50 ways TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

There’s a conversation that comes up now and again about whether someone who’s been sober for many years might decide to go back on the drink in some shape or form, when they’re very old. Or at least a good bit older than they are now.

The logic — such as it is — seems to be based on the notion that when you’re on the way down, or even on the way out, it hardly matters what you do, be it drinking or smoking dope, or maybe both. You’ll be dead soon anyway, so you might as well go down in flames.

“What harm can you be doing to yourself at that stage, anyway?” is the philosophical question. And yes, it does have a certain superficial validity in terms of drinking or smoking or other drug-taking, though for best results, this mightn’t be the time to start gambling again, if you’ve been off the track for some time. And, of course, if you’re drinking again, this might encourage you to resume your gambling, as an unintended consequence — ah yes, for a long time there, you hadn’t had much to fear from our old friends, the unintended consequences.

But in truth, for many of us, this must all remain in the realm of philosophical questioning, because really we don’t know what we’ll be doing when we’re 75. We are only guessing, that if we have most of our faculties in some kind of working order, we might be inclined to let ourselves go a bit, to start drinking again, to indulge ourselves in a kind of senile delinquency.

Or at least in this distant vision, we assume that there will be almost no consequences to what we may decide to do, simply because we’re not going to be around long enough to face the consequences of anything.

Yet many of us have seen people who are very old, and still tormented by their addiction; who never managed to kick the habit. And it is actually causing all sorts of trouble to people around them, who literally and every other way find themselves clearing up the wreckage.

They, too, are at that stage where they are wondering if there is any point in going to the trouble of giving it up, when they are doing so much to end it all anyway — on balance, there’s no doubt that their remaining time on Earth would be easier for all belonging to them if they managed to quit, but it can’t be easy at that age, either, to change anything.

Would there be chaos, too, if the person who had managed to change their lives at a much younger age were to go back for one more crack at their old addictions? My best guess is that there’s a big chance it would indeed be just as chaotic, and worse, because you know you will have lost something too, lost some peace that you had found with great difficulty, something you had forgotten was so important to you.

In those vague visions, there is usually no more than a glass of wine or two. It’s all very tranquil and, well, elderly, but then the whole reason you stopped drinking completely in the first place was that a glass or two never did it for you, it merely had the effect of annoying you with the promise of what you were missing with this ‘moderation’.

You may find that no matter how old you are, if you re-start drinking wine in 30 years’ time, that feeling will come right back to you — though again, I’m only speculating here — and anyway, if you’re doing this stuff properly, there is no such thing as 30 years’ time, there is only today.

Which is the key, not just to recovery, but probably to everything.

Or we might take our cue from the recent news that Mr Keith Richards has quit drinking. At 74, he said that he just got fed up with the liquor.

Hey, it’s never too late.

“If you’re doing this stuff properly, there’s no such thing as 30 years’ time, there’s only today”