My FIL appears to be responding to the drugs, although he's still hospitalized, so we came home yesterday utterly exhausted from the weekend. We both took today off to sleep in and recover, because although there were no additional crises, the conversations we had to have were brutal.
FIL is an alcoholic. He drinks the equivalent of four to ten drinks a day, all straight gin. When we were there over the holidays, he didn't eat with us because he was on strong antibiotics that upset his stomach and he "couldn't keep anything down but gatorade." And gin, apparently, because we watched him drink.
It's not clear how long he's been an alcoholic, because until his retirement he was a mostly functional alcoholic. Ms. P ran into a friend of her parents' years ago now who asked if they still drank. Clearly, their drinking was notable even among academics, a notoriously hard-drinking bunch.
His alcoholism is now having a directly adverse effect on his health. I mean, he's diabetic, so it's had an impact on his blood sugars all along, which doesn't do his health any favors. But he's gotten pneumonia something like six times in the last three years, and a little research revealed that alcoholism destroys a protein in the lungs that keeps fluid out.
Even more than his alcoholism, what was difficult was trying to talk about it within the family. The minimization, the rationalizations, the secret-keeping, the denial. It was sometimes hard to hold onto the reality that we've seen with our own eyes in the face of it. BIL talks about his "drinking," not his alcoholism, and he insists FIL chooses to drink, that it's one of the few pleasures he has left. MIL says drinking doesn't affect his diabetes. Neither is a defensible position, but these are the stories they tell themselves to get through the day. And I get that.
We know we can't stop him from drinking. We tried, a few years ago, to set some clear limits about our willingness to be around him when he drank, but while it has meant that he's not obviously drunk around us, he still drinks. It's also one of the few things he has any real control over these days, because his body has deteriorated so significantly that he's not very mobile, and he's the kind of stubborn cuss who will keep drinking just because someone suggested he shouldn't. So we can't stop him, not really. MIL says she's going to stop buying gin once it all runs out, but we have our doubts that it will last, not in the face of his rage and anger.
We did, however, collectively agree that his doctors need to know how much he drinks because it will likely affect his treatment plan. It's still unclear how or whether that will happen; one of us talking to his doctors will likely cause him to sever the relationship. It's bullying, pure and simple, and it's protecting the addiction, but it's also a question of what kind of relationship people want with him in what is likely to be the short amount of time he has left.
Ms. P and I know that in many ways we have it easiest because we're not local. But not being local also means we're outside some of the dysfunctional behaviors that keep his drinking hidden and accepted. It's not easy for any of us.
He says he's not ready to die, but none of his behaviors really support that, and we really don't know what to do. So the weekend was us going around and around with one another, talking, fighting, crying, whining, and generally trying to find a way out of the trees that would feel okay to everyone and yet call a spade a spade. Because while we are accepting that this situation might just be the way it is for the duration, we aren't willing to be complicit in the cover-up.
One of the hardest parts is that this isn't the end, either of the problem or of the conversation. Even if he pulls through this, and it looks like he will, this very situation, complete with pneumonia and hospitalization, is likely to keep happening until it finally does kill him. There's not much way around it at this point, not with his health issues and his alcoholism. So we're in this for the long haul.