Relapse, Recover, Don’t Repeat

Forty was a tough year.  I was deep in a cycle of relapse, sobering up, swearing to myself to do better, and then relapsing again. By the day of my forty-first birthday,  I was alone and miserable. My wife was ready to leave me. As a precursor to her threat, she’d taken my daughter and gone on vacation without my miserable company.  I sat alone in my house with pneumonia, bottles of pills, and bottles of liquor. I’d made it past forty, which is more than my father ever did--dying by suicide as a result of alcoholism, addiction, and depression--but  I wasn’t far from where he ended up.