My mom battled alcoholism to become the mother we needed | Opinion

As a boy, while in bed late at night, I would hear my mother go downstairs to the kitchen. She would pull open the freezer door and drop ice cubes clinking into a glass and go back to bed, drink in hand, to watch TV. In the mornings, I would find her glass in the sink and catch a whiff of an odor I then found strange and strong.  

Night after night, year after year, my mother secretly repeated this ritual. One night, without a word to anyone, she left the house in her car. My father had no idea where she had gone and got on the phone to try to track her down.

My sister and I waited for the next few hours with a growing sense of dread. Our mother had disappeared into the night. Then we saw lights in our driveway flashing blue and red from a police car. Next, we heard our mother come up the steps from our den laughing. 

Later, we asked our father what had happened and he told us. My mother had stopped in a bar and drank until drunk. She had driven onto the George Washington Bridge, about 11 miles from our home, and parked in the middle. Then she got out of her car and approached the railing.

That’s where the police found her. My mother was standing there, staring down at the Hudson River 200 feet below. 

Only decades later would I realize how much past really is prelude.

I quit drinking. The reaction surprised me.

In January 2024, at age 71, after drinking alcohol every day for 54 years, I stopped. Last year, a newspaper published an essay of mine about why and how. Readers weighed in online with more than 500 comments. The feedback was pro, con and in between.

But the topic that loomed largest for me among readers was the role genetics played when it came to drinking. The voices that most cut me to the quick had to do with family history.

“I have several family members that died in their early 50's from illnesses linked to alcoholic beverages,” one commenter wrote. “That was enough to prevent me from drinking.”

“My older brother drank himself to death by age of 48,” another commenter said. “Younger one had a near miss on that by age 45, then stopped cold turkey and hasn’t had a sip in 15 years. I’m now 63 and just recently decided I was simply no longer interested in booze.”

“My dad and his father were alcoholics,” a third commenter told me. “By my early 40’s, I couldn’t just have one drink. ... One morning I flew into (Portland, Oregon) with a thumping hangover. I stopped outside a bar in the airport and just about went in for a ‘hair of the dog.’ That was the turning point where I realized that had to stop.”

Said yet another commenter, “I quit at 57 after becoming very, very dependent on white wine every night to deal with the stress of my job. My aunt and uncle were also alcoholics. My grandfather died in his 40’s from (alcohol withdrawal) on his way to the county hospital. Both my parents died as a result of alcoholism, my mother committing suicide while drunk and my father from a fall while drunk.”

Little brother tossed big sister a lifeline, and she became the mother she wanted to be

In my own family history, my mother was Exhibit A. Exhibit B, and also an alcoholic, was my Uncle Leonard, her younger brother by a year. He learned to drink while a captain in the U.S. Air Force. Despite his drinking, he went on to graduate from Yale Law School. Later, he founded his own law firm, eventually overseeing dozens of lawyers on the 30th floor of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper and representing clients such as Lloyd’s of London.

My uncle was so bombed at my bar mitzvah in 1965 that he surrendered to the impulse to confide in me, complete with profanity, that none of the 100 guests assembled in my honor that afternoon gave a fig about me. But by his 40s, he quit drinking. 

About 10 years later, my Uncle Leonard became my hero for life. He intervened with my mother, then in her 50s, about her drinking. He persuaded his big sister, speaking as one alcoholic to another, to enter a psychiatric facility for treatment. In so doing, he ultimately shepherded her safely toward sobriety, rescuing her, possibly just in time.  

How my uncle pulled off that feat I never found out. He never told me and, despite my curiosity, I never dared to ask. But it no longer particularly mattered. All that counted was the result. Neither ever took another sip.

Later, at the assisted living facility where she then lived, my mother admitted being an alcoholic to me and said she was sorry. She never again stared down off a bridge at the dark water 200 feet below, contemplating its cold embrace.

The little brother tossed his big sister a lifeline that brought her back to shore. Leonard lived to be 90, my mother 91. But before time ran out, she finally got the chance to be the mother she might always have meant to be.

Bob Brody, a consultant and essayist, is author of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age."