Avoiding Reality

  Though out our married life, happy hour was the high spot of our day.  Most of our days were spent on our own careers. I usually was working full time or at least four days a week as an RN, and Gordon worked forty to sixty hours a week as a Border Patrol officer and then as a DEA agent. Frequently he was away from home for weeks or months at a time.

    This was the time to catch up with what each of us was doing and what the children had accomplished or what trouble they had gotten into. This was the tool we used to keep him current on family affairs.

    As his depression deepened, the sharing continued, but the alcohol also helped him hide from his monsters.  Instead of one drink, it became two or three hefty ones. This increased intake also developed two personalities.  When we started happy hour, he could be a pleasant, cheerful person ready to share the day’s activities.  By drink three, he became combative, argumentative, and fault finding. He knew better how to do everything.  He became a person I did not like.  Life was no picnic. If I pointed out the fallacy of his remarks, he became more combative.  To solve this problem, I talked to him as I would an Alzheimer's patient - don’t argue, steer the subject to something more pleasant.

   As he continued to drink, he spilled his food at dinner and also fell several times.  The solution was for him to go to sleep early.  In the morning he was again the pleasant husband I married.  That is if he did not spend the night wrestling with the monsters in his nightmares.