Ann Johnston - Drink - The Deadly Relationship Between Women and Alcohol

That night, I pasted the napkin into my diary. Beside it I wrote: “ I am bullied by alcohol. I am hiding behind it. ” I knew the jig was up.

Days later, on Father’s Day morning, I learn that my cousin Doug—childhood confidant and best friend—had been killed by a drunk driver, on his way home from his mother’s eightieth-birthday celebration. His young daughter, the youngest of four, was in the front seat. She survived but was severely injured.

It was a sunny Sunday morning, and I remember thinking: “What else do you have to lose to alcohol before you give up?” I had already lost a big part of my childhood, now my cousin—and I was losing myself.

I pulled out a bulletin board and tacked a piece of paper with four handwritten words at the top: “The Wall of Why.” As in, why I needed to give up drinking. Or: why I needed to avoid dying. The diary was no longer working. In fact, it had never worked. For the first time, I was terrified this habit might kill me.

I spent an hour filling the board with images and words I loved. In that condo, I had very few photographs—one of Nicholas with his arm around me, after winning bronze at a rowing regatta; one of Jake casting a line off the houseboat deck; one of my dog Bo. There were so many faces missing. I took out my fountain pen and wrote the names of others on pieces of white paper, pinning them carefully to the board. Then, I added several pieces of prose—Annie Dillard, Simone Weil—and some poetry: “Love after Love,” by Derek Walcott.

Then I got down on my knees and said the only prayer I believed in, words from T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker”:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith.

But the faith, and the love, and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Within weeks, Jake and I would find our way to a recovery meeting in a church basement. He held my hand while tears rivered down my cheeks. For an hour I listened to a roomful of seemingly happy people share their stories, their faith, their gratitude. As they started to stack the chairs, a tall black stranger in a funky hat came up to comfort me. “Darlin’,” he drawled, “believe me, whatever you did wrong, I did way, way worse.”

Every season has its own soundtrack: that summer, it was Keith Jarrett’s introspective Köln Concert wafting over pink-streaked granite, keeping us company as we drank cranberry juice and soda with our meals. Jake’s precious mother had just died a difficult death. When Jarrett felt too haunting, Jake would toss in a little Frank or Van to keep the tone romantic. “I’m making love to you with my playlist,” he’d call out from his computer, and I’d be enveloped, newly sober, in a fresh cocoon of sound.

But for the rest of the world, the summer of 2007 belonged to the defiant Amy Winehouse: “ They tried to make me go to rehab. I said No, no, no! ” An earworm if ever there was one. The point wasn’t lost on me as I headed back to McGill, having tallied my first seventeen days of sobriety in the north woods of Ontario. Checking my BlackBerry as I cabbed in from the airport, I found myself humming along. “ No, no, no! ”

Little did I understand that it would be more than a year before I was able to secure any meaningful sobriety, to put alcohol somewhat solidly in my rearview mirror. It would be three years after that before I regained what could be called a true sense of equilibrium. And it would take all my journalistic skills to put what was killing me—and as it turns out, a growing number of women—into some profound and meaningful context.

In the meantime, I was about to lose many things I cared about: my livelihood, my heart, my gusto. And before things got better, they were going to get as tough as tough could be.

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