{"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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s still so bitterly ironic to me that what killed you is the very disease I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve devoted my life to battling. But in a way, your alcoholism never gave you a chance.<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sorry we never talked about it, although you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m 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\u00c3\u00afve, 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re thinking, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Gee bro, nice cheery letter!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I only wish I could be more cheery. This is an occasion I never wanted\u00e2\u20ac\u201d that even with the grim medical news coming from Pittsburgh, I never really saw coming. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be missed should the worst happen. This too, is another symptom of addiction: the disbelief that we matter to people, the certainty that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re really \u00e2\u20ac\u0153only hurting ourselves.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Hard to be cheery when feeling so cheated\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s drinking and the family\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Nixonian \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cover up\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u201di.e., \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t talk about it, too embarrassing\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Dad\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s favorite) and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not that bad\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t exaggerate,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d all repeated like mantras. Even I, near the end, felt that chances were good you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve struggled lately with, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Did I really do enough?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Should I have gone all out and planned an intervention, John Wayne style? Should I have demanded you listen to me until \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the truth\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153well this is it, she can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ignore it any longer.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Wrong again, bro!<\/em><\/p>\n

Of course the clich\u00c3\u00a9 is that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153inside job\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d finally \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hit bottom\u00e2\u20ac\u009d when the doctors told you your liver was shot\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6until mom told me this wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s degree in psych., saving souls and fighting the good fight. I wonder if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re chuckling as you read this.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nothing I could have done\u00e2\u20ac\u009d doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem to help. Maybe that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153see the light\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? (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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153get\u00e2\u20ac\u009d her daughter to stop using and go to meetings. I thought, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Wow she really thinks there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something she can do!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d So easy to sit in one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cozy office chair and dispense wisdom to the struggling, misguided souls asking for help\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the hard part (as if there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an easy part!): You can detach, stop trying, accept another\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s addiction, respect their \u00e2\u20ac\u0153life choices\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and move on. But how to really <\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153move on\u00e2\u20ac\u009d when it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s your own flesh and blood? You can stop obsessing, stop letting the person\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s disease hold your serenity hostage, attend Al-Anon meetings, seek counseling\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6but the kind of Zen-transcendent it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s-all-good acceptance I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve perhaps subtly advocated to others isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t possible, at least not for me, at this point in time.<\/p>\n

Because I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stop loving you. Can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not either-or (as I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m fond of telling my patients). You can love the person and hate the disease. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just hard to stand by and watch a loved one fall to pieces and to try and pretend it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not happening. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know why I hit the lucky number; I just know it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just hard to accept that, in this case at least, love was not enough\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6so difficult at those times when I think of our private jokes and laugh and want to email you\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6hard to really accept that my kid sister\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmy first friend, my loyal ally\u00e2\u20ac\u201dis really, undeniably gone\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

\u00c2\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":{"_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}]}}