She was a person, and not her disease

“My mum was an alcoholic.” 

It is, at the end of the day, just a fact.

Some days I’m able to state this flippantly, the same as if I was confirming the colour of the sky.

Other days I can’t get the words out without wanting to sob – the label seeming callous, the use of past tense sickening.

It may qualify as simple truth, but it feels like a harsh generalisation to me; reducing the most incredible woman I will ever know to a disease, and almost making people forget that she was my mother, a sister, a daughter, a professional, a friend, before she was an alcoholic.  

She was more than her disease

I resent that if more people knew, her entire life would be defined by what ended it.

It makes me even angrier that sometimes, I catch myself unable to recall details of her personality from when she was sober. 

It’s difficult to think about. She may have battled alcoholism from 2020 to her death in late 2025, but she was more than her disease.  

Mum was born in the late 70s, and took her small hometown by storm, showing both incredible academic ability and a rebellious streak that meant her school didn’t know whether to reprimand or laud her!  

She went away for uni, taking a high-flying job. After I was born in 2007, she took naturally to juggling family life and her aspirations, steadily climbing the ladder at work with her charisma and blinding intelligence.

I was always in awe of my amazing mummy, and how she was so smart and funny and beautiful – I wanted to be just like her.  

We moved back to her hometown in the late 2010s. Mum had her dream job, a daughter who admired her and loved her, a nice new house close to her family, even a dog: it seemed like things couldn’t be better. 

Of course, this is when everything imploded.  

In early 2020, she suffered major trauma. The world shut down around two weeks after, and she turned to alcohol as a coping mechanism, a way to deal with all the awful things she’d been through.  

This is where I wish I could stop

This is where the story gets painful. This is where I wish I could stop.

I would love to only talk about the positives of my mum’s life: the impressive career she had, the amazing friends she made, how she loved being a mum – being my mum.  

But that wouldn’t be telling the full truth.  

For Mum, drinking only one bottle of white wine was a good night. When she was drunk, she was sloppy, irritable, depressive.

She would drink more after bad things happened to her, or to us, or on anniversaries of past traumas. Soon, she was drunk every moment of every day.  

She mixed spirits with wine, drank in the morning, went out at night and told nobody where she was until she fell over our front step. I would take her upstairs, put her to bed as she cried. She lost her job. She struggled to maintain standards at her new job.  

Her and Dad had screaming matches so bad that the police were called to our house on several occasions. She ruined her relationships with her best friends.

She would fly off the handle if Dad and I talked about her to each other. She made me feel as if I couldn’t talk to anyone else about her drinking at all.  

I know that memory is one that will never fade

She made multiple attempts to harm herself while drunk. After one bad episode, I told her I wouldn’t be able to keep a relationship with her if she kept drinking. She looked her 14 year old daughter in the eyes and said, “these things happen.” I know that memory is one that will never fade. 

I wish I could remember the last time I saw her truly sober and in her right mind. I don’t. Mum’s soul left us before her body did. 

I miss her so much it hurts

She took ill very suddenly, while working far from home, and went into hospital with multiple organ systems no longer able to function. She lost consciousness and was intubated the morning after we made it to her side.

She never woke up. She died 12 days after she went into subacute liver failure.  

I miss her so much it hurts. 

I hate her for the choices she made while she was drinking, but I love her for the mother and woman she was at heart. I’m so angry at her and I’ll never get how she could do this to me, but I understand every reason for everything she did.  

She was human

She was the smartest, funniest, most hard-working person I think there ever was or ever will be. She was headstrong, ridiculous, occasionally cruel. She was human. 

She was a person, and not her disease. 

I have so many regrets. I wish I’d asked her for more advice, because now I’ll never get to hear it. I turned 18 three weeks after she died and I don’t know how I’m meant to become an adult without her.  

I wish I’d tried harder to convince her to stop, even though I know she would have never listened to anyone. I wish I’d told her I loved her more, even though I told her close to every single day.  

Towards the end, I chose to stop mentioning the elephant in the room – to stop fighting. I saw that battle as futile, and one that would ruin our relationship if I charged into it. I hope I made the right choice.  

There were countless unbearably hard times, but we made good memories, had good conversations, and I hope she didn’t lose her love for me by the end.  

I know I never stopped loving her.  

An unbearably cruel illness

Alcoholism is an unbearably cruel illness. It’s also one that often we can’t be open about.  

So few people know the real reason my mum died, and fewer still knew about her drinking while she was alive. 

Maybe I’ll share more about her death in the future with our close circle, but somehow I don’t think so. Only the closing chapter of her life was marred with addiction, and not everyone needs the fine print.  

I wish I didn’t have the details I do and I don’t even have all of them. My mum doesn’t deserve her memory to be tarnished for those who didn’t already know of her struggles.  

It’s an awful community to be part of. But it is a community  

Being a child of an alcoholic feels isolating. If your parent struggles with alcoholism, you’re not alone. If you’ve lost a parent to alcohol-related disease, you’re not alone. 

It’s an awful community to be part of. But it is a community. Lean on others who can understand you, and confide in your trusted friends who don’t, too.  

I love you, Mum. I miss you. I’m sorry. 

A x

Alice

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