I haven’t really grieved too much for my godfather as i knew he was going to die. I refused to bend to his softly-softly needs because i know how alcoholics and their co-dependents manipulate any way they can to get what they want. It was sad to see him degenerate, and we now have a double funeral on Monday 18th. The loss of his talent was painful enough, and his internal organs was the warning sign that it was all coming to an end, but there are the small things that turn into the defining moments.

But my mum revealed something astonishing to me on the weekend that was absolutely heartbreaking and changed the way i felt about the situation. To understand it, you need to understand the whole context – Murray had drunk several bottles of scotch a day for 40 years completely non-stop, and had got worse and worse over the last 10 years. A few years ago his kidneys gave in, as well as his liver, and last week, his whole body did.

Everyone in our family had tried to get through to him for over 30 years. I didn’t, because it’s my understanding that martyring yourself like Murray did actually carries a form of reward, or he wouldn’t be doing it. All negative behaviours like addiction, eating disorders, violence, neurosis and anxiety have an intrinsic reward. It is usually derived from others when they see how ill and pained you are – attention, feeling cared about, and being recognised.

Murray would throw up blood all morning, lie in his own vomit, drive around drunk, and despite being over 50, had never left home. Even when he was on a dialysis machine (drunk of course) or in a comatose, he still refused to acknowledge he had a problem. Such is the immense power of denial. We tried everything. Nothing would help him to see how ill he was or do anything about it. Not even facing his own death moved him.

The night before he died, Murray independently approached his GP to tell him that he had a problem. It took seeing his father lying almost dead and waking from a comatose for him to connect the dots in his mind and heart. For the first time in 50 years, he saw himself in the mirror and wanted to change. Real, true change. In AA, they call this “reaching your rock bottom”. All addicts and troubled people have it, and they need to get there as soon as they can before they come to that point when they finally realise that they need to change. That place is the lowest point you can reach, and those illnesses always take you there. The only thing the people around can do is to pray you reach it very, very quickly so the suffering is minimal.

He died a few hours later.

It changes your mind from a place of frustration and indifference, to one of compassion. Make no mistake and be under no illusion – not feeling loved will kill you. Holding grudges and not forgiving will kill you. You will die if you procrastinate. Your addictions and obsessions will take everything you have. If you want any more proof of that, go to the morgue at the Royal Berkshire hospital and look at the frail pallid body of this man. His pain was being rejected by his father. Don’t be foolish enough to assume it’s something you forget about and get on with, as it’s essential to your healthy survival.

Murray’s favourite saying when being characteristically flippant was that he’d get round to it “one day”. And he did. Only it was too late. He ignored all the signs and warnings, gave into his fear, didn’t think and never asked for help. The net result was that what was in his heart killed him – the drinking was a symptom and his method of self-medication. And you will find that in anyone with problems of that nature. What is in the heart will manifest in their life. Look at who they are and what they do, and you will how they feel.

You will die from your depression. Addictions and compulsions will take your life. You will die from your eating disorder. Your attitude got you into debt, not your circumstances. You cannot hope to possibly solve it on your own, as none of us can. You cannot “manage” those problems – they need to be resolved immediately before they do any more damage. Bu the nefarious thing about them is that they don’t want to be resolved, and they deliver you a reward of some kind. The trick is to replace that behaviour and reward with something that does the same, in a healthy way. An example is my sis, who replaced anorexia nervosa with becoming a fitness instructor and helping others to maintain a good slim weight by eating and exercising properly. The result is the same, but the behaviour is different.

But of course, that will never happen to you. Just like cancer will never happen to you, even though it’s probably rampant in your family history. Don’t be an idiot and think that you are somehow in control. If you were, you wouldn’t have the problem.

Murray is the archetypal example of what happens to you if you keep putting difficult things off. You do it to evade feeling anxious about what it is you need to do, only putting it off adds extra anxiety so it’s counter-productive. The short –term benefit you get means you add another 20% onto the existing burden. “One day” will never, ever come. Ever. Only you can decide and affect the change, if you are brave enough to. If you don’t, you will be eaten alive by what’s bottled up inside and producing the lifestyle symptoms. You will keep locking it down in your head, convince yourself you’re happy as larry, but it will claim your life eventually.

There is no “upside” to these types of destructive behaviours, they don’t go away by themselves, and you will never be able to “switch it off” overnight and you absolutely will not be to stop it when you decide. Only a proud fool believes these silly lies. They only have negative consequences and their rewards never last, meaning you have to keep going back and doing them. You have triggers that provoke you into them, so you need to find out what they are and train yourself not to react the way you have done.

It will be too late one day. But you have no idea when “one day” will be. It could be tomorrow, because it’s not in your control. It could be in 2 years. You cannot assume it will be in decades either, or that some mysterious and magical event will happen that will turn you and the whole situation around. It’s not coming. You are on your own and responsible for yourself. The longer you leave it, the more likely it is that you will just fade away. That is absolutely certain – if you don’t take responsibility for it and do it, It won’t happen because it’s only you that can make it happen, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Life will come whilst you are making other plans, so disregard the plans and don’t rely on them. You’ll be thwarted, and your super-optimistic dreams, fantasises and ambitions won’t occur like you want them to. No-one’s ever have. Read it back again. You are not in control, so you either stand up and get it done, or you roll over on your back and settle for the little you think you are worth. It is not your behaviours, it is what is in your heart and the choices you yourself make to build what you want to be surrounded by in your life. If you don’t like not being in control, tough. That is the way it is.

I also learnt that even a little love is a very dangerous thing. Some people are so scarred and terrified of receiving even the tiniest of it can send them completely mad. They are wary but so incredibly desperate – they’ve got so used to being destitute and starved of care that they’re weirdly comfortable where they are and the challenge of someone standing there in front of them explaining they love them will send them running for the hills or provoke them into lashing out. Love is so massively powerful that it cannot be stopped or resisted. Ironically they want to stay alone but need love more than the rest of us.

For Murray, it was too little too late because he consciously chose to ignore the signs until he was completely blinded by the illness as it slowly at him. But each of us are still here and have a chance, even if we can’t see that it we leave these evils unchecked they will claim us too. There is no dress rehearsal, and there is no time we have that is available to be wasted, even if marketing tells us there is, or the people around us seem to believe it. We are here, now. We will not be here forever. None of us will, none of those others. Those people are going their own way and make their own choices but you don’t have to be like them just because you want to feel all warm, familiar and comfortable.

My godfather now rests in peace, away from all the things he never had. All he had to do was to ask and it would have been given to him. I’m angry at him for that as we would have done anything we could. Simply because we loved him. For no other reason than that. He could have saved himself, but he needed love so badly that he just couldn’t take it. That need drove him, fuelled the bottle against his lips and eventually killed him. This was no fairy tale or self-help book, it is real life. We are real people, with real hearts and real needs. He was no exception as a human being.

A week before he died i wrote to him and told him to go to his father’s bedside. The instructions i gave him were to look him in the eyes, forgive him, and release him from his debt. I’m told it caused a lot of uproar and a lot of tears, and that Murray’s last words about me were that i was so like my grandfather. We all prayed that he would have the chance to forgive him before the cancer took him, and Murray had finally agreed to go and see him.

God did not take either of them – don’t be lulled into that trap. In my faith there is a God who is loving enough to lay down his inconceivable power and let us idiot monkeys overrule him. All the prayer in the world cannot override a person’s free will and choice. Murray death was a consequence of the choices he made, and the things in our lives are consequences of the choices and agreements we have made. It is never, ever too late to reverse those choices and start again no matter how long it has been. The only certainty we have is that if we think there will be a day someday when it will be the right time, it will never come and we will always be too late.

1. We admitted we were powerless - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. We admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. We humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

And the one part of the Prodigal Son parable i never saw. The Father saw him a long way off, which meant *he was looking* for his son because his heart was so desperate to see him again - searching and waiting for him to come back. There was no judgement, only the most incredible love. Love Murray never knew because he never walked towards it or was too scared to ask himself where he could find it.

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him. “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”

Luke 15:11-32