Stranger at Home

1994

I cried a lot. Maybe it was because I knew that I was heading down the path of self-destruction and there was nothing I was willing to do about it, that I was drinking myself to death, and that I might end up with cirrhosis of the liver or some other horrific disease any time soon, if I did not already have it. I emerged from the blackout in the March of 1994, when I was suddenly struck down by an extreme pain in my side. At first, I thought it was appendicitis, but when I eventually made it to the hospital after alerting the attention of the couple next door, the medical professionals told me it was much more serious than that.

I had been in the bathroom at the time, and after wincing in pain after having been to the toilet, I decided that something was not right. The sharp, shooting pain would not go away. I had been drinking heavily the night before and I was still drunk the next morning. After a few minutes of extreme agony, I collapsed on to the floor, deciding that this was probably the end. I thought about how much I had messed up my life, and how things could have been different if I had just stayed away from the drink. I had everything that should have made me happy, but those things were not enough for me. I was screaming, in pain and in fear, and eventually the young couple next door knocked on my front door. I spoke to them whenever I saw them, but I am not even sure of what their names were.

"Are you alright in there, Jeremy?" she said through the letter box. The bathroom was at the other side of the apartment to them, so I was surprised that they had heard me, but then again, I was screaming loudly.

"Help!" I called through the room. "Call an ambulance!"

I barely managed those words, because I was in too much pain to acknowledge much else. I was surprised that I had heard them – I had stopped screaming for only a second or two to catch my breath and scream some more. Still, it was a small miracle that they had heard and come to help me. At least I was not alone now and help would come, but whether or not that help would save me remained to be seen.

An ambulance eventually came, but by then I was out of it. I think I must have been on the verge of unconsciousness, and whilst I was in the ambulance, I thought of Christopher. I thought it was him coming to take me to wherever the afterlife was. It was a tradition to die early in my family – I had just sort of accepted that this was it. I thought about the life that we could have lived together. We could have been happy as brothers, but one moment, that one stupid moment, took that away forever and doomed us both. I remember wishing that the next life would be a more fortunate one, and I did wish to live again, because this was really not fair.

Then, as I was being wheeled into the intensive care unit of the hospital, I remember thinking that I had to stay alive. I could not leave this Earth without finding out the truth about my brother. I had to know which one of my parents killed Christopher. It would be a kick in the teeth to live my whole life obsessively wondering about it, and never finding the answer. I did not know how I was going to find out, or which path I was going to follow next, but there had to be some way of finding the truth.

When I woke up, still fresh with new determination to live and fight for the truth, the doctors told me that I had an ulcer on my stomach which had burst. I was very lucky, they told me, not to have died. Immediately I thought of Harry. I almost died in pretty much the same way as him. They also warned me about my drinking problem, and that I should expect further health scares such as this in the future if I was to continue drinking the way I did. They warned me that I could be dead within a few years, maybe even a year or less, if I did not listen to them now.

I stopped drinking for a few weeks – I did not even want to drink a glass of water with the way my stomach was feeling. Inevitably, however, after my stomach repaired itself and I was feeling well again, I returned to the drink. Even a brush with death and being blatantly told that I would die did not stop me from drinking.

I cannot remember much about the rest of that year, nothing noteworthy anyway. I remembered what the doctors had told me, and as much as I did not want to go through anything like that again, I could not help myself. Alcohol was still a priority to me.