The Coroner's Report

Alcoholism, according to the literature lucky alcoholics get their hands on, is “an incurable, progressive, fatal disease.” The literature shared by doctors says the same thing. It is curious, then, that few people die of alcoholism.

Rather, they die of cancer in the liver, throat, mouth, or stomach; through the accumulation of excess fat in the liver, or a liver swollen and tender with hepatitis or hardened and scarred with cirrhosis; by stroke or inflamed heart muscles. There are also the suicides, the homicides, and all of those bodies smashed up like eggs in a box by moving vehicles they have had the misfortune to drive or walk into.

But really they die of alcoholism.

I know people who have died purely of alcohol consumption, without staggering into an oncoming bus or falling from the hairline of a cliff. I don’t know what was written on the death certificate, but it was wine, beer, or spirits and getting drunk every day that did it.

An aunt of mine died of drink. She drank whisky and vodka, rarely mixed with anything, except maybe water for the whisky. When I was young, she was my second mother. One day she was listening to voices from the radiator, the next she was dead at fifty-four. I think she had stopped eating altogether as well.

Her husband was the enabler. He, too, was a chronic alcoholic. He lived until he was sixty-two when they found him at the bottom of his staircase. My father had to identify the body (“There’s nobody there when you see it. It’s just an empty shell”). Anyway, the enabler used to hide half-bottles of whisky and vodka around the house while he went to drink (and fight) at the local pub. She’d think, perhaps, that she was getting something for nothing as she found them. She drank a couple of hundred bottles too many, but he bought every one of them.

A friend of mine died of sobriety. He was an alcoholic who drank stout, bottled beer, and Irish whiskey. I stayed at his place once. He got up one morning and called a taxi to take him to work and had a couple of cans of Guinness while he waited. This was about seven a.m. I used to think that odd. Now I think nothing of it, having had my own share, beginning last year, of breakfast beers.

When I was briefly not drinking nine or ten year’s ago, my friend’s girlfriend left him. He quit drinking. This was no doubt an act of character, since he was a bartender. Everyone he knew drank, every day. The girlfriend didn’t come back, but he got a new girlfriend, a grounded, attractive woman who also worked in the industry. Within a few months, he jumped off a small bridge in the middle of the city into heavy traffic and was killed. Thinking of the drivers, I thought that an awfully selfish suicide. His girlfriend, the new one, said that he had been circling passages in the Bible. I didn’t hear which ones. I wasn’t in the picture at the time. But circling passages in the Bible was enough for me.

And when I say he died of sobriety, I mean, of course, that the death certificate might as well have that on it as “traffic accident.” Like my aunt and her awful husband, and like countless others, he died of an incurable disease that doesn’t appear on death certificates as often as it should.