My dad died a two months and 2 weeks after I got clean and sober. I could have gone back to drinking but I didn’t. I stayed sober but for myself. I never went to grief counseling groups i also watched my dad die in the hospital. But he died from cancer as it ravished his body. I don’t know if I could if I could forgive my mother she took me and my sister to see my dad dead at hospice. Something about the lifeless shell doesn’t make me want to remember him like that. But it’s horrifying but that’s the way she wanted us to say goodbye I resent that fact.

Years later I clinged to a trauma counsellor. I felt as though all the world was against me for letting my dad die. Since he wasn’t very old and he lived a medical complicated life. But at first grief plays with heart strings we do anything to cope before we slide down that slippery slope. Some people cry all the time others get really angry and others stuff all those emotions into the bottle within themselves. You already know somewhere something’s unhealthy but you don’t know what.

Where I stopped my sister started she started drinking everyday. At Christmas she was so drunk that she walked into the door of the open fridge and passed out. She seemed to want to cuddle with the litter box. I picked her up off the ground and made her walk to her room. Boxing Day she had hang over I would to if I walked into a fridge door. She was grouchy and didn’t want to hear mom play music at noon to clean the house but neither did I. She got into arguments with her boyfriends but I could see why.

She stopped drinking everyday I think because she started to find different things to love like yoga and a new boyfriend with a kid attachment. She also found a different work setting different work friends meant different outlooks in life.

I don’t know if we ever get over it, it just that it evolves as we evolve. And we find ourselves somewhere sometimes better then the first time. Or some people worse then the first time.

Maybe look into a trauma counsellor, a new addictions counsellor and therapist that supports a different direction in life. Maybe even a different line of work or filling yourself with something you love doing and/or passionate about. I am sure you have skills we all do they just become a little weathered and tattered when something big in our lives effects us so much.