go to meetings. I thought, \u201cWow she really thinks there\u2019s something she can do!\u201d So easy to sit in one\u2019s cozy office chair and dispense wisdom to the struggling, misguided souls asking for help\u2026<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the hard part (as if there\u2019s an easy part!): You can detach, stop trying, accept another\u2019s addiction, respect their \u201clife choices\u201d and move on. But how to really <\/em>\u201cmove on\u201d when it\u2019s your own flesh and blood? You can stop obsessing, stop letting the person\u2019s disease hold your serenity hostage, attend Al-Anon meetings, seek counseling\u2026but the kind of Zen-transcendent it\u2019s-all-good acceptance I\u2019ve perhaps subtly advocated to others isn\u2019t possible, at least not for me, at this point in time.<\/p>\n

Because I can\u2019t stop loving you. Can\u2019t switch off the caring. How could it be otherwise?<\/p>\n

Maybe the idea is to make room for both, the love and <\/em>the acceptance. It\u2019s not either-or (as I\u2019m fond of telling my patients). You can love the person and hate the disease. It\u2019s just hard to stand by and watch a loved one fall to pieces and to try and pretend it\u2019s not happening. It\u2019s like a fatal car accident happening in slow motion right outside your door. <\/em>I prayed every night for you to find the desire to stop drinking. I struggle to accept it never happened.<\/p>\n

I know you meant no harm, Sis, and I never took it personally. I think if you could have stopped, you would have; as I say, the odds were seriously stacked against us from the get-go. I don\u2019t know why I hit the lucky number; I just know it\u2019s a gift that I protect with my life, and I would have given anything to have shared it with you. I tried.<\/p>\n

I hope you know that somehow, wherever you are, I was worried but not condemning you. There is so much shame with this thing but I always longed to say to you, How could you <\/em>not be an alcoholic, <\/em>with all the crap we had to deal with? Even so, I underestimated the awesome power of this thing, and can only guess at how you suffered beneath the chuckles, the jokes and that wonderful wit of yours. It\u2019s just hard to accept that, in this case at least, love was not enough\u2026so difficult at those times when I think of our private jokes and laugh and want to email you\u2026hard to really accept that my kid sister\u2014my first friend, my loyal ally\u2014is really, undeniably gone\u2026<\/p>\n

\u00a0Related articles:<\/strong>
\nThe Pendulum of Grieving<\/a>
\nOver-Extended: Thoughts on Boundaries in Addictive Families<\/a>
\nIn Case of Emergency: Seeking Help When a Loved one Struggles with Addiction<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Darren Haber, MFT – The struggle to accept the things we cannot change, especially in people who we cherish, can be very challenging, even for those well versed in relationships and loss. When the loved one has died as the result of an addiction, guilt can also play a role. Writing a letter to the person can give us a chance to say things that may have been left unspoken before the person died and help us move through our grief.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1061,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[447,141,382,232,25,57],"class_list":["post-12187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-addictions-compulsions","tag-addiction-drug-alcohol","tag-family-of-origin-issues","tag-grief-loss-bereavement","tag-psychotherapy-issues","tag-the-human-being-of-therapy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1061"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}