I've found that mourning the alcoholic is particularly complex. With "normal" mourning where a person dies, you feel the loss of their role in your life and of everything they were to you. You're left standing facing a big, gaping hole in your life.
In mourning acceptance of the alcoholic, we mourn the loss of the person we believe they once were, but this is overlaid with doubts that we ever really knew them, and then is further confused by the realization that in their place is a person you don't really know, and can't accept.
It's like we awaken from our denial, and find a stranger standing right in front of us, and our whole sense of security wavers because we wonder how much of the past was real, and how much was a figment of what we wished to believe, or what they wished us to believe. We're left with the huge hole of mourning, but the jarring sensation of a stranger invading the scene, too. We can't even mourn in private, because the stranger is ever there in our thoughts in this new reality, interfering with our mourning, distracting us. It's a mind-f***.
CLMI