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Sobriety and Grief
More thoughts on my grandfather’s recent passing.
This essay originally appeared in the Exploring Sobriety newsletter.
In last week’s newsletter, I shared some sad personal news: My grandfather passed away. He had been the last of my grandparents, and his death hit me hard.
It’s now been about a week and a half since he died. As you can probably imagine, I’m still working through my emotions.
This is the first time that I’ve ever had to deal with grief while sober. A few distant relatives have died since I quit drinking, but none that I knew well. My grandfather was the first that I was truly close with.
As for my other grandparents, they all died over a decade ago, back when I was still a heavy drinker. I felt sad when each of them died, but the truth is that I didn’t spend all that much time thinking about it.
When I was a drinker, I coped with every negative emotion in the same way: I drank until I was drunk enough to forget about it. After each of my previous grandparents’ deaths, my drinking increased, but I did little else to mourn them.
It wasn’t until after I got sober that I began to think more about what it meant to have lost them. I remember years after I quit drinking, I finally was struck by the reality that I’d…
