This is a de-identified, risk-screened, and language-organized account of personal experience; the text retains no identifying details about the original author's identity, region, or other recognizable information.
After all these years of urging him, in the end I can't even tell whether it was for him or for myself
To be honest, I'm in a terrible state right now—my heart is full of pain and I feel emotionally shattered. Even if I can see through everything, I still can't heal myself. The influence of one's family of origin really lasts a lifetime. I never urge anyone to get married or have children now, including my younger brother—with a family like mine, wouldn't we just be setting some girl up for a disaster?
Seeing my parents live out their old age like this is truly heartbreaking. In the hospital, I basically see sick men with women caring for them. Sometimes I think: it must really be nice to be a man—protected by parents in childhood (the older generation favored sons over daughters), looked after by a wife at home when young, and attended by children at the bedside in old age. If they had truly devoted themselves to the family and been loving parents with devoted children, that would be one thing—but some men just smoke and drink and don't take care of their bodies, don't work hard to earn money in their prime, and end up burdening their families in old age.
I admit there's resentment in these words. But I also know resentment doesn't solve anything. My father keeps drinking, my mother keeps crying, and I keep urging him to stop. I can't count how many years this cycle has gone on.
The hardest part isn't facing his drinking—it's facing the fact that I can't change anything
I feel like I can barely breathe under the pressure of life. I work hard, take good care of my health, stay safe when I go out, and desperately try to live my own life well—but in the end, it all comes crashing down, and I'm nothing, and everything is a mess. Ordinary people have it too hard; maybe wanting to live a good life is a luxury.
Right now I'm home all day picking up the kids, cooking, and doing laundry. When I have nothing to do, I lie in bed binge-watching mindless dramas. I know I'm being decadent, but it's the only way I can numb myself. Who's to say low-grade pleasure isn't still pleasure? It's better than torturing myself thinking about unsolvable problems.
I admit that some of the things I say to my parents are extreme and not what I truly mean. But I also don't want them to keep piling their pain onto me while I just have to take it, feeling like I deserve nothing. Since they can't empathize with my hardships, I'll say it to their faces so they know that the bitter fruit they're eating now was sown by their own choices—and that no one in this world is obliged to bear the consequences of another person's choices.
I used to think my relief would only come when they were gone—now that I look back on that thought, it sounds like a prophecy. But when I said it, I never imagined it would come true so quickly.
July 5, 2025, around 8 p.m., everything ended
My father passed away. The weather was too hot and our family's circumstances were limited—what I'd always feared was that he wouldn't make it through the summer, and that's exactly what happened, though I didn't think it would be this soon. Maybe it's also because I didn't know how to face that day.
I've been busy handling the funeral arrangements and I'm still in a daze, not fully able to register the pain of what's happened. Maybe it's like when my grandmother died right after I finished elementary school—at the time I didn't feel much, but a week later it hit me what death really means.
It means I can never see my loved one again. No matter what happened before, they're gone now, and some things should be let go. Life has to move forward.
At the funeral, I finally saw clearly what had really happened in this family over the years
From now on I'm a child of a single-parent family. I only regret that I grew up too slowly and didn't have the ability to hold up the whole family. Because of what my father did while he was alive, he had offended all our relatives. At the funeral, how many people actually shed tears for him sincerely?
When I heard people still criticizing my father's past behavior even at his funeral, I felt both wronged and angry. He's gone now—why say these things? Can't they just let him leave in peace?
But I also know those criticisms weren't unfounded. During all those years of drinking, my father lost his job, ruined his health, and wore away the bonds between relatives bit by bit. I can understand their resentment, but in that moment I was just a daughter who wanted her father to leave with dignity.
Looking back now, in all those years of urging him to stop drinking, I was really doing one thing—hoping he could see himself, and hoping others could see him too. But alcohol kept him from seeing himself, and what reality showed others was only the bad sides of him.
I don't know whether things would have been different if I had found another way to talk to him sooner. But I do know that persuading someone to stop drinking has never been up to one person alone. The person who drinks has to be willing to move forward themselves. As for those of us on the sidelines, all we can do, perhaps, is let them know they aren't walking that road alone.
If you're facing a similar situation, you can look at how family members can provide support, or start with a simple self-assessment to get a sense of where things stand.
Those who urge others to stop drinking often feel exhausted before the drinker does.