Daughter describes her mother's alcoholism (ticks all the boxes)

A daughter has described her mother's descent into alcoholism (Metro online newspaper). Every step of the way including her death ticks a box about alcoholism. It's a good story for that reason but it is tragic. Utterly tragic. By that I mean for the daughter more than for the mother. She was drinking two litres of spirits every day and was out of it. It is always the relatives who suffer the most and here is her story summarised.

Note: please forgive the odd typo. This was written in haste. Note 2: I have cared for a binge alcoholic for years 😎😢. But time is running out. I can't really do it anymore. It is too hard or too horrendous to be honest. Although Jane (not her real name) is sober for three months on the trot until the next 4-5 week binge comes along followed by 3 weeks in hospital if she survives. The binges are very severe.

Her mother always liked a tipple. She would drink in the evening and then progressed to having a drink before she went to bed and then to drinking when she woke up. That is called crossing the wire. It is going from being a heavy social drinker to an addict. Once you become an addict it's all over. Game over. There's no way back. All you can do is manage it but she never managed to do that.

She ended up with not one bottle but two empty bottles next to her bed. A lot of alcoholics drink alone and they end up with empty bottles all over the floor around puke and pee in the bed because they can't control their urination sometimes and can't control their defecation either.

This carried on for a while and then her drinking got worse as it always does. The daughter started to dread phone calls from her mother. That's because she would cry down the phone and tell her story such as she had been scammed out of her money. That's another point. When you're drunk you are predisposed to being scammed. You can also have accidents that you would not normally have and injure yourself.

So the daughter took charge of the money to prevent her being scammed. She tried to limit her mother's drinking by buying lighter drinks but her mother became angry with her and went back to her old ways. Comment: you cannot stop alcoholic drinking. It's impossible. It must come from themselves. They must stop voluntarily. You can never force an alcoholic to not be an alcoholic.

She took her mother to an alcoholism specialist. Perhaps more than one specialist and every time she pulled the wool over their eyes and continued as she had before. They believed that she just drank a little bit here and there not knowing she was a hard and fast alcoholic. Comment: alcoholics lie at every opportunity about their alcoholism. And the problem is that that in lying about alcoholism they extend it to every facet of their lives. It totally undermines trust between the alcoholic's relatives and friends.

This lying about their alcoholism extends to hiding booze all around the home. They will deny alcoholism at every opportunity. Comment: it is known that a vital phase in recovering from alcoholism is to admit that you are an alcoholic and you do this in a Alcoholics Anonymous meeting which you attend regularly and if needs be every day. That is to remind yourself that you are alcoholic.

And then she developed alcoholic dementia called Korsakoff's syndrome. 

She then she became so weak she became bedridden which I presume made her more weak and more bedridden. Alcoholics do tend to spend a lot of time in bed which means muscle wastage. This is exacerbated by the fact that they don't eat properly. They can become very skinny. And of course they are very unhealthy. This can shorten their lives as can, of course, accidents.

The daughter says that her mother cried and whaled for days and that she would go without food for days on end and was literally starving before her eyes. Exactly what I just said.

And then her mother dropped into a coma. She passed away a week later with her daughter by her side. Her daughter was tortured with guilt and she was angry because mother's alcoholism had made life much harder than it would have been. Of course she missed her mother who she says was the kindest person she knew and the strongest but of course all that was taken from her with alcoholism.

When her daughter cleared out her mother's bungalow it was full of bottles of booze including unopened bottles of brandy tucked away in a tumble dryer. As I said alcoholics hide their alcohol and their alcoholism from everybody even those that love them and want to help.

Ten years after her death she still wonders what she could have done to help her mother stop drinking. I will tell her. Nothing. Nothing at all because it has to come within. As you can see it really harms the lives of relatives and friends. They are the ones who really suffer the most.