Thursday, May 28, 2015

An Alcoholic Commits Egotistical Suicide

What do you do when your husband decides to drink himself to death?

Can you stop him?

Can anyone stop him?

If you can’t stop him, are you an enabler?

Could you have done something?

Could something have been done?

Such questions assailed Paula Ganzi Licata after her husband died of alcoholic hepatitis.

She described her late husband’s problem:

My husband was a high-functioning alcoholic, which is a clinical-sounding way of saying no one knew he had Scotch before breakfast and urinated in the basement utility sink each night, too drunk to climb the stairs. His doctor estimated that Robert started drinking heavily only five or six years before his death. There was a sudden spiral, perhaps exacerbated by excessive amounts of Tylenol and unprescribed Xanax, in conjunction with a genetic predisposition. A perfect storm.

She reacted with waves of self-doubt, guilt and shame:

Could I have done more? Was I too harsh? Too easy? An enabler? Should I have kicked him out to scare him straight? Or driven him to an A.A. meeting every night? Should I have told more people? If I had left, would he have stopped drinking? Why did I stay? Hindsight is filled with “what if” scenarios, second-guessing every step of the past.

What about treatment?

Licata tried everything she knew. The physicians and the AA sponsors tried everything they knew how to do. The problem was, her late husband refused to take advice. He was a very bad patient:

I was outraged by Robert’s denial and disregard; yet protective and heartbroken, wanting to save him from himself. In what I thought was the beginning of recovery, I accompanied a jaundiced Robert to his doctor where we were told his condition was reversible. He started an outpatient program, began seeing a psychologist specializing in addiction and attended only a few A.A. meetings, despite doctor’s orders that he go every day for the rest of his life.

I can’t say Robert “fell off the wagon,” as he never fully abstained. And I couldn’t force him into rehab: We lived in New York, where a person with an alcohol or substance abuse problem must voluntarily appear for treatment unless he presents an immediate threat to himself or others. The threat Robert presented wasn’t the kind they meant.

Six months later Robert was given a diagnosis of alcoholic hepatitis and given a 90 percent chance of dying within two weeks. All my anger and frustration vanished, replaced with heart-wrenching devastation.

I changed doctors to a specialist who offered better odds and a steroid program; arranged to have A.A. reps visit and tell their survival stories; coordinated bedside therapy sessions. Family, friends and professionals all tried to keep Robert focused. But he was a terrible patient. Robert’s phobias made him demanding and uncooperative, refusing dialysis, treatment rooms with low lighting or hospital rooms on a high floor. I slept beside him in a recliner. “Don’t be long,” he’d call out whenever I left the room.

After her husband died Licata was enraged. Appropriately so, his slow-motion suicide was clearly an egotistical act, an assault on her moral being. (We owe the concept of egotistical suicide to French sociologist Emile Durkheim.) 

Robert didn’t seem to care what happened to him, as long as he could hurt her. He did it by inflicting psychological torture, by showing that he was so powerful and so willful that he could do as he pleased. No one could stop him. His legacy to his wife would be a curse. She would feel shame for having failed to save him.

She wrote:

In the wake of Robert’s death, I began to process the past. What I’d come to accept — living separate lives with an alcoholic — was a wretched existence. Some surviving spouses are angry at God or at the cancer; I was angry at my husband. Hell hath no fury like a widow born.

If her husband was so hellbent on hurting his wife and those who cared for him, there was nothing she could do. One likes to imagine that the state should pass laws allowing us to commit such people involuntarily to rehab, but that seems farfetched.

Should Licata have abandoned her husband and left him to his bottles? In many cases this is the correct response.

And yet, if her departure appeared to have precipitated his descent into oblivion, she might have suffered more guilt, coupled with social opprobrium. After all, they had been married for nearly two decades when he began his death spiral.

If she had left him while he was apparently sick, she would also have risked social censure for abandoning a sick man.

Had she spent the rest of her life grieving for him and guilt-tripping herself, he would have succeeded.

In reality, Licata moved on. She did not allow his abuse to define her life. She found a new husband and concluded:

The scales tipped as surely as Robert’s last years of drunken selfishness, recklessness and verbal abuse obliterated our good years. 

6 comments:

  1. An "egotistical suicide" is an interesting idea. The article doesn't use the word.

    Is there a definition? Okay, here...
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(book)#Types_of_suicide
    "Egoistic suicide reflects a prolonged sense of not belonging, of not being integrated in a community, an experience, of not having a tether: an absence that can give rise to meaninglessness, apathy, melancholy, and depression. It is the result of a weakening of the bonds that normally integrate individuals into the collectivity: in other words a breakdown or decrease of social integration."

    So this category is more intended towards males who are unmarried and disconnected, while this man had a wife who loved him and wanted to help him.

    Its interesting most of the quotes from her don't explicitly show his abusive behavior towards his wife, only the end has some specific claims: "drunken selfishness, recklessness and verbal abuse."

    Your commentary here seems to be projecting more than exists in the testamony:
    re: Robert didn’t seem to care what happened to him, as long as he could hurt her. He did it by inflicting psychological torture, by showing that he was so powerful and so willful that he could do as he pleased. No one could stop him. His legacy to his wife would be a curse. She would feel shame for having failed to save him.

    Its not clear to me that the husband's intention was to hurt his wife, OR that he was feeling any clear sense of resentment against the world. In fact we don't have any idea what lead to his downward spiral.

    We might assume he was living a "double life" for years, and that finally something needed to be confronted that he wasn't willing to confront, and his wife wasn't in a position to help him.

    I might guess his widow's feeling of anger was not necessarily about her husband at all, but as a way to silence her inner voices that told her she was responsible for her husband's choices, that she did the wrong things, or failed to do the right things.

    And in the claimed stages of grief, anger is only stage 2:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubler-Ross_model#Stages

    Perhaps anger came out so strong because she had suppressed it so long, so her "processing" allowed her to feel anger that she hadn't allowed herself to feel. And perhaps it enabled her to let how of her feelings of responsibility.

    I always wonder about our "need for validation", so when I hear a tragic situation, I'm very reluctant to take sides, even knowing it hurts the person who is expressing blame and rage against someone else.

    I wonder if I was talking to her and I helped validate her pain and supported her blame and said "yes, your selfish husband was inflicting psychological torture upon you", perhaps that would help her go deeper into her rage and perhaps that would help her process it better? Or perhaps she'd reverse on my supporting her by my own projections on her alcoholic husband and start defending him and saying he wasn't so bad, and all her rationalizations would arise again that said he was doing the best that he could.

    Its always strange to know how to listen and how to validate. I confess mostly I just don't want the responsibility of judging tragedy. We're all fallen beings, and we're all beings of light and unlimited potential to remake ourselves, somehow mixed together in messy bags of flesh.

    I perhaps two "egotistical suicides", one drug related, in my immediate family, and I have my own anger, but mostly I'd rather try to understand than judge. I recognize self-destructive choices are within me as well, if I'm foolish enough to "believe everything I think" as the bumper sticker discourages.

    Or as Jack Handey said "Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them, and you have their shoes."

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  2. It's incredible how many American writers/artists drank themselves to death.

    Poe. Fitzgerald. Hemingway (suicide simply hastened the inevitable). Faulkner. Tennessee Williams (in a drunken stupor, he choked to death on a prescription drug cap).

    Capote. Raymond Chandler. Errol Flynn carried a metal suitcase w/2 quarts daily vodka. WC Fields had a steamer trunk! ... others I can't remember at the moment.

    David Foster Wallace - esteemed writer, athlete, mathematician, beloved Professor & husband - hung himself at 35.

    Selfishness? "Disease"? Egotism? ... Balderdash. DFW suffered from severe Depression - no drug could help.

    I'm tempted to invoke The Soul - as an agnostic, can I? We're fractured creatures. We'll always be so. Enigmas to ourselves. Scientism won't help.

    The piteous creatures above, and many many more, have my sympathy. -- Rich Lara

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  3. A woman down the street from us (wife of a fireman--which I though might have been relevant) apparently did that. I don't know any details that weren't obvious on frem the street.

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  4. "Robert didn’t seem to care what happened to him, as long as he could hurt her. He did it by inflicting psychological torture, by showing that he was so powerful and so willful that he could do as he pleased. No one could stop him. His legacy to his wife would be a curse. She would feel shame for having failed to save him."

    That's called domination.

    People are defined by their choices. Robert made his. Licata bore witness to the dignity she wished for her husband, and was met with ridicule. What a terrible cross to bear. Yet I admire her courage. He effectively abandoned her, yet she would not abandon him. I respect her choice, though I am sad she suffered so much because of his.

    And I don't consider someone who drinks before breakfast and can't walk up the stairs "high functioning." That's non-functioning for the most important function in his life: his marriage vocation. Sounds like she was married, and he wasn't. Yeesh.

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  5. Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

    "Robert didn’t seem to care what happened to him, as long as he could hurt her. He did it by inflicting psychological torture, by showing that he was so powerful and so willful that he could do as he pleased. No one could stop him. His legacy to his wife would be a curse. She would feel shame for having failed to save him."

    That's called domination.


    I would add only that under no circumstance ever, is anybody to blame for a suicide except the deceased. If there was such a circumstance, it would be called "murder", not "homicide".

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