The Dead Father

He had been on the unit, or I should say in bed for the first three days he was with us. Usually when a patient is unable to get out of bed for two or three days it can be attributed to chronic alcohol use or, a really bad cocaine crash (awake for days using). In this case it was the result of alcohol.

Since stays at the detox lasted three to five days only, I decided to go to his room and maybe bedside I could begin to do his paperwork.

He was in his early forties but the years of chronic alcohol abuse gave him the look of a haggard man in his late sixties. After asking him if it would be o.k. to sit by his bed and ask him a few questions, I took a seat.

As I was asking him various questions to complete the Bio-Psych-Social I could sense an intense sadness permeating from his being.

I asked him, “Have you ever had any sober time?” He replied “yes” he had a year once. I then queried him further, “what was it about that year that you were able to stay sober?”

His look became distant; all expression was gone from his face. It took him several minutes for him to look back at me. Then he responded, “well, we found out that my father was terminally ill…I was sober for the six months leading up to his death, then for six more months after.”

He then looked down at his bed and began to uncontrollably sob and rock back and forth. Through his lamentations one had the sense the agony was coming from the depths of his soul. This went on for a period of a couple of minutes (though when you are with someone going through this, it can feel like hours).

I then asked him when his father had passed away. Next, the shocker when he told me the year and it was thirteen years prior! There I had been thinking it was probably a fairly recent event and it was thirteen years ago.

He then went on to tell me that this was the first time that he had ever talked about it to anyone. In a way I felt privileged that this person had allowed me into his being.
He had not been able to maintain sobriety for more than a couple of days when he broke after a year clean. The issue of his father’s passing was on his mind every day; all day.

Part of his aftercare plan was to hook him up with a therapist that works in the area of unresolved grief issues. No longer did he want to live with the belief that men don’t cry, men don’t grieve.