So, first on his daughter, she is safe, he lost custody of her years ago in a really ugly divorce. He's down to supervised visitation at this point and can only see his daughter in the presence of his ex-wife. She basically has been allowing this once a week, generally Saturdays, but due to the fact that he is drinking so heavily most of the time he misses 3 of the 4 visits a month because he is loaded. So, the ex-wife is debating on pulling all contact with his daughter from him, which based on a court order, she can. All decisions related to his daughter are up to her. He does not have the capacity to make a decision. 

He does not have a driver's license and his vehicle is no longer registered. So, he does not drive. He really has nowhere to go and lives a 5 minute walk from a liquor store so, he does not care about driving. Everything he needs, which amounts to nothing but vodka, is right there. Plus, if you saw his bedroom, it is an obscene sea of bottles. It is pure madness. I went over one day and cleared it out, it took me probably 9 or 10 hours to clear out all the bottles, mostly empties. I was not cleaning, just getting the bottles out. I opened the bedroom closet and it contained a mountain of bottles that came tumbling out. It's a big room, but seriously 9 hours of lugging out bottles. I filled the giant recycling bin, then had to put the rest of the bottles in bags and leave them in a storage area under the porch and put them out in the recycling over a period of weeks. 

When I tried to go about the task of clearing out bottles in the rest of the house, it was overwhelming. I just did not have the time. They are hidden everywhere, toilet tanks, closets, all over the basement, the unused vehicle in the driveway is also a storage center for booze. It makes the movie Leaving Las Vegas look like child's play. I even discovered that he had smashed holes in some walls, put furniture in front of the holes, and he had bottles hidden in the holes. 

So, I asked this question because I began this fight in 2020. He basically went into total alcohol freefall that year, during a nasty divorce, which he did not want. He was a regular drinker, but appeared to function fine, held a job, was at social events, had friends. He was not abusive to anyone, treated his wife and daughter like the center of his world. The divorce was sudden, and out of left field. He basically came home to discover his wife had taken the baby and moved in with her parents. Gone, with a note that just said, "I can't be left alone with our child so I am moving in with my parents for good." 

She then did several stints in mental hospitals. Essentially, she was going through one of those postpartum problems where she wanted to kill her child and had a lot of hostility toward her. She did have enough forethought though to know she wanted to kill her child and could not be left alone with her and this is why she moved in with her parents. They are retired and always home, so they became the caretakers of the baby. 

He was then left home alone in a big house with a brand new nursery they had created, and nobody there. His wife told him she could not see him and did not want him to come to her parents house to see his daughter. She said she needed time to get better. He turned pretty quickly to drinking heavily to cope, and when he demanded to be able to see his daughter, she hit him with a restraining order. In the meantime she emptied the bank accounts. She probably had begun doing this prior to leaving but his discovery of it came after she was gone and he was going to buy groceries and his card was declined. 

Thus began a truly relentless assault by his ex-wife to take everything from him, daughter, house, pets, belongings, everything. She did, her lawyers crucified him, completely. It was merciless. He dealt with it through drinking. 

Now, he also suffers from PTSD, which is a problem alongside the drinking. I knew this, so in choosing treatment centers, I looked for places that could handle dual diagnosis. The first place I got him into in 2020 was a beautiful place way up in the mountains. It was like a gorgeous resort. I drove him up there, hours, and found the gate to enter, which opened to this winding mountain road to the buildings, probably at least 2/3s of the way up this mountain, that just had a spectacular view. We got out of the car, I deeply inhaled beautiful mountain air as I got out and looked out at the mountains and thought "I've made a good choice. If I was getting help, I would want to be in a place like this." 

He did at first, for the first couple weeks, tell me that he loved it. The place was full of interesting people, porn stars, figure skaters, FBI, DEA, regular cops, military people, just a lot of people that could get into a good program for help. By week three he was calling me to get him out. In week 4 he was making up stories about appointments he had to get to and I absolutely had to come get him immediately. 

I was having a weekly conversation with the guy that was in charge of his treatment, which in this place was a combination of medicine and 12 step. This guy told me he was doing great. I told him, in the third week, that he had started asking me to get him out. The guy was surprised. He said he would talk to him. In week 4, which I knew was the point he was really freaking out needing a drink and he was demanding I get him out, I told the guy that was overseeing him and again he said he would talk to him. 

I told him, I did not want him released. That I knew what was going on, and he was just trying to get out to drink. The guy said they would deal with him and he would have others help evaluate him. 

Here's the problem with really nice treatment centers, they are totally voluntary. Meaning if you say "Let me out." they have to let you out. I mean, they will sit you down and bombard you with reasons you should not leave, but they can't hold you against your will. You are there on the agreement you want to be there. End of week four, they release him. The guy overseeing him assures me he has done wonderfully. He has set him up with a regimen of medication, has him assigned to an outpatient program, and has a personal coach assigned to him that will meet with him at least once a week, that he can call anytime. 

I drive up into the mountains and get him. On the long drive back, I am taking him to my parents house, it is Thanksgiving, his wife has agreed to drop his daughter off at my parents house so she can see him, we discuss the program he has been in. He says positive things about it. Says he did well. He starts quoting passages to me from the book they give them to read. He looks wiped out. 

He asks me to stop at a toy store on the way back, he wants to give his daughter a gift when he sees her. We do. His daughter is madly in love with her daddy, still is, calls him daily, wants to see him constantly, she is a daddy's girl.  

We go to my parents for Thanksgiving, it would be the last Thanksgiving I would spend with my dad. He would pass in December. After his wife picks up his daughter, and nobody is paying attention, he slips out of the house and disappears. I would locate him days later several towns away in a hotel where he went to get drunk. He had planned it all out.  Get a room, fill it with booze, nobody to bother him. 

This pretty much kicked off the odyssey of a dozen rehabs, a few arrests, and a half dozen mental wards he got thrown into for oblivious behavior, an overdose, where the woman he was with called an ambulance because she could not wake him and then went back into her apartment and overdosed herself and was found dead the next day by her sister. That's basically been the last 5 years in a nutshell. 

Now, every rehab I put him in, he walked out and drank. I sectioned him, this you do not have a say in, he walked out and drank. Same day he got out of every one of these places. 

I've found one more rehab, they claim to have some alternative treatments, but again, the key is, he has to tell them during the new patient interview that he wants to go in, otherwise no dice. I've been fighting with him for months to agree, but that bottle is pretty much permanently attached to his mouth. 

This is where I am at. I could tell insane story after insane story. 

Because alcoholism is such a common problem, I figure many others have dealt with it. I was thinking there would be people that maybe found a way that worked to get someone through it that perhaps is outside the more common treatments. 

This has been a long fight, most of it ugly, sad, extremely difficult, and a bit soul crushing. I can't quit though, I have to ride this out to whatever conclusion comes, and I am aware, it could be a bad one. He's my brother, so, there is no looking away. It's an extremely graphic slow motion car crash.