Genetic mystery?

Life is a delicious mystery but some of its mysteries are less than toothsome.

I lost my last brother recently, to alcoholism. At 51 it had eaten him alive, ripped through his liver and made him unable and unwilling to fight death. But it had already torn his desire to live and in the end, death was a victory for him.

Geoff was a brilliant man with a scarred but handsome beauty and a six-year-old daughter, Viveca Eve. His union with her mother had ended three years ago, a victim of his disease, but he continued to see Viveca and considered her his greatest gift.

Why, then, could he not have lived for her?

All my questions revolve back to my own experience, of a father lost too soon. If he had loved me enough, I often thought, he would have lived. I have come around that corner of thinking, but I think it will take Geoff’s daughter years of pain and counseling to turn it. Our fathers teach us by their deeds.

It is hard for me to accept that he did not choose this disease. He often blamed his mother for marrying our father and cursing him with his genes.

Our older brother, Chris, also succumbed to an addiction that ultimately killed him. It took him by a more circuitous route than liver disease but it was his demise. In the end though, he was clean and sober for six years before his death. He was proud of that. He may have thought his children would forgive him for dying if he stayed sober. But his daughter still rages at him for leaving so early in her life.

I seem to have escaped the fate of my brothers, but how? I am not abstinent but I rarely drink more than a glass of wine. The difference may be that I am not powerless over my need for alcohol.

In college, I drank much more. At one point, my dearest friend suggested that I drank too much. I heard her. I changed my habits. This gentle prod could not have moved an alcoholic, I think.

My brother Geoff and I had been estranged for all of Viveca’s short life—six years. There was a time after our older brother’s death that Geoff went into AA. We would meet for lunch or coffee at a restaurant in the city. He was an entirely different person then—warm and open and authentic. I could feel the love between us. When he started drinking again, I told him I could not watch another brother die and I refused to see him. I was trying to protect myself and my children from his loss.

My husband disagreed with my choice and often told me I should call my brother. He saw him occasionally, or heard about him from mutual friends. It was a thorn between us. I was not the only one who spurned him at the end of his life, though. Many friends, with deep affection for Geoff, spoke at his funeral of their estrangement from him in recent years. Only his mother, at the end, stayed near. She wondered what she could have done better, as a mother.

My daughter Callison came with me to Geoff’s funeral. She met her cousin Viveca for the first time. We were both struck at once how six-year-old Viveca looked like six-year-old Cassie. But we were surprised to find that Viveca and I share a birthday.

With any luck, we also share the magic gene that saves us from the fate of my brothers.

- Cass Collins