I’ve been dreaming of my late wife recently. Odd little dreams, here and there. Nothing special or weird. She just shows up. I wonder if it’s the mental equivalent of me cleaning out her closest and that sort of thing. She was in my dreams last night, twice. The first one is fuzzy now, but there were a lot of people involved and it seemed as though we were at home. The second is more distinct. She was walking toward me carrying a bottle and drinking out of it. When she got up to me, I realized it was a bottle of whiskey, and I remember the shape of the bottle, it was oval. I couldn’t make out the brand.

When I thought about the dream this morning, I was reminded of the type of behavior I saw in the latter stages of her dementia when her self-control was disappearing, and it also made me think about alcohol in general. We didn’t have any in our house growing up. I didn’t have my first drink until I was out of high school. It was a Tom Collins in the restaurant of the old Shamrock Hilton in Houston. It didn’t seem all that special. Over the years, of course, I learned to drink and how to party and we had fun, but generally it was something we did on special occasions. Even now I have a pantry full of whiskey that most likely will be there for a while.

The thing I like about whisky, beer, and wine is how it brightens the mood. Although I did know a mean drunk once, and that was bad. But generally, people are really happy when they drink, and I like to be around them. The only thing you need to watch for is the tendency for people to tell you things they probably wouldn’t have said without an artificial stimulant. I commented on this to a friend once and was told that maybe alcohol made it easier to tell the truth. It was a new way of thinking about it for me, but I also recall a line from a song by Matt Harlan, “You’re just drunk and things ain’t what they seem.” That’s the line I apply to myself when I process things that happen at parties.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale