He kept turning up at mine, to moan about the new girlfriend because I was “his best mate” ??? WTF??
Weeks later, he was begging to come back. Promised to get his drinking sorted. Said he really did have depression. Then came out with that he was sexually abused as a kid and needed help and would go to the doctors. I took him back.
The drinking didn’t stop, he didn’t try to get help, sometimes I would drink with him when I came home from work. I had crossed a dangerous line and didn’t even realise it.
He was up to 2 bottles of whisky a day.
Then he had a drunken rage about something stupid and beat me up. That was it for me. The end.
I had already been a punch bag for enough years with my boys dad that wasn’t going to happen again.
After I threw him out, I would sometimes drink a glass of wine after work alone at home.
I went into a mega depression, just couldn’t pull myself out of it.
After some months, I was referred to a psychotherapist…Im going to write about that later.
He wrote about 3 letters a week (before the days of texting and emails)
I ignored them.
A year later, he turned up on the doorstep. His sister had committed suicide. Left 4 children, at 32 years old. She had had a speed addiction
I let him in, tried to sympathise, then he produced a litre of whisky from his back pack and I asked him to leave.
He continued to write a few times a week.
Then they stopped for a few months.
Then he wrote a letter and the writing was all over the place, missing the lines and looked like he had continued to write off the edge of the paper. His drinking never usually showed up that badly in his writing.
He said he had had a seizure (he wouldn’t blame the drink though). It had left him with a broken back, a broken hip and some slight brain damage, as he had been on some scaffolding when it happened and fallen quite a height.
He was out of hospital but in a back brace, would I meet him in town?
I met him 10am in the morning and when he bent his head to kiss me on the cheek, his breath stank of whisky.
He said he had been to the pub first..but this was before 24 hour licensing laws and there were no pubs open. I had a coffee with him and left.
I still loved him, but he wouldn’t stop drinking, even after breaking his back and brain damage, he wouldn’t admit it was the drink.
By this time, my 2 years of therapy was over. I was a lot stronger than when I had started and the depression hadn’t raised it’s ugly head in years. The PTSD I had apparently been suffering from went, and so did all the odd neurotic symptoms that came with it. But my drinking was taking off. The better I felt, in my own self, the more I liked a couple of glasses of wine after work.
I saw him again, a few months later. He found out I was going to Australia and didn’t want me to. I went anyway. That didn’t work out…for reasons I explained earlier in the thread.
When I came back I didn’t hear from him at all.
A year later, my younger son, said he had a strange dream about Andy. He said he had appeared in this dream and said
“Your mam and I were meant for each other, we would have been happy if it wasn’t for the drink”
I laughed and told him, that would be the only time he would hear Andy admit that the drink was to blame for anything, in a dream.
He went down the town to hunt down Ernie Andys friend. He didn’t find him but he found another friend who said
“Andy died a year ago, he drank himself to death over your mother” …he drank before I knew him!!
What had happened was, he had cut himself drunk on some job with a saw. He was suffering from malnutrition with the drink, and his liver wasn’t working right so wasn’t producing any protein, the wound wouldn’t heal, got infected, he couldn’t fight off the infection he got septicaemia (blood poisoning) and died. He was 39 when he died.