It would behoove you all to read Maureen Dowd’s column in Wednesday’s NY Times.

Thank you for your kind words. You know where I am coming from, and it is a constant battle  and inner worry. I have forever thought that on that particular day rather than going to his room  when he came home,where I would have never known he had been drinking again, he sought me out in the yard. It was a message to me that, yes, he had relapsed once more, and suppose he actually wanted to be chastised. I can still hear him saying to me, after I called him the name - "What sort of mother calls her son a F*****?"  Indeed - one who has lived with this problem too long & their last nerve just snapped.

Thank you once more. I mostly remember what a sweet person he was, and the tragedy was that he was so intelligent and so sad and threw away the gift he was given, as it was too painful for him. I wish you luck and nothing but good days for your future. With this problem all you can hope for is one good day at a time, and 4 yrs. of good days is a gift for both of you. You know what I mean by "good days." The "bad days" are what we hope never come. Well, mine came, but I do have wonderful memories of the gift he was to me.

Unless you have been there and lost your child you cannot relate to this at all, as it is impossible to understand. No matter how you handled the situation, if your child died you will forever blame yourself for doing something wrong. My youngest son was hyperactive as a child. This was in the 60s and they had no labels for it then, nothing to do, but "cope" as I was told.  He did below average work in school in spite of testing  with a 178 IQ. We were military & were transferred to Washington DC when he was 16, and shortly afterwards realized he was drinking a lot. It was easy to get liquor there as we lived in VA & he’d stand outside the State stores & somebody always was willing to buy anything for him. He started school, but one day I got a call from one of his teachers telling me he never was there in spite of getting on the school daily. His drinking became more obvious by then and he was a total alcoholic without our even realizing how bad it had become at not yet 17. I took him to a psychologist who recommended he be hospitalized. He was placed in a psychiatric hospital in Georgetown, because at that time there were no rehab places as there now are. He actually enjoyed it there as there were other kids with drug/drinking problems too. He spent 10 mths. there because he used to walk out the door & go to Georgetown & come back drunk so he was kept. He was eventually transfered to a place in Victoria, TX where he spent another 7 mths. until he graduated from high school. He was doing very well by then, returned home, still saw a shrink in DC and was on Antabuse so he couldn’t drink. During all this time he was always depressed, and it was one of  the reasons he  drank…self medication. He was put on Lithium after he was back home. Our life was pretty decent and stable then, but we got transfered to Omaha , where he started going to another shrink and AA. I went to AlAnon, and things were still pretty good. Before we  left for Calif. after my husband retired from the military he had started drinking again, but not enough that we suspected it…mostly at home in his room. We returned to CA, but he couldn’t find an AA group he could relate to so quit going. We bought a beautiful new home where he even had his own bathroom. Things seemed pretty good, but one day he came home, I was watering plants & he sought me out, and I realized he was drunk again. I couldn’t deal with it, as had total burnout, and the thought he was drinking to get drunk  made me almost lose my mind. I called him a terrible name (which I regret to this day & will carry it to my grave), and he said to me "what mother calls her son that?"…indeed! I got in my car and drove all over the place for ages, so mad he had started on the drinking trail again and at what I had called him. Well, it didn’t go much further, as shortly thereafter he killed himself on his motorcycle at midnight..ran head on into another car with a blood alcohol of .04. We’d lived in our new house 10 weeks and he had been 21 only 6 weeks. We never spent another happy moment in that house and moved to another state a few yrs. later. His old shrink & I thought it was suicide as he was too smart to drive that drunk, and after his death I found a lot of writings about his sadness and depression. Tough love, or supporting your child can both result in the same result - death, if they are in a mental state where this helps them survive. You forever ask yourself what did I do wrong, what else could we have done to help him with this? There are no answers and you are forever left with the memories of your beloved child, his problems, and what if? It has been 29 yrs. and sometimes seems like just recently. I still miss him so much,and live with the tragedy of his life and death.