by Mat Capper
‘I wake up with a jolt. I’m covered in sick and I’ve pissed myself. The sick is still running down my cheeks and around the back of my neck. I can taste it in my mouth. I turn my head slowly and clear my throat. My legs are shaking and every muscle in my body feels like its going into spasm. The mattress is soaked with a combination of sweat and urine. What is going on? Why the fuck am I still here?
I remember taking handfuls of tablets in the hope that I’d never come round. Why the fuck am I still here then? I’m probably still going to die, but a long and painful death from liver failure and not the calm and blissful one from the overdose I’d taken.
I knew it was a coward’s way out, I knew my family would be devastated but there was just no other option for me. I quite simply couldn’t cope anymore. I’d done the cries for help, the counselling, the hospitals, the prescribed drugs. I’d reached the end of the road.
I was suddenly gripped by a combination of an overwhelming desire to live and the terror that it was probably too late. I wondered how long I’d been out for. There was no noise coming from outside. The only thing I can hear is the song ‘On Your Own’ by the Verve. I’d put it on repeat because it was the last thing I wanted to hear as I drifted off. I’d felt so alone for years.
I pull myself up and look round for some drink to stave to stop me fitting; the DT’s have already started to kick in. I notice that the sick that surrounds my bed is foamy and it stinks of chemicals. Did I puke up all of the drugs? Or have they already taken a grip of my organs? There was no drink to be seen anywhere. I’d used it too wash down my cocktail of drugs.
I’m shaking from head to toe. I peel off my soaking jeans and look around the room for something to wear. I find an old tracksuit and throw it on with a tee-shirt and long overcoat. I know the nearest phone is about two hundred metres away.
How will I get there?
God I hope I don’t die…………………………………..’
A friend of mine, Tim, died about three months ago. He died the most horrendous death I have ever had the misfortune to witness. He weighed about 7 stone, had liver failure, kidney failure, jaundice, he was near blind, couldn’t walk and had oesophageal bleeding. He died from choking on blood after refusing to be taken to hospital three times even though ambulances were called. His disease?….Alcoholism….
Now Tim wasn’t your down and out tramp, with string around his waist gulping down meths in the local park. He was a 36 year very intelligent talented writer who had edited a national magazine for many years. More importantly he was my friend and someone whose drinking I could identify with and yet I could do nothing to help.
I met Tim about four years ago after his mother had contacted me through a mutual friend. At the time he lived in a wealthy part of Liverpool with his girlfriend and a dog called Withnail. He had been off work a few weeks after they had discovered he was regularly turning in drunk. I often get called to go out and help people with drink problems given that I have sought help myself and know where people can attend Alcoholics Anonymous.
When Tim opened the door to me I was surprised at how well he looked. He was small, with jet black hair, with a look of a young and fresh faced Dustin Hoffman from the graduate. We may have looked like the odd couple as we walked to the car, given I’m about 6ft 2 and fairly heavily set, and Tim was about 5ft 2 and desperately thin. I felt like I wanted to pick him up and protect him from the misery he’d obviously been living in.
During the car journey we spoke about his drinking. He told me he had been a successful playwright and radio writer for many years before the drink had really took a grip of him. He’d ended up working as an editor for a national magazine and was close to losing his job. I asked him how much he drank and he told me, about a bottle of vodka a day, which although sounds a lot it was not unusual for the people I tended to meet. Indeed when I was drinking it would be an average day’s drinking to keep on an even keel.
During Tim’s first A.A meeting he spoke about knowing that only a power or force greater than himself was going to be able to help him, given that he’d already tried all other forms of treatment. Even though I am an Atheist, (I used to be Agnostic, but the indecision killed me), I knew where Tim was coming from. I’d accepted that I first needed to be beaten by alcohol before I could accept defeat and really find the ability to change.
The underlying principle of Alcoholics Anonymous is that only a power greater than ourselves can provide the courage to change. This was developed by Carl Jung in his treatment of alcoholics in the 1930’s and in particular his work with an alcoholic called Roland H. He described a total psychic change as being necessary in order to recover from chronic Alcoholism. In a paper published in 1933 he says; "To me these occurrences are a phenomena. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of the lives of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them".
Now for the so called ‘normal folk’, out there, this is possibly a difficult concept to grasp. The idea is always one of control. How often do I hear ‘people should pull themselves together’, or ‘people have no self discipline’. In my experience this has no meaning or value to the Alcoholic who is still drinking. I’ve had visitors come to see me in hospital, after I’ve been taken in with Alcohol poisoning from drinking two bottles of Vodka daily for ten days, and tell me that if I keep drinking I’ll die. This was the truth and I could understand that it was likely to happen yet it meant nothing to me — and it certainly wasn’t going to stop me drinking. My psychic change occurred only when I hit a hit a ‘rock bottom’. For me it was the realisation that I was beaten and rather than to continue to fight I needed to give up to win.
I’d love this part of the article to be about Tim’s spiritual awakening and how we now regularly meet to discuss films and go to the theatre, but I’m afraid this isn’t the case. Tim attended some meetings for a while and we spoke on the phone regularly until he seemed to slowly disappear out of sight. It wasn’t until about six months ago that I was driving through Liverpool and out of the corner of my eye I spotted what looked like someone from the living dead. It was only as I looked closer that I realised it was Tim. He was bright yellow, with grey hair and was holding onto the wall for support, not because he was drunk, but because his legs had given up on him. I drove past him and looked for somewhere to park. By the time I returned, he had gone. I went straight to his mother’s house who greeted me in tears. She shouted “Tim!” and told him I was there. I heard a shuffling from upstairs and then the sound of someone virtually crawling into the living room. I can remember feeling sick with anxiety as Tim walked into the room. Tears filled my eyes for only the second time in ten years as Tim greeted me with a stick thin hand. He shuffled to the sofa and looked at me through helpless blackened eyes. The only words that I remember saying were the same words that had been spoken to me in hospital, ‘Tim, you’re going to die if you keep drinking’. He looked at me resigned to the fact and shrugged his shoulders.
I managed to get Tim admitted to the Royal Hospital where he went into a coma and was operated on and given numerous blood transfusions. He stayed there for over a month and didn’t touch any alcohol. I would visit him four or five times a week and sit and talk about AA and football. But I knew he wasn’t done with drinking.
The day he got out of hospital he was back drinking two to three bottles of vodka daily. The last conversation I had with him was on a Tuesday evening. He told me he wanted to die and could no longer take the misery of drinking, having no money, no friends, no partner, no job. He told me he didn’t want to go back to hospital. I managed to arrange to meet him on the Thursday, where I hoped I would be able to talk him round going back into hospital or maybe convince his mum to attempt to get him sectioned. When I rang back on the Wednesday morning, his mum told me that he had died in the night.
Now a day doesn’t go by where I don’t think about Tim. I wonder whether a person wanting to die automatically makes them insane or can a sane person make a decision or express a desire to die. Another friend of mine died from Motor neurones disease and nobody would question his desire to die, but with Tim I’m sure people would feel differently.
I don’t know why i've written this article; all I do know is that I couldn’t help it. I am driven to write about people who have had such an influence on me, be it positive, sad, or profound. I’m still devastated at losing Tim, so devastated that I couldn’t go to his funeral. I often wonder what I can do to help people to change their lives. Maybe this is why I work with drug addicts, the so called outcasts of society, because even though most of them relapse and destroy not only their own lives, but the lives of people around them, sometimes I get to witness miracles, and in witnessing them I know there is hope. It is in this hope that I get my faith, not a religious faith in a god or religion but a faith that things can change, and that anything is possible.
Dedicated to my friend Tim.