Unlike many others, drinking never seemed to ease any pain or grief for me. I just became a grieving drunk. Humans have evolved to experience loss and grief. There is nothing wrong with allowing yourself to grieve, and I believe not grieving draws out that empty feeling for much longer than it needs to be. The correct response to loss is grief. Drinking is an incorrect response.
If you default to drinking in such situations, I would suggest you have a separate problem, not related to the loss. So now you have two problems.