Sunday, October 5, 2025

Mourning the Undead

The phone rang again this morning at 05:21hrs. By now, I know what these early morning (sometimes, late evening) calls mean. You my brother (or sister) has been caught stealing. Again. The mob found you first, and by the time the police arrived, you were barely clinging on to dear life. And me? I don’t complain. I may not even share my struggles with anyone. I don’t even flinch. I simply reached for my phone and started checking how much of what little I had left with in my mobile money account, figuring out how much it would take this time around to bail you out of this latest escapade.  

That’s what my life has become now: not a savior, not a comforter, but the Chief Executive Officer of the cleanup crew. I sweep up the mess you leave behind, mop up the aftermath, patch over the scars. While all this is happening, I am also breaking inside. I need a version of Simon of Cyrene to help me carry this cross to the familial crucifixion. Or else, I remain stuck due to this anchor on my life. 

This is the silent side of addiction to alcohol and the associated crime that no one prepared me for. We usually talk about the people who fall, but rarely about the families who fall with them. Families who live on edge, never knowing if the next call will be another arrest, hospital or the final call no one wants to answer.

I remember us before all this. When we were children, full of hope and reckless laughter. Queens and kings in our own rights. Though poverty was our prison, we swore we would not die in it. We dreamed of living in houses on the hill surrounded by forests, of better lives carved out of ambition and outworking everyone. We had the world by its tail and opportunities felt abound. It was bonded to the belief that we the hoi polloi would take charge of our own story.

I still see traces of that dreamer in your eyes sometimes, before the demons take over, before the addictions dictate your every move. I beg you, in my heart, to fight brother. Fight on sister. Claw your way out of that sunken place. Remember who you were, and who we promised each other we would become.

But how long can you hold on to someone who refuses to hold on to themselves? How do you love someone who is drowning, when every time you reach out, they drag you down with them? Our mother, God bless her soul, confessed to me just last week that she can’t do it anymore. She cried and told me she had changed the locks on her heart. Imagine what it takes for a mother to say that about her own child. That’s what addiction does. Not just to the person using, but to everyone who loves them.

And here’s the brutal truth: I am tired. Tired of rehearsing goodbyes that never come. Tired of being the strong one, the last line of defense, the one left to absorb every new wound. I am exhausted from being a pallbearer while my siblings are still breathing.

They say love is supposed to be tough. But how tough? How many second chances? How many bailouts? How many prayers whispered into the void? At what point does love stop being strength and start being self-destruction? Though they say that for the giving man to withhold helping someone in order to first assure personal fortification is not selfish, but to elude needless self-destruction. It easier said than done.

This problem bigger than just my family. Walk through neighborhoods, police stations, even hospitals, and you’ll find the same stories repeated: sons and daughters consumed by alcohol addictions, siblings stretched to breaking, parents burying children who never found their way back. It is a slow, quiet epidemic. The one that doesn’t always make the headlines but is tearing families apart, piece by piece. Though Zambia's per capita alcohol consumption is generally placed lower than other countries, its rates are still a significant public health concern especially due to high rates of illicit and unrecorded alcohol consumption within the country. There is a huge alcoholism problem in this country, it is never recognized as a problem because alcohol is such a huge part of our recreational culture.

My siblings and I were supposed to make it together. To live the Zambian dream. Instead, I’m left carrying their stories of wasted potential. Of what could have been. Of a life consumed by choices that seemed small at first but ended in ruin. Of liquor slaves. 

And yet despite everything I still hope. Hope that one day, they will rise. That they will remember the child who once dreamed of hills and light, not chains and darkness. Because until the very end, hope is all I have been left to give.

Moba ndi msampha woipa (alcohol is a very dangerous snare) – Chewa Proverb