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Can you discard the feeling that you are dealing only with habit, with stubbornness, or a weak will? If this presents difficulty, re-reading chapters two and three, where the alcoholic sickness is discussed at length might be worth while.
And even if they did not love their families, how could they be so blind about themselves? What had become of their judgment, their common sense, their will power? Why could they not see that drink meant ruin to them? Why was it, when these dangers were pointed out that they agreed, and then got drunk again immediately? These are some of the questions which race through the mind of every woman who has an alcoholic husband.
My attention was caught by a doggerel on an old tombstone: "Here lies a Hampshire Grenadier Who caught his death Drinking cold small beer.
We put them on paper, even though we had no resentment in connection with them.
We are like the passengers of a great liner the moment after rescue from shipwreck when camaraderie, joyousness and democracy pervade the vessel from steerage to Captain's table.
We have found much of heaven and we have been rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence of which we had not even dreamed.
The alcoholic may say to himself in the most casual way, "It won't burn me this time, so here's how!" Or perhaps he doesn't think at all.
We think it dangerous if he rushes headlong at his economic problem.
I could almost hear the sound of the preacher's voice as I sat, on still Sundays, way over there on the hillside; there was that proffered temperance pledge I never signed; my grandfather's good natured contempt of some church folk and their doings; his insistence that the spheres really had their music; but his denial of the preacher's right to tell him how he must listen; his fearlessness as he spoke of these things just before he died; these recollections welled up from the past.
How could a Supreme Being have anything to do with it all? And who could comprehend a Supreme Being anyhow? Yet, in other moments, we found ourselves thinking, when enchanted by a starlit night, "Who, then, made all this?" There was a feeling of awe and wonder, but it was fleeting and soon lost.
Quicksand stretched around me in all directions.
Yet in ancient times material progress was painfully slow.
If not members of religious bodies, we sometimes select and memorize a few set prayers which emphasize the principles we have been discussing.
Why, he argued, should he lose the remainder ofhis business, only to bring still more suffering to hisfamily by foolishly admitting his plight to people from whom he made his livelihood? He would do anything, he said, but that.
He will appreciate knowing you are not bothering your head about him, that you are not suspicious nor are you trying to run his life so he will be shielded from temptation to drink.
"Bathtub" gin, two bottles a day, and often three, got to be routine.
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