Member-only story
My Father Killed Himself for Me
Lessons of life and love that I learned the hard way.
My father was an alcoholic.
He passed away from liver failure after spending two weeks in the Intensive Care Unit of a small-town hospital.
So why would I tell you that he killed himself for me?
Because he did.
The story.
My father has always had problems with alcohol. He wasn’t abusive, wasn’t aggressive, wasn’t anything other than a man who drank to put himself to sleep.
Then to wake up properly.
Then to go through his day.
My father was also a financially poor man. We’ve come to think of “poor” as almost an offensive word, so it’s difficult for me to say this, but that’s what he was. There have been year-long periods when my father couldn’t afford to pay the minimum alimony that was assigned by a judge.
It’s not that he didn’t try, because he did. He just lived in an Eastern European country that changed political regimes, and when it did, for about a decade, everything was upside down. The mafia was running the country and all businesses. Employees didn’t sign contracts and didn’t get paid. People got shot on the streets.