Dear Elizabeth
Last month I got the film Leaving Las Vegas out on DVD and I have been in turmoil ever since. The film is the story of a man with a drinking problem who kills himself with alcohol in Las Vegas.
My father died of alcoholism a decade ago. He didn't do exactly what the hero of the movie did, but the premise was the same. He drank himself to death, despite me and my sister loving him very much and begging him to quit. Our experience could have been summed up by the last scene of Leaving Las Vegas when the man is dying and he spares his last glance of concern not for the woman who loves him but the bottle of booze beside him.
My father rejected our love and lived in just the same way and I'm still trying to come to terms with it. Did he loves us so little? How do you think you rationalise something like that?
Yours, Rejected
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Dear Rejected
How hard that must have been. Not only having to cope with your father dying - a vast and complicated process for any child - but the years leading up to it, when you had to look on as he drank and drank in sublime unconcern, so it must have seemed, for the way he was hurting you. It sounds as if your mother wasn't around, or perhaps alive, to help you with this burden. So it must have fallen harder on your shoulders.
How do you rationalise something like that? I'm not sure you can. It's about feelings rather than thoughts, isn't it? Your feelings of hurt for your father, for yourself, for your sister. Your sorrow, and your sense of rejection. But a certain kind of interpretation may help. The way I see it is that alcoholics are very unhappy. They are in despair. They are trapped by steep black walls. They can't see beyond them, and they can't climb over them. Their loving family is separated from them as by a chasm, and they can't hear their voices, or feel their love. They can't feel 
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