On Sunday August 23rd at just after 1am, Dad finally died. I say
finally as it was years in the making. I'm writing about Dad's fatal
dependency on alcohol, in part to help me to come to terms with his death. But also in the hope that in me sharing his story, it might prevent someone, somewhere from passing 'the point of no return'. The point at which, for an alcoholic, accepting death is an easier option than facing the future.

It is instinctive when we have lost someone to an addiction to ask 'could we have done more?' I am resolved on this question. All of us who loved Dad in recent years and decades - of which his illness spanned at least three (to my mind) - did all that we could to support him in confronting his ultimate fear: a life of sobriety. There wasn't a choice for a life of moderation. Moderation had long been ruled out, if ever it was an option. 

Shortly after Dad's death, I read the autobiography of the journalist, and alcoholic, A. A. Gill. The opening passage finds him in a rehabilitation clinic. He recalls the moment at which he decided he would not pass 'the point of no return'. "Have you had your last drink?" asked his specialist. His answer: "Yes". Gill is a few years older than Dad was. Gill was approaching sixty at the point of publication. Dad made it to 57. 

Two people. Two stories in life. One dependency. One chose the future. The other, a protracted slide to inevitable multi-organ failure. Inevitable, not because it had to be that way. But, resilient as the human body is, it can only take so much. 

‪A life cut short. Worse perhaps, a life not lived to its fullest. 

What then, is it that gives some the ability to face the future, and not others? I don't know. I have wrestled with this question for years. The many hours spent sitting at the hospital bedside of a man - a shadow of his former self - yellow with jaundice, I wondered this. But it goes back much further than the hospitalisations of recent years. Ten years ago I would plan to meet Dad on Saturday. "See you at The Central at 10:30" (to clarify that meant a.m., and yes, that's the pub not the cafe).

Since then, as a family, we have witnessed his gradual but steady decline. Long before he died, I was searching for reasons to explain the daily consumption. The true extent to which was never known, not even to him as the years went by. 

During Easter 2014, I went away with Dad on holiday to Lanzarote. Two things are imprinted on my mind about that holiday. Dad had totally lost control. He was deluded about the extent of his drinking. Where once Dad's love of good food had been such an important part of his life - though always with the accompaniment of beer and some decent wine (never one or the other) - his entire appetite, let alone his interest, had gone. He ate not enough to sustain a child. I mean that in the literal sense. His only source of nutrition - and that's pushing it - was lager (with chasers when I wasn't around). 

Second, I got an insight into the fear. Sobriety made him remember. Some are dealt an unfair hand. Dad certainly had more than his fair share of tragedy. As a young boy, a witness to domestic violence that left his mother in hospital and his father in prison. As a young man, a twist of fate that left him forever unable to talk for more than a few seconds about the explosion on the Piper Alpha oil rig that left 167 people dead. Only for a change in his rota was Dad not on board. He'd swapped with his mate Tommy. Tommy was killed. This ate away at Dad for the rest of his life. 

Of these two personal seismic moments, he never spoke to me about the former. Of the Piper Alpher, he talked to me about it by the pool in Lanzarote. Not for long. Then followed several beers that, even for him, were knocked back at some pace. It was this reality that Dad couldn't face. It was these memories that ate away at him, that created the cycle of drinking to forget.

I hope in sharing his story that others charting a course of reliance, leading to dependency, leading to delusion might find another way out. Because surely, always, the future is better than the end. 

I am running the Paris marathon on Sunday April 3^rd. I will be raising funds for Restoration Station (part of the Spitalfields Crypt Trust), a social enterprise in London supporting men recovering from addiction.