Self-Assessment

Do you consume alcohol? If so, how many days a week do you drink? On days when you drink, how many drinks do you have?

For as long as I can remember, my mom has drunk a bottle of red wine a day. This is not an exact measure. She'd always keep a bottle open on the counter, sometimes two. Rather than finish a glass, she'd drink a little and then top it off, so her glass was always full. It was impossible, by design, to know precisely how much she was drinking. But a bottle a day is my best guess. "I enjoy a few glasses in the evening," she'd say, if asked. That's every evening, without fail, for the last thirty-plus years. And the evenings could start early and end late. And a glass is a nebulous measure.

Do you ever drink alcohol before noon? Do you ever have an "eye-opener" to help you wake up?

She'd often find herself unable to get moving in the morning, despite waking early and consuming countless cups of strong, black coffee. But she still found opportunities for day-drinking on the weekend—mimosas, Bloody Marys. She kept a bottle of brandy stashed in the garage, where she smoked her cigarettes. She would always go out there for a little while, a last smoke she'd say, before shuffling off to bed. On "special occasions"—major holidays, minor holidays, birthdays, anniversaries of deaths—she'd get on the phone with her brothers and sisters and take shots of Crown Royal, her dad's favorite drink.

Who do you drink with? Do you ever drink alone? Estimate the number of hours you spent drinking last time you socialized.

The system was simple, elegant: My dad bought the alcohol, and my mom drank it. He'd make regular shuttle runs to a wholesale warehouse called Liquor Square for volume-discounted cases of Malbec and Shiraz and Cabernet. The setup seemed to suit him. From what I've gathered, he siphoned self-regard from being needed, and as long as he maintained this situation, my mom would always need him. Plus it was simpler for him, I imagine, to airdrop a pallet of wine and retreat to another room in silence than to show up and be present—something I think I witnessed glimmers of him trying to do at times but never saw him succeed. He told me once, in a rare moment of candor, that he listened as a little kid to the Lone Ranger radio show and had always loved to play the hero: sweeping into town, saving the day, and riding off solo into the sunset. It took me a long time to recognize that the hero-and-damsel scenario he was describing, the one he and my mom were playing out over and over, had a name. It was called codependency. In their version of the story, the mystery man swoops in with a bottle of booze and then skulks off to his office, or to the basement to watch tv, or out back to mow the lawn.

At what age did you start consuming alcohol? Why did you start consuming alcohol? Do you have a history of drug or alcohol problems in your family?

My mom grew up as one of nine children in a working-class, Irish Catholic family in a small town in upstate New York. Her mother had been a schoolteacher but stopped working when she started having kids. Her father was an auto worker and a volunteer fire captain. He spent his Sundays in an easy chair with a tall glass of Crown, neat, and a pack of cigarettes. His kids knew not to disturb him because, as my mom once told me, he worked hard and needed to relax on his day off. He died at fifty-eight of heart disease, when I was two, and my memories of him are not quite of him, exactly. They're of his worn recliner, and on the little side table next to it, his ashtray, his tumbler, and a die-cast...