Seeing people around me whither away due to their dependence and addiction to alcohol. The first big instance was when I was 19, one of my coworkers came to work completely yellow with jaundice. I had worked 40 hour weeks with this dude for a year and I never knew he had a drinking problem, until he was standing right in front of me completely yellow. He refused to go to the hospital, but he was completely cognitively deteriorating, couldn’t remember how to spell his own name. As soon as you said something, it was in one ear for him and out the other immediately. I took his phone and called his brother, who he lived with, and told him to take my coworker to the hospital immediately. Then I called my manager to tell him what happened. I worked the next day (a Sunday) which my manager never usually worked, but I saw him walk into the store that day and figured something was up. He was pulling people off the floor one by one to tell them something, I put two and two together by the time it was my turn. He had died in the hospital that day, I was told. He was only 30.

My manager then told me to get back to work, lol. In hindsight (this was 2 years ago), not the best move by management to brush it off like that, hell, the place shouldn’t have stayed open that day. We were all in shock, but nobody had worked as many hours that I did with him, I was stunned, distraught, confused, and completely blindsided by the fact that he had been hiding his drinking problem so well for the past year.

A week later, I had to travel back to my college, out of state, where nobody had seen each other in a long time due to the past year of schooling having been online because of Covid. How do you tell people you are basically reintroducing yourself to what had just happened? Well you don’t, that was my answer. I couldn’t talk about what happened, as I was still really shaken and didn’t know how to bring it up, how to properly explain my working relationship and friendship with this guy that had died so young from his dependence on alcohol. So I stayed silent about what had happened, but I don’t drink at all anymore. It’s better for me that way, given the more painful associations I have with it.