It has been an awful week here as I am reeling from the shock my 42 year old brother died on Tuesday. He was also an alcoholic and had been battling to save his foot and get through liver failure.

I had only one sibling. Spud was a gentle giant, very funny and good-natured. Alcohol ruined his life and ultimately took it.

There was a time he could have stayed in his children's lives had he been sober. They have serious special needs and he was watching them and had some drinks despite promises he quit. One of the twins almost drowned in a creek that day, after crossing a busy road. The aftermath from his ex involved police and a night in jail and a 30 mile walk home in the heat where he had no home to return, then a drive back cross country to Michigan.

I held onto hope that somehow he could smooth things over with her, despite her pretty extreme revenge tactics. The years passed and any fraction of news received was always bad. They are still non-verbal, they were in diapers at an age well beyond and may still be, they were getting aggressive.

Spud loved golf, and nature and hanging by the lake. He was a bartender for most of his adult life. He started losing jobs because they would smell alcohol. He had a job he loved, people who he clicked with, and came to work drunk. They gave him a second chance. He came to work drunk again.

He worked at a microbrew place and loved a good IPA or whatever. Beer wasn't enough in the later years. He drank vodka almost daily, and as a 6' 5" guy could put quite a bit away. He excerbated his early stage diabetes, which lead to neuropathy and loss of feeling in his feet. He was drinking his calories, choosing to buy alcohol over food. His electrolytes were messed up, issues with calcium and magnesium. His bones grew brittle. He shattered his foot, called "charcut foot", where he was just wrestling someone and his foot collapsed. He tried to deny it was broken until months later when his deformed foot created pressure sores where the bone would rub against the shoes. It was fixed, but plagued him with infections. 

Once he lost his mobility, tunneling wounds on the bottom of his feet, he couldn't work at bars and golf courses anymore. Then the pandemic hit and he lived with us. The depressant of alcohol cycled into his depression, his lonliness and isolation and grief of never seeing his children again. He lost all will to live, things were neglected, filthy.

The only thing that made him feel good was alcohol. He would get reprieve from his pain but then cause more pain.

At 42 years old, no one thinks they are going to die. He knew he was cutting life short, but Guiliani is old af and an alive alcoholic. There are old dude alcoholics out there. He would sooth himself with these delusions. 

In August his belly started ballooning like a pregnancy. His arms and limbs grew thin. He once competed in a Tough Man boxing match/fight having never been in an actual brawl in real life or the ring, and fucking stomped his opponent. He played every sport in high school. He was good at all of it. He wasn't pro scholarship good, but always top man in tennis, baseball, football, and especially golf. To see him so gaunt, so frail, was like a time warp and now he's a senior.

The end game of death by alcohol is brutal. He had ascites, where they would take 8 liters at a time from his belly. The ammonia that the liver can't clear builds "on the brain", and makes people delirious. I had finally brought my dad in his wheelchair to see him at the hospital and he was like a wild animal. It was like he was very drunk.

The nurses were having trouble getting him from the bathroom, and he didn't make sense. He had come home from the hospital and i found him at 6 am trying to pick at a hole in the flooring like it was a sticker and he could pull it up. I called an ambulance later when it got worse. He tried putting pants on as a shirt. He kept saying "I'm wide open", like dissolved in space.

The lactose ingested to pull ammonia into the bowel also makes you shit yourself. He had an infected foot that couldn't have any weight beared. He was bed bound, in diapers, shitting in a bed pan. When he was moved to a nursing home, in 2 week quarantine, where the nurse to patient ration was 1 to 28, he would sit on the metal bed pan and be forgotten, his bony hips making the 45 minute wait unbearable. Then he would get cleaned up and realize he was shitting himself again, of which the nurse swore over it.

The doctors told him "maybe he can get on a liver transplant list in 6 months", but meanwhile he needed 5 blood transfusioms and albumin put into his vasculature to keep his pressure up, and now the fallout was his kidneys are failing. It was the worst.

The night before he died i had a dream of a dark, old metal track like a roller coaster. I went to a very high point, stood above a vast emptiness of blackness, and a sharply descending track dropping at my feet. I was deeply terrified, and caught my breath as i knew i was about to be dropped into the void.

I awoke, knowing that dream was about my brother who had now contracted covid in the hospital. It was the dark night of the soul, the apex of which there is no escape but down, but death. He had made the bad decisions, gave up the fight to the demon, and was at that summit of final judgment. 

After the covid diagnosis, they sent him to the only hospital taking covid patients down by Detroit. I called him and it felt like speaking to someone on a train to Auschwitz. There were 2 very old people on the bus with him that he asked why they were going and they couldn't understand him. The man kept saying, "What? What?", like a demented Monty Python skit. He was so frustrated and tired of being in a hospital bed and I think on some level welcomed death to all that.

Now I'm left, caring for his estate, caring for our father who had a stroke, cleaning the disgusting mess he left of molded things and even a melted power cord that fused into a glob, melted a whole in bottom of laundry basket, and left a blue orange singe in the carpet where it almost caught fire. He became like a baby at the end. 

The people who contacted me through Facebook, his friends who promised to call, visit, did not. No one cared. My dad and I cared, but to think that assholes couldn't send a message, make a call??

That's what alcohol does. It pushes every one away. They judge and abandon. They don't see it as a disease, they see it as weak will.

It is a disease. It does kill. You can wake up now and see the reality before you find yourself at that summit. Love your people. Love yourself. Don't throw away the miracle that is the one life you've been given. If this story can kick one alcoholic in the butt to scare them straight, then maybe he didn't die for absolutely nothing.