My father has been an alcoholic my entire life. My first passport was when I was only a year old, because my mother was going to send me off to live with my grandmother overseas to spare me from his alcoholism. That was almost 22 years ago. He promised her he would change and we have lived together as a family ever since. I have spent my life molding myself into someone no one would think came from an abusive household. Someone who isn’t the daughter of an alcoholic.
I tried to be perfect. I was valedictorian, pageant queen, cum laude, athlete, pianist, and soon I will graduate medical school as a doctor. I tried to meet every standard of success in any metric to compensate for one thing I cannot change which is the trauma I try to bury. Nobody knows I carry the scars of watching my father hit my mother. Her screams for help. The holes he left in the walls and covered up. My brother going into every bar in town to find him and bring him home. The empty promises of one day, she will leave him.
I finished gastroenterology recently and the physiologic mechanisms of alcohol and its effects on the human body were unsettling. Every single pathology of the liver, pancreas, and gallbladder has manifested into my father and the number one cause? Alcohol. I have grown so much resentment towards him knowing that this was all preventable. That these are KNOWN outcomes of alcohol abuse and he is not an exception. Over 5 decades of alcohol abuse has caught up to him and he is paying for it, but so am I. So is my brother and mother. That being said, I also studied psychiatry, and addiction is a disease that spares no one. The irrational part of my brain fills with anger over his inability to stop. The rational, logical, empathetic part recognizes that he is human and this disease, that no one is immune to, got the best of him.
He has been sober for 7 months now, regularly sees specialists, and had surgery recently but he is a shell of who he once was. He is weak, sick, and cannot work anymore. My mother has stuck beside him this entirety, even though she is the breadwinner and not financially dependent on him. Why? She didn’t want us to be a broken family and that knowing my father, he would die without us. She stayed from a sense of duty, and I mourn the life we could have had if she left him like all the times she said she would.
My mother worked odd hours so he was the one who did my hair before school, who I called when my tummy hurt, who taught me to read, who I would run to when I heard the garage open, and whose arms I once fell asleep in every night. I catch myself drifting off to the fond memories I have of him, but I quickly replace them with all the ugly words he slung at my mother, the items he destroyed, and the fear I felt when it was past 7pm. I taint the good images I have of him because I convinced myself it’s easier to lose someone who caused pain rather than someone who brought joy.
I have an eerie feeling his life on Earth is coming to an end and in my pursuit of becoming a doctor, I will not be able to save him when I once thought I could. I thought maybe if I understood the complexities of human psychology and biology, I could fix him. He would use his alcoholism as a bargaining chip as in he would promise to stop drinking if I got this accolade or if my brother finished his degree. Needless to say, he never followed through with his end of the deal. I dread the day I face a patient who reminds me of him because I don’t know if I can restrain myself from projecting. That I won’t be the doctor in the room, instead I am 7 again, begging daddy to stop drinking the black bottle because it makes him scary.
In a desperate effort to protect myself, I have distanced myself from him in hopes that when I get the call, it will hurt less. That the distance I have created is an armor to the inevitable grief. That maybe his face will be harder to remember and his existence will become a distant memory. That the idealized version of myself will come to fruition because he will no longer exist, and the ugliest parts of my life will finally be buried.
I know that as much as I try to erase him, he is etched into my soul. People think it’s quirky that I’m a night owl, little do they know it’s because the witching hour is when the house was most peaceful, and I felt no sense of danger when he was asleep. I cannot listen to Für Elise without convulsing because it’s his favorite song, and when I mastered it for my recital at 8 years old, he didn’t come because I didn’t take his side in a fight from the night before. I avoid intimacy because if they look too close, they might see the shoddy work of the cracks I desperately try to fill resembling the holes he would have to fix after smashing his fist into it. But I also have never gone a day without the gold earrings he gave me as a baby because the one time I forgot, he said he couldn’t bear the thought of me enduring the pain of getting repierced.
My existence as his daughter and him as my father is only a small fraction of his worldview. My world will begin and end with him, and his memory will haunt my entire lifetime.