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He was an Eagle Scout, military veteran, respected educator, and beloved friend. He self-medicated his Seasonal Affective Disorder with alcohol. He died. He was my dad.

"That glass of scotch and soda sweated on his home office desk as he graded papers."

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The holidays are a time of joy for many. For others, particularly those with mental illness both diagnosed and undiagnosed, they are a time of struggle with depression, Seasonal Affective Disorder, and substance abuse.

Substance abuse as self-medication for Season Affective Disorder, depression, mania or other mental disorder symptoms, can blend in with the frivolity of holiday celebrations. Alcoholism and other substance abuse problems hide further in the closet at these times of year.

Getting help for the substance abuse and for the underlying mood or other mental disorder can be a life or death matter.

He was the life of the party, the guy who spiked the punch at the Senior Party. He used his sense of humor to cover up his dyslexia, which in the fifties was more commonly known as stupidness.

He was a good boy, though: an Eagle Scout, a Boys Stater, class president two years. He was voted Man About Town by his senior class of 1955 and he dated the most beautiful sophomore cheerleader.

He always had pocket money, not because his dad was rich, but because he got a job at the furniture store when he was twelve. He wasn't going to work for his dad. He decided that if his dad wasn't putting gas in his car (a 1940s Hudson) or clothes on his back, then the Old Swede wouldn't be telling him what he could and couldn't do.

He was South Dakota's James Dean, started smoking at 14 and drinking about the same time, since Whitey Lusebrink would sell him beers under the counter and way, way off the books. Back then you could drink 3.2 beer at 18 so what was the big deal?

With a September birthday, he turned 18 in the first weeks of Senior Year. That made him instantly the most popular guy in school. This was the fall that Bill Haley and the Comets Rocked around the clock.

It crept up so insidious and perverse. Here was the town's Golden Boy, his mother's pride and joy, who went on to college and an advanced degree in counseling, with a deadly addiction hidden so deep no one knew.

His wife, whom he married at 33 when he was finally ready to settle down, had no idea. She saw a brilliant counselor ready to save everyone from themselves in the age of narcissism that was the late 60s and early 70s.

He began a stunning career where he pulled inner city teens literally off the streets and some of them grew into the people God meant them to be. Some of them relapsed. Some of them died.

As it started to dawn upon him that he could not save the world there was more often at his side a full glass of scotch and soda on the rocks at home. Just one, maybe two or three or four at the very most until after dinner.

The 80s saw budget cutbacks in the very programs that were getting the inner city kids back to school. He was demoted to classroom teacher and that glass of scotch and soda sweated on his home office desk as he graded papers and planned lessons in American History, saccharin filled by the text writers and sucked free of passion, controversy, and most of World War II in the Pacific.

His sweet child was becoming an unruly adolescent. His beautiful wife was cyanotic from her progressive heart condition. His child and wife were neither sweet nor beautiful when they fought, which was every time they were both home. A student killed himself over a date to the Prom. He buried himself further into his work, his pipe, and that ubiquitous tumbler of scotch and soda.

Everyone who saw them saw a beautiful house and garden, exquisite camping vacations to Martha's Vineyard and Napa valley. They saw a handsome man with an honest face and great sense of humor, a beautiful kind wife with delicate, dark features like Audrey Hepburn, and an intelligent daughter with long legs and blonde hair. And some of them saw the scotch and soda, but then what did they hold in their hands?

His wife left him. It's drinking or me.

What are you talking about? I don't have a problem!

His daughter said, "My daddy's not a drunk! Stop harassing my daddy!"

She was only fifteen but somehow it made him right and his wife wrong.

They divorced. She got all the money. He got the house and the daughter. He won, he thought. But she was sixteen. It's not easy being the single father of a sixteen year old girl. Especially that one.

His wife committed suicide by not taking her heart medication.

He was raising a daughter when all of his assets were gone. He was fifty now. A daughter starting college. And he was it, there was no more every other weekend.

The bottles of scotch filled a kitchen cabinet.

His career was back on track; he was in charge of a new program at an alternative school, back in with the inner city teens he loved so much. He had four more years with the military and was a substance abuse counselor at the Air Guard base. Yes, a substance abuse counselor.

His complexion started to take on a reddish color. Roseacea? Hives?

He began having stomach cramps. Ulcer? Spastic colon? The scotch and soda took the edge off.

His daughter graduated from high school with honors and scholarships. She would attend his alma mater.

He was so proud the day he moved her in to the dorm. Now, finally, she would soar on her own. Now, finally, at 53 some time for himself.

He dated some, nothing serious.

He traveled some and put in extra hours designing curricula for alternative school social studies. A dyslexic, he wrote a curriculum, "American History for Non Readers." the concepts were not dumbed down but the chapter readings were less cumbersome and the vocabulary was more succinct. And this one had the ins and outs of McArthur and the war in the Pacific, his specialty.

He played some golf with friends and had some scotch and sodas at the club.

His daughter got married, had a baby, and graduated from college in that order within 15 months.

He took early retirement at 57 from the school district, wanting to quit before he burned out, and he moved back to the small town where he was Golden Boy, Eagle Scout, and the Guy Who Spiked the Punch in 1955.

In hot pursuit of his youth he played golf with some old buddies, he traveled, but mostly he looked forward each day to Happy Hour at the Decoy. That's where everyone gathered, like the town square of centuries past. It was just for socialization, and if he had a few Vodka 7s, whose business was it?

He finished up at the Decoy by 7:00 each night, 8:00 at the latest. He fixed a simple dinner and a carafe of Vodka 7s and after dinner he settled into his recliner for ESPN, The Golf Channel, or an HBO movie.

He talked to his daughter for an hour every Sunday night.

Of late, he started calling her more often. There was something creepy in his house and most nights he would have trouble sleeping or would awaken, frightened. Once he saw his parents standing over his bed. He moved the family scrapbooks to the attic.

His health was worse: that pesky thyroid thing, and he was coughing up blood, more and more. The TB test came back negative. He was losing weight. He started drinking Chardonnay from a box in the morning to take the edge off his body aches. His knee hurt almost all the time, probably flashbacks of his childhood polio.

His daughter and her family came to visit now and again, and he could keep it under wraps for them. He was starting to think he might have a problem, but he just had to be strong and overcome it, like he had survived pneumonia before penicillin, he had survived polio during the early 50s epidemic, and he had served in the military.

He didn't feel quite right but he left after Thanksgiving for his winter condo in Arizona. By Christmas he was coughing up or vomiting blood every day. He quit smoking but felt no better.

On New Years Day his daughter called, and again on January 9th they talked again.

Almost every week they talked for an hour but he couldn't stop coughing on January 9th.

"Daddy, I'm calling you back tomorrow. If you arent' any better you get to a doctor. I know you don't like doctors but this is bad."

He slept restlessly with cold, frightening night sweats. He was hallucinating. The days blended into one long nightmare. He vomited blood in the sink, the toilet.

On January 17th he was found on the floor of his bathroom, having vomited blood from his bed to the sink, and having died some 36 hours previous. He was 63.

This man was not the town drunk. He was a kind man who loved God and sang his praises at church. He was a counselor who helped many people turn their lives around. He was a friend whose absence has left a gaping hole in two communities, not to mention a family who still cries at the mention of his name. He was a survivor of many obstacles who was remembered as a gifted educator.

He was remembered for his service to his country and to his fellow man, and received full military honors where the American Legion expressed the thanks of a grateful nation and handed me a folded American flag.

He was my dad.

He was a closet, "functional" alcoholic.

If you see your loved one in the story above, someone with a loving "normal" home who seems to need a drink to go with it, don't turn away, don't say, "it couldn't be."

I thought it was impossible until I learned that my father died a painful death from the veins in his liver, protruded by alcohol, exploding.

If you see yourself in the paragraphs above, please get help. Don't leave a gaping hole in your liver or your family.

This article first appeared on Suite101.com - Mental Illness in Families and Society, and is reproduced by the kind permission of the author, Amy Hillgren Peterson.  You can check out her topic here, and her remarkable memoir of coming of age and bipolar, Elusive Butterfly, here and order it from Amazon.com here.

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