LIKE A GREAT WEIGHT ON MY HEART...

Then Job answered:

"Today also my complaint is bitter; his hand is heavy despite my groaning. Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! I would lay my case before him, and and fill my mouth with arguments. I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me.

Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power? No; but he would give heed to me. There an upright person could reason with hm, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.

'If I go forward, he is not here; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him... God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me; if only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!'"

I was invited up to my oldest brother's for dinner; not a short drive, but I had an offer of a bed at my mother's, so there was safety in that. I was a little nervous about the event, given my feelings about how he had responded to my coming out and acted the following day, and because generally he is not terribly predictable. [My own theory is that the reason he responded the way he did is that it all cut rather close to the bone -- we are not as dissimilar as both of us would like to believe...] And I had no idea what my arrival would bring out in him. So, as I said, I was nervous. I would have liked a beer before I got there. I was sort of hoping I would be offered one when I got there. And by the time the once-mooted dinner hour had come, I was REALLY ready for it.

But by then we had spent several hours in his office, tweaking a massive Photoshop project he had underway, and there had been nary a cross word, nary a slighting remark, no mention of lesbian real-estate investment in his county, or elsewhere for that matter. All was smooth except for the continuing butterflies in my stomach. It was almost eerie, actually; as though the upheaval of my coming out had never happened, and I had just happened to leave the neighboring state, and my family, on a whim. God is not the only one who works in mysterious ways.

Well, finally, just when I was ready to start combing the cupboards for Sterno, he tapped one of his home-brew kegs; I could feel the nervous twitch in my innards slowly subside as the stuff hit the blood stream. He, on the other hand, was busy losing his temper over his wife's late arrival, so I just relaxed as far out of the way of his dinner preparations as I could, after making the hamburger patties out of the coldest [not entirely unfrozen] hamburger I have ever had my hands in -- each one had to be made so thick, so big around, and weighed until it came close to 150g -- his son and the teen guest of honor both preferred theirs bloodless, so they had to be cooked longer and separately... there were a lot of procedures and rules I had had no idea were involved in making burgers for dinner, but then, as I have often said here:

What the hell do I know?

The wife arrives, the kids descend hungrily, dinner -- which was literally burgers, period -- eventually happens, by which point I have had three 12-oz. doses of muscle relaxant, and am, ahem, "feeling no pain." Nor is anyone else, from the general air of relaxation. And then, at some point, things begin to go south. I probably missed the beginning, being rather more relaxed than I usually am, but it soon became clear that there was a serious issue around the fact that my brother had had a fourth bottle-equivalent, which is apparently beyond the tolerated limit. His children got rather vocal about how three was a bit much, which, given the fact that I had had three, I found a bit uncomfortable.

But the real killer was the fact that, after the equivalent of four bottles of beer, my brother could no longer stand up straight, or go around a corner without holding on to the wall, or really enunciate anything anymore. I had their dog to play with, and I'm fond of dogs, though I had never seen the exceptional attraction of this particular dog until he began to offer something else to look at, and something else to listen to besides what had become a litany of accusation.

My experience of alcoholics, based on a limited sample of my friends and some people who used to show up in court diversion in my former lifetime when I sat in judgment on other people and not the other way around, is that they develop a tolerance for alcohol which allows them to drink the Cheap Dates of the world like myself under the table without batting an eyelash. We routinely had people in diversion whose blood alcohol content would have had me comatose or worse, and who had been not only driving, but driving well enough that nothing would have happened if their tail light hadn't been broken, or...

Well, this was new. I had seen him soak up twelve beers of a holiday dinner and bob and weave, but four? My sister-in-law informed me that it is the natural result of liver damage -- there is not enough of it left working to process the alcohol, and when it gets far enough behind, it starts "backing up" in the bloodstream -- to the point where the blood vessels in the throat can begin to break down and leak. Now, my brother and I have had our run-ins over the years, and we often can't seem to agree about anything, but I do think we love each other anyway. I know I love him. Now the thought that he had managed to kill off enough of his liver to put his life at risk really took a longer while to sink in. What I was dealing with was his incapacity and everyone else's inability to put up with it anymore: apparently this was happening several nights a week.

I went upstairs to the bathroom and sat and sobbed -- for the regulation fifteen seconds, till the Onboard Censor shut it off. And this time it was really just as well. If I had cried as I wanted to, I would have been in the bathroom for hours, and everyone would have heard me. As it is, I suspect it was not inaudible to everyone. And my spirits were obviously visible in my face, because when I said goodbye, struggling not to say too much, my sister-in-law said, "Almost every night." And that I can hardly imagine.

I had been worried about me. And worried about how I would fare at his hands. Without a clue as to what the real tragedy was. Something has to be very broken in him, for alcohol to have become so important for so long that it could destroy him so young -- he's not even 60. It's true our father drank himself to death, but he didn't start until he reached the age at which his father had died a nasty death, and there wasn't much else for him to live for. But I carried this around like a stone on my heart for days afterward, until I had finally talked to enough good friends that I felt I knew what it meant, and what it meant to me. Some of them offered medical perspective, and some of them offered personal perspectives, and with time the horror of the evening began to recede.

That was when, as we were on the phone anyway, I told him how upset I had been, and why. How my medical friend has hazarded a guess of about 25% of liver function left. He was very reasonable, very logical, admitted to having been shocked that evening himself -- all in the tone of complete denial that I remember so well from an attempt to intervene with a friend who had developed some serious psychoses in middle age: voices in the walls and things like that. She listened to our explanations of our concern, and thanked us, and moved right on without letting them dent the surface of her mania. This was eerily similar.

But I am not his keeper. Just someone who cares what happens and doesn't feel like there's much I can do beside make my unhappiness known. They say misery loves company. There's truth to that in one respect: company makes misery bearable. But it is often twisted to imply that people in misery like to have other people miserable around them, and while that may sometimes be true, it is certainly not true now, of me. God knows I feel no joy at the suffering around me; and it is all around me. What I can say, with a heavy heart, is: there, but for the grace of God, go I.

Amen to that.