SUICIDE BY ALCOHOL!

I have lived in the same general area for all of my life so I have several friends that I have known for a lot of years. One of my oldest friends just died yesterday at the age of 57, he would have turned 58 on August 2. The official cause of death is organ failure by alcoholism, but to me it was suicide by alcohol. I have known him for 40 years and when I met him he was a big strong young man who worked for his father as a saw filer. He was a lifelong buddy of my boyfriend when I was 16 and we became very good friends over the next 15 years and then we began to see less and less of him until about 5 years ago we never saw him at all. Last July I was going through some old diaries and was reading about all of the fun times I had with Robin and his classic late 1960’s muscle cars that he started collecting and working on from the time I first met him. He had some really cool cars and I had a lot of fun when he used to let me drive them, because of him I bought a 1969 AMX and I really enjoyed that muscle car and Robing used to help keep it running and I still have fond memories of that car and of helping Robin work on it, he taught a lot of what I know about cars and I really enjoyed learning how they ran and how not to get ripped off by car mechanics. To this day I am know a lot more about how cars work than the average person and I can attribute a lot of that from having fun with Robin and his muscle cars!. He was very passionate about his hotrod cars and spent a lot time restoring one, driving it for a while and selling them to buy another one to fix up. I am saying he made any money at it but he certainly enjoyed driving and working on a lot of cooo cars. He owned a Mach 1 Mustang, a Torino, a 442, a really cool convertible GTO and a whole bunch more. In about 1992 he fathered a child by a professional welfare lady, she had 2 children with 2 different men before she met Robin, she had never worked and was getting welfare payments for the two children she had before she met him He had just intended her to be pretty much a one night stand but since he didn’t use protection he did pay the price and he did quit seeing her romantically (if you can really call it that) but he did do the right thing and pay child support for his kid and he would pick the boy up on the weekends him up on the weekends to spend time with him. I lost touch with him during that time in his life and so I started trying to find him last summer and I was successful. I got a hold of him after tracking down the name of the person who was renting the last place that I knew he lived at and then got Robin’s phone number. He was really glad to hear from me and told me to stop by and see him because he was always home. When I went over to visit him I found out he was always home because he had become a serious alcoholic who couldn’t hardly walk because he weighed about 350 pounds. He couldn’t even hardly walk anywhere in his house and it was very depressing to see someone who had been a hardworking and active guy all of the time I used to hang out with him. He did always drink but it was after working as a self-employed saw filer after he learned how to do the job from his dad and started his own business. He probably is an alcoholic by heredity and environment, unfortunately his father was an alcoholic and he died a year and a half ago at the age of 78 so he did a lot better job of taking care of himself than his son did. Ever since I can remember Robin always drank, but so did I and a lot of my friends but we didn’t drink as much as Robin did, even when he was 18 and couldn’t legally buy beer he always seemed to be able to get it. He didn’t have the horrible tragic life that all of my other friends who killed themselves did, some of them killed themselves by plain out suicide and a couple of friends died from drug overdose. I do remember that he got in trouble with the law for drinking and driving pretty often but back in his early twenties but the police were much more lenient when it came to drunk driving in those days, Robin used to get pulled over and told to leave the car but I hardly ever remember him getting taken to jail until 15 years later when he got arrested for drunk driving several times and eventually did a little time in jail and lost his license. During the period he lost his license he started doing one of things that helped him start on his road to total demise that he is now on. He was a skilled saw filer and made a lot of money and he had his own business so he started hiring flunky’s to drive him around and to pick up and deliver the saws he worked on for a living. In fact now in retrospect I remember spending about half of a year when I was 22 where he loaned me his 1969 GTO to drive to and from work because my car was old and unreliable (but now that I think back I think he probably loaned it to me because he had lost his license and by loaning me his car he was enticing me to come and visit him a lot and go and do things together with him). We got close to being romantically involved at that time but I got turned off by all of the drinking and partying that he did and also I was young and had a lot more ambition than to hang around and drink beer. This started a pattern of him paying people to do things for him because he couldn’t drive or because he just didn’t want to do whatever it was he hired flunkies to do, and I still saw him doing that by paying his son and his son’s mother to go to the store, liquor store and do his housework because he was so fat from drinking all the time that he could hardly walk. When he was 18 through his thirties he was well built and in good shape but that was gone forever when I revisited him last year. When we had become good friends from our teens and thorough our twenties I was going to college and working part time but when I turned 30 I started working at some really good jobs and I was very responsible and didn’t have any room in my life for Robin and I saw no future in our relationship so we slowly quit hanging out together. I didn’t quit caring about him as a friend but my life took a different direction after I got my first good job. In retrospect after he had a kid with the welfare expert, I am now pretty sure from what I have seen go on since I started to go over and visit him a year ago, when I stupidly thought I could help save his life, and he did lose about 75 pounds over nine months but he never ate right, quit drinking or started exercising. He had his worthless 22 year old son living with him, who has never worked a day in his life and is also an alcoholic. Robin told me wanted to get better and I stupidly believed him, he kicked his son out of the house while he lost some the weight, he did continue having the boy’s mother take care of him and the house, but at least she didn’t drink but I found out after he was admitted to the hospital for beginning liver failure that she would buy him alcohol and he would pay her bills. So with everyone enabling him I was fighting a losing battle trying to help him and bottom line was only he could help himself. I realize now that he probably sat around and got drunk when his son was young when he took him on the weekends and hence the boy is following in his father’s footsteps only worse because he never learned a trade like Robin did from his father. I feel Robin is at fault because he could have taught him to be a saw filer like his father taught him but I think he was already too much of an alcoholic and so therefore that is what he taught his son and that is terrible disservice to do to his son but what is done is done but it makes me sad for the innocent children in this lineage of alcoholism. My guess is the the bottom line will be the same, death by alcohol. I find it so depressing in a world where most of us are struggling to live, and want to, to see someone who should have been able to make himself healthy choose death by alcohol poisoning. Since he died today I guess I need to let my anger go and just be sad that my friend has left this world, it seems like such a senseless tragedy to drink yourself to death. And even worse I found out from Robin’s sister after he died that Robin’s son’s girlfriend is pregnant, and with his son already an alcoholic at age 22 the future for his poor son is not looking to be very bright. What a senseless string of tragedies.