Mary KennyTragedies may lead us to “disabling” addictions, but treatment can help us overcome the darkness, writes Mary Kenny
Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, has apparently offended the wider Kennedy clan after he gave a frank interview – and wrote an even franker book – about his parents’ alcoholism.
Mr Kennedy, aged 48 and a former Congressman, claims in his memoir A Common Struggle that his father, Ted, died from “disabling alcoholism”, and that his mother, Joan, was frequently “inebriated” when he was growing up. It had an awful effect on him, and from the age of 13 he too was abusing alcohol and pills.
Patrick says that his father essentially turned to drink when his brother Bobby was assassinated in 1968 – the second Kennedy brother to be slain so cruelly.
I think most of us can understand that after such a series of family tragedies, anyone might well hit the bottle.
Hitting the bottle in a crisis is one thing. Staying with it for the following 40 years is indeed an addictive form of behaviour, and even if Senator Kennedy was a “functioning alcoholic”, it will have darkened and diminished his life.
Patrick Kennedy may well be reprimanded – even, he claims, cast out – by the Kennedys for breaking the “code of silence” around this issue. But he has surely helped other people to confront alcohol addiction by bringing the subject into the public realm. He is right to call alcoholism a “disabling” illness, and he may well be right to link it – at least in some cases – to mental illness. He believes his father was “medicating himself” as a consequence of post-traumatic shock.
But if Ted Kennedy was, as his son claims, a serious alcoholic, then it’s a pity that he didn’t seek treatment – be it from a rehabilitation unit, or the everyday, down-to-earth support of Alcoholics Anonymous, as open to billionaires as to paupers.
The first step would have been to recognise that he had a problem – and to confront it. And admitting it shouldn’t be a cause for shame.
In James Graham’s fascinating book The Secret History of Alcoholism, he lists the dysfunctions of behaviour to which alcoholics are prone: these include ethical deterioration, paranoid feelings, grandiose conduct, multiple marriages and affairs, superficial emotions, unreasonable resentments, and, interestingly, “rejection of religion”.
Graham calls this last “another expression of egotism”.
Be that as it may, these reactions are indeed “disabling”.
Perhaps it’s ironic, however, that the family of Joe Kennedy Snr should suffer from alcohol problems: for that family patriarch built some of his fortune on the supply of alcohol during Prohibition. Prohibition wasn’t a good law, but was it ethical to profit from evading it?
German media focussed on ‘flüchtlinge’
The German word for ‘refugee’ is rather sweet: it’s ‘flüchtling’. That is, literally, “one who flees”. But it also seems to conjure up a little bird on the wing – ‘ling’ often indicates a diminutive, ‘little’, in English, too, as in ‘fledgling’ and ‘nestling’.
The German media has been, understandably, very focused on the subject of ‘flüchtlinge’, and the word is pasted over all the tabloid papers. And each time it evokes, to me, a small bird on the wing.
Odious comparisons of tragedies
Some people on social media have been asking if Ireland will mourn as fervently for the Traveller families who died in the terrible Carrickmines fire as we did for the students from middle-class families who fell to their death in Berkeley, California during the summer.
There’s a saying that “comparisons are odious” and that would be my own reaction – although I also accept that this is also a way of suggesting Travellers are often disfavoured generally.
But I’d suggest that the two tragedies are different in this respect: it was evident, immediately, that the Berkeley event was a result of a structural building failure. A balcony simply should not collapse. So there was a sense of anger that this wasn’t simply an accident – it was due to slipshod management, as the subsequent investigation showed.
(There was added anger when the New York Times implied that Irish students did too much partying anyway – thus blaming the victims.)
With the Carrickmines tragedy, the public didn’t immediately know what caused it, although it is emerging that the State (or local authorities) may have failed to enforce fire-safety regulations. The fact that the deaths involved young families, and a pregnant mother, has surely made it especially poignant and distressing, and it seems to me that most people reacted with full compassion.
I don’t know if this is any consolation to fire victims, but when my oldest friend was killed in a fire (caused by arson), we were told that she would have died very quickly from carbon dioxide poisoning – rather than by the burning flames. Apparently, most fire victims pass out from the carbon dioxide before the horrors of fire itself reach them.