“The bastard,” my mom would occasionally mutter under her breath when someone evoked her father in conversation. It would be just loud enough for my 5-year-old ears to detect.
Later, in my teens, she’d admit he was a wonderful grandfather, which must have been infuriating (or at least baffling.) You see, as a father, he was a no-good drunk who gambled away his family’s money. Magically, 30 years later, he was a pot-bellied grandpa who loved spending time with us kids.
It was no secret that Grandpa George drank a lot during my mom’s childhood. This fact sculpted my mom’s constitution. Her iron will and constant striving to overcome was a direct result of her father’s vices and her mother’s complicity.
It never occurred to me to ask why Grandpa George had been such a terrible father.
But years later, when I learned that Grandpa George’s dad only ever called him “the kid” (never his actual name) and died by falling down a flight of stairs drunk, it all fell into place.
Grandpa George had embodied and passed on the only thing he knew how to: the dysfunction of my ancestral line.
Plant Medicine Woo-woo Wisdom
During a pilgrimage to partake in the healing properties of plant medicine, I was met by my driver and concierge. He was barefoot and greeted me in the parking lot of a train station a few hours outside of NYC.
Despite sharing some concerning viewpoints regarding the Earth being as flat as Mark Wahlberg’s abs, Patrick also spent his time rehabilitating abused horses that others deemed too wild and dangerous to look after.
If I’ve learned one thing during my healing journey in the plant medicine community, it is that Walt Whitman was 100% correct: people contain multitudes.
Patrick also shared with me something that I still think about to this day.
His family, much like my maternal line, came from Ireland. According to Patrick, the colonizers of Ireland gave the Celtic people alcohol to subdue them.
Patrick’s theory as to why these colonizers imbibed the Irish is not something anyone of us can prove, but here it goes anyway…
The British intentionally got the great people of Ireland drunk because, when consumed, alcohol invokes harmful and demonic spirits.
“Hence why alcohol is called spirits,” Patrick really hit home.
The idea seemed far-fetched to me initially. But it’s something that has stuck with me ever since. And whether or not it’s factually accurate, taunting demons damning my family’s lineage seems like a fitting symbol for alcohol.
My Cliché Healing Journey
At age 35, it became painfully clear to me that my relationship with alcohol was demented at best.
After a couple of weekend relapses, I finally rid myself of alcohol at the age of 38 for good.
I was mostly a social drinker. By outward appearances, my drinking didn’t seem out of hand (except on the few occasions it was).
But all drinkers wear these stories like a badge of honor. For me, that badge disguised and obscured deep shame, and I was ready to stop wearing it.
I was told in a plant medicine ceremony in Costa Rica that only if you are 100% ready to get rid of something from your life—not 99.9%, but 100% committed—then you can give it to Grandfather Fire.
The ceremony leaders instructed us to approach and silently say our names and the names of our parents before giving our addiction away to Grandfather Fire, but only if we felt called to.
I sat at that fire many times, drunk off the plant medicine, crying at my inability to sincerely give up alcohol. Finally, in my 15th ceremony, I was ready.
I said the names of my parents, and, forever committed to being “extra”, I also said the names of all my grandparents with one exception: my Grandpa George.
I hadn’t yet learned of his nameless childhood or how his father died. I was still holding onto the grudge that my mom had possessed during her life. And so, I refrained from saying his name as a way to show my alliance to her.
With nearly all my grandparents evoked, I gave away my dysfunctional relationship to alcohol (and weed) that night to Grandfather Fire.
In the plant medicine and breathwork circles that I frequent, it’s said that when you do deep healing of this nature, you heal not only 7 generations forward, but also 7 generations back. As a childless woman, the latter part of that statement always intrigued me.
Quantum physicists concur that time is a construct and the past and future are happening all at once, in different dimensions.
And so, somewhere (or somewhen), I like to think that my mom, Grandpa George, and his dad are all together, sipping on La Croix, basking in their gratitude and sobriety. All because I cried to Grandather Fire as he finally took away our most demonic addictions and the despair that these alcohol spirits summoned in.