Alcohol Awareness Week

It’s amazing what you can have delivered these days. One evening last month, I ordered a chicken katsu curry and my dad’s death certificate.

My father died in 2005 at the age of fifty. I was seventeen. At several junctures over the last twenty years, I’ve asked my mother to explain to me again, one more time, exactly what he died of. Bet she loves that. They’d divorced many years earlier and my brother and I would visit Dad every other weekend. I’ve always known his drinking was at the root of it. I’ve also talked about his alcoholism extensively in my own treatment and ongoing therapy. Despite my dear mum explaining to me multiple times that he’d developed a pancreatic tumour in relation to his drinking, it wouldn’t quite lodge in my brain as fact. Every few years, I would sort of half-forget, or question if I was remembering my mother’s account of his death correctly. Weird.

So, this year, I decided to get some clarity that I could literally keep. The certificate duly arrived in the post - and there it was - listed first for underlying cause of death:‘Chronic alcoholism’. Then, typically, some emotions happened. I noticed the familiar, quiet hum of sadness getting a little louder, coupled with a profound feeling of validation.Chronic alcoholism. Acknowledged in black and white. Official. Recorded.That iswhat happened. My dad suffered from chronic alcoholism and that’s why he’s gone.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve had a recurring thought (though not a belief) that maybe I’d been protected from the full truth - and that my father had in fact died by suicide. In a recent session with my therapist, I explored this and accepted that in a way, he had. As a teenager, I would sometimes find myself fantasising about him having passed away. I’d imagine the outpouring of sympathy I’d receive from family, friends, and teachers. I used to feel a lot of shame for having those thoughts. I understand now that the fantasy wasn’t about him being gone - though there wo