Chapter 3. "Already Dead"

This patient still haunts me to this day. Pat was one of our old time alcoholics. He was forty-six, and the last twenty five of these years were a series of unending trips to the detox. He had well over a hundred documented detoxes, but this last one was especially disturbing. Mary, the director, had asked me to sit in with her on a family intervention we were hosting. Pat’s mother (who was in her seventies) and his sister (whom I recognized from a town organization to which we both belonged) were among the attending.

We were trying to convince him to include a half-way house his discharge plan. He had never tried one before and was less than eager to try now. But his liver function tests and biopsy showed late stage cirrhosis - If he drank again, the ball game was almost definitely over.

As I was talking to him an eerie feelings came over me. I had only experienced this feeling once before when talking to a patient, and that patient died less than twenty-four hours later. It is difficult to describe but it felt like I was talking to a person that was already dead, a shell of a person. He stared straight ahead as I talked. His eyes were like black, lifeless coals. When he spoke there was no emotion, just a vacancy, almost as if his soul had already left his body.

He was adamant in a quiet, monotone voice. He would only go to a half-way house if he broke out again. We all tried to point out to him that he had tried on his own over a hundred times without success. Maybe it was time to let others do his thinking for him; at least until he reached some comfortable level of sobriety. His sister’s eyes were welling up with tears, but even this did not alter his blank stare. His mother, as the matriarchal glue that had held this family together after Pat’s father had died of cirrhosis, tried her best – but alas, to no avail. Pat wasn’t taking in what we said to him. His plan was to return home again to his mother’s house where he had a basement apartment, and go back to AA.

About a week after his discharge, Mary called me into her office one morning. “I know you have tomorrow off, but can you come in Thursday morning? We have a funeral to go to.”

I looked at her and said, “Pat?”

“Yes,” she said. "The family would really like us to be there for all the time we had spent trying to get him to change his mind." When he got back home he had locked himself up in the basement apartment and proceeded to drink himself to death.”

“Yea, but Mary I feel like we failed him and his family.”

“No Willy, his addiction was too powerful,” Mary said to me. “We did all we could. Sometimes we have to let go when a person is listening but unable to hear what we are suggesting. We may work on behalf of a Higher Power, but we are not the Higher Power, right?”

“Yea, I guess so,” I muttered.

The next day we attended the funeral. At the grave site an unseen bagpiper began to play Amazing Grace. I took one look at Mary and we both began streaming tears. God, that song hits me the same way every time I hear it. Pat’s mother was one of the few that were not crying. She thanked us for coming and said, “Well, at least Pat is out of his misery now. He suffered for so long.” What a strong woman I thought to myself.

Death by alcohol – First her husband, then her son.