Bring Me a Brewsky, Amazing Grace

Bring Me a Brewsky

Tie her down with the straps. Please. She is weak. She shouldn’t move. But she is detoxing so violently that she is out of touch with reality. Hallucinating. Just strong enough to move and fall out of the bed in her flailing attempts to get me to “bring [her] a brewsky!”

She reaches and claws. The worst mixture of love, sympathy, empathy, disgust, sorrow, nausea.
That’s what I feel. It actually swallows me. I am bound by it as sure as the canvas straps of her hospital bed bind my mother.

Her skin looks like some kind of leather dyed yellow; she is dying of alcohol-related cirrhosis. Her stomach is actually eating itself and she was found unconscious, hemorrhaging from mouth and anus in an abandoned gas station parking lot. The male voice that called the ambulance called to let me know, and remained anonymous.

Amazing Grace

Nothing soothes her. Not the Adderall, nor the pain killers. She is wild and virtually psychotic. I am completely helpless; I cannot help her. To watch her is torture. So, I do the only thing that I can imagine. I begin to sing a prayer that she used to sing to me. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound. Immediately she looks up at me, mouth agape. Her eyes attempt to focus. I keep singing: that saved a wretch like me. She begins to sing with me, “I once was lost…” I smile at her, and she at me, “but now am found, was blind but now I see.”