I would love to wish my second wife a happy birthday, today. More than that, I sorely wish I could give her a good long hug, look into those beautiful blue eyes (the only place I ever felt totally safe swimming) and tell her not only that I'm so, so sorry but that I forgive her.
Just like in one of those movies, we met at work, fell in love, got married and brought a beautiful daughter into this world. And then her past reached up and snatched her back again. That was in 1987. We were divorced a year or two later. What would ultimately kill her in August of 2005 was into crippling dreams and burning bridges back then. It made a wasteland out of the future places we had all expected to live. It would continue doing that wherever she went until the only place she had left was an old couch in a dark room, late at night with an empty bottle and a heart that finally quit trying to beat it all back.
"Old Number Seven" by Devil Makes Three reminds me of how convoluted the alcoholic's thought process is. It is terribly twisted and yet, at the same time, it always points straight as an arrow right into that "fiery deep." Only an alcoholic could fail to see that the idea of "drinking in heaven" makes absolutely no sense at all. Truth is, though, the only thing that makes the alcoholic want to drink more than misery is prolonged happiness. To the alcoholic, the phrase "alcohol-free heaven" is a perfect example of an oxymoron. But it's also only in the alcoholic's mind that the idea of heaven being where the bottle never runs dry is forced to coexist with a deep conviction that they don't deserve to be there precisely because they drink.
It sounds funny, but it's not. It's a persistent, internal torture that, left unchecked, drowns the alcoholic in self-loathing. Until you see it in their faces—and I will never forget the few times I saw it in hers—you have no idea what it's really like to be them. It is way beyond those self-critical moments we all have; an order of magnitude more intense than even those times when we have occasionally succumbed to self-hatred. They drink to keep it at bay, even when they know that over time the drinking only makes it stronger.
What I find saddest at this point in time is that she was never able to know there were people who really loved her because she truly couldn't understand how anyone could. I don't know where that came from. We touched on the subject from time to time but she was never able to explain it. In all honesty, I don't know if there's any explanation to be found. I won't ever know. The script writers have already put down their pens ...
Still, I hope no one minds if I pretend for a moment that the story is still unfolding, just long enough for me to add this smallest of epilogues:
Happy birthday, anyway, Dawn. Believe it or not, I still miss you.
Image © 2009, Paul Pomeroy. All rights reserved.