Living Pain Better Than No Pain

I was drinking and drinking, feeling pain, sorry, self-pity, and loathsome.  One day I realized something about my drinking, and it was very simple, perhaps even elegant, but extraordinarily ugly: I was holding on to my own dead Father by drinking.  Damn.  Trying not to feel the pain of his death by replacing it with drinking, somehow subconsciously allowing the drinking experience that I had been subject to as a child to intercede into my inability to grapple directly with my loss, and intensifying the drinking so that it, and only it, could provide my relief from utter terror and ambush.