During one of Melanie’s sober weeks with us, she said, “I don’t know how to live without it.” Finally, she was honest about the substance that made her feel whole, and at forty she had lived with the alcohol more than half her life.

After the initial shock of seeing our daughter in intensive care at the county hospital where patients on stretchers were overflowing into the corridors, my mind kept saying, What if?

What if Melanie had been dead on arrival at the emergency room?

What if someone had misinterpreted our dragging her body to the car and called the police
And the perpetual question: What if she had never had the terrible disease of alcoholism in the first place?

Alcoholism is, after all, a long, slow suicide. The days, weeks, and years of these kinds of questions provide little help in making sense of it all.

While Melanie’s head was on my lap, my mind flashed back to the Travis A.F.B. Hospital in California where she was a perfect newborn baby. Would it have made a difference if I had known then her genetic potential for alcoholism? I asked God why he didn’t knock us over the head with the facts before it was too late. Maybe I’d created a false sense of security by believing I could raise my children the same way my parents had during the 1950s in a small town where life was simpler; where my parents knew our friends’ parents. We later lived in a much larger faster-growing community, making it difficult to do the same. Things were beyond me in the1970s when Melanie was a teen. I’d been a stay-at-home mother, loved my children, and taught them right from wrong. I felt betrayed. What about the parents who neglected their children? I’d read the books about life being difficult. I knew all this stuff in my head, but it didn’t make it easier to swallow, watching my daughter in ER, with a heavy weight around her neck, sinking to the bottom

“God, you’ve promised you won’t give us more than we can handle.” For twenty years I’d watched her slow death wondering why I wasn’t a worldly-wise mother. My overwhelmed brain detached, and I felt I was observing from outer space. I couldn’t deal with the reality of my daughter lying unconscious in the emergency trauma center.

Surely this time “the powers that be” will come to her rescue–some heroic doctor will wave the magic wand that keeps Melanie in custody for the long-term care she desperately needs. This time when she wakes up, the psychiatrist will see the obvious, that our daughter is suicidal, and he will sign the order.

But soon it became evident that no one in the health care system would take the responsibility. She was shuffled from one hospital floor to another. And after only five days, she was released again to find her own way, like a small child in the wilderness. And we, her weary-worn parents, were out of answers.