I have written and rewritten this piece several times in an attempt to clarify, for myself really, why I was so disturbed by the drinking that accompanied the funerals I have attended up in Grande Prairie since last September. A Sunday evening phone chat with my best friends pulled some of it together for me. It bothered me because its not healthy or normal. When I told Vicki about the excess of drinking that goes on at the gatherings in people’s homes after the funeral and dinner, she was as perplexed by it as I was. She’d never encountered or even heard of such a thing. And maybe it is because we are Iowans born and raised and this type of reaction to death is not typical of people from such a stoic background. Or maybe not. Sometimes I am too quick to assume that the difference lies within me and that it is others who are the true majority and I am the freak. But, even my hard-partying cousins on my mom’s side didn’t rent a keg for a funeral – a baptism or First Communion maybe but not a funeral.

I grew up around drinkers. Both sides of my family have alcoholics. My dad was an alcoholic up until going on three years ago. My younger brother also had a drinking problem and quit drinking last spring. Like many people my age, I did my share of paryting – the majority back in my college days though as being a grown-up with a full-time job and responsibilities, as most people find, isn’t compatible with late nights and consuming of alcohol. And too, at some point you ask yourself – what is the point of this? Today, I am practically a tee-totaler. I can’t drink more than a glass of wine over the course of an evening and I honestly never acquired a taste for it. It was always something I did to fit in. I don’t feel the need to please people in that way anymore and resent anyone who pressures me to “just have one – it won’t hurt you”.

In my family of mostly beer drinkers, which I have always found disgusting to the taste, I was made to feel a prude. I still resent that, but I could never fathom the incentive to get a little tipsy with one’s relatives. It seemed, and still does, a asinine idea and a good way to stir up bad feelings and smoldering resentments. Now, drinking among friends and strangers, as many do when they are out in public establishments, seems a dumber idea than drinking with one’s family even.

So, Tuesday night as I lay awake until close to 4AM listening to the conversations and arguments downstairs, it brought back a lot of memories for me. My father drunk and mean-spirited. My brother back in his druggie days when he was threatening to kill us all in our sleep and I would push the dresser in front of the bedroom door just a bit so it would wake me if someone came in after I had fallen asleep. It reminded me of Will who like many men with his illness turned to alcohol in the beginning to try and quell the angry he couldn’t explain but was in reality cause by his immune system attacking his nerve endings and brain. And I realized. I don’t find drunk people as amusing as I do scary. They are unpredictable in word and deed. They cannot be trusted and even though it is widely thought that alcohol lowers people’s inhibitions and allows their true selves to come out, I believe that it allows them the imagined freedom to do and say all the hateful things they truly know better than to do when they are sober. It is not their true self but their selfish self. It allows them to not give a damn. To be hurtful and then excuse themselves of it later on with “I didn’t mean it. I was drunk.”

In May the family is planning a big gathering on the farm. I am thinking that I would rather not go. There is going to be a huge bonfire from the out-buildings they are planning to raze and plenty of alcohol. It is my opinion that a huge pit of fire and drunken people are not a good combination, but I am not a native so perhaps I don’t know best.

I do know however that excessive alcohol consumption and wildly erratic personality changes that it causes in some people – is not normal. I won’t be cowed into submission on this point ever again.