There is a knowing when we are in the company of someone like us. Someone who loves or has loved a person with alcoholism. In a room filled with indistinct chatter, we make sense. At least to one another. Without subtitles, without translation, and without explanation, there is meaning in our midst.
At first, though, we stand alone, with a secret too overwhelming to share, and too heavy to keep. So we parcel it. Word-by-word, page-by-page, and essay-by-essay. Before long, our room is full of people for whom the story we tell is so familiar it needs no forward. And so without preface, they accept it – and us.
I deliberately did not cast far with Swenny and Cher. It was initially intended for an audience of one: it was intended for me. After sharing it with a few close friends and colleagues, I heard from their friends and colleagues about their experiences loving someone with alcoholism. With surprise, I reached thousands of strangers, leaders in recovery, and an actress well-known for her own struggles with addiction. Readers from Estonia, Nigeria, France, and Tanzania had me wondering about their stories, and which hashtag reeled them.
They reached me, too. Some stayed for the duration: through three home addresses, through one high school and two college graduations, through jobs lost, and through jobs gained. Through a failed separation that split the difference on the most recent five of thirty wedding anniversaries. Through a diagnosis of cirrhosis that took eighteen months of worsening symptoms before presenting as the bottom Swenny needed to turn his stops and starts of sobriety into something more lasting: a full year without drinking.
Sobriety is fleeting. I know this having written too often about it, hurriedly and in preparation for its end. Recovery, though, feels different. It deserves to be written about slowly and with the time allowed by its permanence.
But not today.
Today is for knowing when to move on, with gratitude for this community of writers and readers with a language that is ours alone, and with an accent that only we understand. We know why we stay, and never question when we don’t. We share our happy endings, even when they are imagined and seemingly out of reach. We share our losses, risking renewed hurt in knowing that on any given day, someone is reading about them for the first time.
I hope they find here what they are looking for: a story like theirs with an ending they can live with. I hope they know, too, that the community they have found is broken, but beautiful. Because while loving an alcoholic is not easy, no one does it better than us.
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