Part 2: What We Still Didn’t See
In 2023, I learned that my oldest son had an alcohol addiction.
We call it Alcohol Use Disorder now—AUD. It sounds more clinical, more manageable somehow. But there is nothing manageable about watching it take hold of someone you love.
I didn’t learn about it gradually. There was no slow realization.
I found out at his rock bottom.
He got a DUI.
Someone saw him weaving on the 401 and called it in. I think about that person often. A stranger who decided to act. They may have saved lives that day—maybe even my son’s.
Because the truth is, he could have killed someone.
Or he could have been killed himself.
That moment—the charges, the consequences—that was when everything became visible. Before that, there were signs. Of course there were. But like so many families, we didn’t fully see them for what they were.
Or maybe we didn’t want to.
In the months that followed, his life unraveled quickly.
He lost his license. That made sense. But then came everything else—his job, his relationship, his home. Stability didn’t just crack—it collapsed.
Piece by piece, his life became smaller.
If you’ve never lived this, it’s easy to believe that this is where the story should turn. That losing everything should be enough to make someone stop.
That logic should step in and take over.
But addiction doesn’t work like that.
It doesn’t respond to consequences the way we expect it to. It doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t care what’s been lost.
And so time passes, and you keep hoping that this will be the moment things change.
And then one day you realize you’re not waiting for change anymore—you’re just waiting for the next crisis.
Today, I am writing this while my son is in the ICU at Juravinski Hospital in Hamilton.
He has been there for seven days.
He is on a ventilator.
He is there because of alcohol.
Not because he was drinking—but because he wasn’t. My son doesn’t want to drink. He has to drink. And then he becomes angry with himself and he stops. And when he stops the nightmares level up – for all of us. This is active addiction.
Active addiction is what happens when substance use or compulsive behavior stops being a choice and starts running the show. The brain’s reward circuitry gets fundamentally rewired, not weakened by lack of willpower, but physically altered at the neurological level, and what follows touches every part of a person’s life: their health, their relationships, their sense of self. Understanding what active addiction actually is, and why it’s so hard to escape, is the first step toward making sense of it, whether you’re living it or watching someone you love go through it.
Neuro Launch
Because at some point, alcohol stops being something a person chooses, and becomes something their body depends on just to function. And when that stops, the body goes into shock.
The words the doctors use are clinical: delirium tremens. Status epilepticus.
What they mean, in real terms, is this:
- His brain is seizing.
- Over and over.
- Without enough time to recover.
- His body is in a fight for survival because it no longer knows how to exist without alcohol.
They have him sedated. Breathing for him. Holding his body still while his brain tries to quiet down.
And we wait.
This is the plan.
This time.
Because there was a last time.
One month ago—May 10, 2026- not coincidentally ‘Mother’s Day’ —he was in ICU in Kitchener-Waterloo for the exact same thing. Another ventilator. Another round of waiting. Another moment where we thought, this has to be the turning point.
We are here again.
My son is 31 years old.
He grew up in a home where he was safe, loved, and cared for. There was food on the table, clothes, stability. The basics that are supposed to give a child a solid start.
But there are other things we pass down, too.
Addiction is part of our family story. Mental health struggles are part of our family story. Those are inheritances just as real as anything else.
You don’t see them when a child is small.
You don’t see where they might lead.
And then one day, you do.
I don’t know what happens next.
I don’t know if his body will recover from this.
I don’t know if, even if it does, we will find ourselves here again.
What I do know is how fast this escalated from something we didn’t fully see… to something we can no longer look away from.
In Part 1, I wrote about what we didn’t see growing up. About how normal alcohol felt. How woven into life it was.
This—this ICU room, this waiting, this fear—is also part of that same story.
It’s just the part no one talks about.
To Be Continued….