Copious Amounts of Alcohol and Grief Don’t Mix Well, In My Experience
Another sad letter to my beautiful son on his birthday
Today is a fantastic day. Tomorrow will be, as well, since it will be a day that isn’t today; and yet another day for us all to experience new challenges and find ways to make others happy.
Grief is an uncouth animal. It springs out of nowhere with neither invitation nor provocation. This is something I said almost a year ago today. It had become such an unwelcome persistent entity from the day of your accident that I imagined it being a duck-billed platypus: Grief, an evolutionary error. An accidental pet.
But then there is wine. With it, both highs and lows seem more accentuated. Substance-wise it would seem that alcohol would facilitate most people’s thoughts to be quieted somewhat — their feelings somehow magically diluted in a brew or a glass of wine. Muted.
But not for me. For me, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective) every glass of wine above my minimum intake is like a prism that accentuates everything I feel at the time of ingestion.
Since I miss my son every damn day, then this feeling is almost inevitably accentuated. Why drink more than, say, two glasses of wine, then? Why drink at all?
Sloppy careless answer: Because after a long fucking day, it helps me sleep. Precariously: one extra glass plus a sleeping tablet means I don’t wake up in the middle of the night and feel gripped with sadness.
Or simply (dumbly): some part of my heart feels like: Yes, well of course I deserve it, this magical third glass of whatever. For whichever tasks I didn’t do on auto-pilot today. For stuff I did exceedingly well. For the awesome concert events you and I started, each one now fully booked — successful happy shows from every perspective.
But, sadly — the 3rd (or 4th) glass is The Prism of All Prisms.
It could be the image of my face, looking back at me in this bathroom mirror… getting old and wrinkled in slight little corners, nooks, and crannies. This face looking back at me reminding me so poignantly that YOU used to look into this very same mirror. YOU WERE in this exact space that I’m standing in right now. You were here in a very different timeline and with starkly different thoughts to mine now.
I lament that you commented on the Dali-esque art on the shower curtain that hangs here still. You noticed how cool it was on your last visit here; your “family home” after you moved to “your Madrid home”, a few months after you moved to “your first flat and home away from Home”.
“Wow, that’s such a cool shower curtain! It’s beautiful, when did you get it?!” I remember the big happy relaxed smile on your face. I realized then, unimportant minutia at that time, that you never noticed it before. We got that Dali Art Shower curtain about a year before you moved out. Two years before your accident. You never noticed it on the last few months you were living here because you were so tired all the time. Juggling University, your job, and your busy happy social life.
Over my 4th glass of red wine tonight, it occurred to me that I had a replica of that Dali-esque shower curtain in my Amazon shopping basket, which was well on its way to your new home in Madrid because you liked it so much. But it wasn’t meant to be. You were in an accident around this time last year, and you didn’t make it and we lost you.
I may have even sent it, the replica of this gorgeous thing, sent as one small gift to make you smile. I could check, but I haven’t because it doesn’t matter. The last 12 months and 13 days have been a mosaic of auto-pilot mode, sadness about your death, happiness about your life, sorrow about every little thing that will never be.
Aaaah how I miss you. I need to sleep now.
I hope the alcohol accentuates that need to sleep. But it might not.
