After a lifetime of anxiety and drinking, sometimes drinking to excess (but have never considered myself an alcoholic though my eldest brother was/is) I have decided it is hard to know what to think? It is like just about any other issue in one's life. Yes, you may be drinking to blunt the anxiety but then you also may be focusing on the drinking to keep from focusing on the anxiety and/or both of those instead of focusing on the actual problem/fear and doing something with it.

Take your father's final illness and impending death. . . are you working with yourself and what scares you about that for yourself and how you can meet that difficulty?

Running or blunting or being anxious, drinking, etc. don't really help anything and tend to increase the anxiety/problem over time? I know when I learned I was most afraid of being afraid, anxious about being anxious :-) thinking about and working with that helped me a lot. You cannot do anything about your father's illness but you can do something about you and taking care of yourself.