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