Wonderful autobiography about loving an alcoholic. Remember clearly how amazing the first chapter was… that’s how they should be written. Sadder near the end. Should not have read it at this point.
So: detox is a set of pills to take in order to safely come off alcohol after an extended period of heavy drinking. rehab is an extended set of therapies dealing with the physical, mental and emotional results of long-term heavy drinking, and the obstacles to giving up. Recovery is where you want to end up: a long-term state of carefully nurtured sobriety.
And alcoholism? The simplest and most useful account I ever heard is this: It’s not what you drink or how much you drink, it’s why you drink and what it does to you. You might drink every day and not be an alcoholic; you might have been sober for twenty years and still be an alcoholic.
A good guideline to an illness’s moral status is the use of a noun to describe its sufferers - a leper, an alcoholic, an anorexic - rather than using the illness as a quantifier, which allows the inclusion of other qualifiers and thus preserves the patient’s humanity: a child with flu, a woman with gastro-enteritis, a man with cancer. The use of a noun also re-iterates the illnesses’ chronic nature. These are conditions which must be managed but cannot be cured.
Here is something I learned at an AA meeting. Twenty years earlier, the speaker, a healthy, cheerful woman, had been jobless, thrown out by her husband, banned from seeing her children, depressed, insomniac, skint, hopeless, sick, shameful, in constant pain. Suicidal. She thought it through and made her decision. She spent her last money on two bottles of gin. Back at the flat she was about to kicked out of, she drank one bottle, and put the plastic bag it had come in over her head, and tied it, and prepared to die. But through the clear plastic she could see the other bottle, sitting on the side. The alcoholic in her couldn’t just leave it there. She had to drink it. She tore the plastic bag off her head, drank the remaining gin until she passed out, was found by her flatmate and rescued. So, her compulsion to drink had saved her life.
As the Frenchman said, Happiness writes in white ink on a white page.
Chopin’s description of how English ladies play his music - “looking at their hands, with great feeling, and many wrong notes.”
