I was fourteen when my older brother began drinking. My brother is only eighteen months older than I. He and I were always really close because it was just the two of us. We had a single mom and no other siblings. He was always a pretty straight-laced kid, but when we moved to Arizona that year he just seemed to make friends with the wrong crowd.
His drinking quickly turned into binge drinking and also led into several different types of substance abuse. I remember being so embarrassed by his behavior when I was in high school. I couldn’t have friends over because he was always drunk; breaking things and causing a scene. His sophomore year of high school he was written up several times for showing up to school drunk or high. Eventually, he dropped out and got his GED.
When he was about seventeen we got a call from the police saying he was in the hospital because he tried to punch through a brick wall when he was drunk. He had so many stitches running up and down his right arm he really looked like Frankenstein. There were so many times when I thought he would hit rock bottom and wise up. Unfortunately, he didn’t.
In his early twenties, he totaled two cars. One was his, and the other my grandmother’s. She was out of town, and I was house sitting. The cops woke me up in the middle of the night because they needed someone sober that would remember what had happened in the morning. He had stolen her keys while I was sleeping and completely totaled her car driving home from the bars drunk. He was so lucky that he didn’t kill somebody or himself. I’m not really sure why, but we were blessed that all we lost that night was a car.
In the last year, he received so many DUI’s that he got to spend a good chunk of his summer in Tent City. Now, at 24, he has moved back in with our grandmother because he is in over $30,000 dollars in debt from all of his lawyer fees.
It is so hard to help someone that isn’t willing to help themselves. My family and I have tried numerous things to help him in recovery, but the addict has to want to get better too. Every year that goes by I am grateful that we have lost only material things through his disease. There is a huge fear there because he has been poisoning his body with hard liquor since he was fifteen years old. He throws up blood almost every night when his body is trying to detox. There are a lot of different reasons for people’s addictions, but I do feel that because his drinking started so young, it will be harder to reverse the alcohol his body has been programmed to be dependent on.
--Alicia de la Vega, Phoenix