I think there might not actually be anything you can do at this point. The point where you really could have helped him would have been a few years ago, probably.
brujon, if you have to say that kinda stuff, you are trying to justify something to yourself. The healthiest thing you can do is not drink and come to terms with your problems. If you need help or advice about dealing with them, go talk to someone you can trust about it.
Booze just holds off the problem; it doesn't solve it.
To share a little something from my life: my dad's an alcoholic. And he's steadily gotten worse over the course of my lifespan.
He was hospitalized once while I was in middle school due to hypertension; he's had a nervous shake since I was in my early teens, which is pathetically awful now. The last time I saw him in person (which was at my sister's wedding), he had a black eye, which he claims was from him falling down the stairs.
My grandmother and my aunt have given up on him; neither of my siblings or my mother trust him at all. My mother is currently going through the annulment process; a little too late, given how my father has ruined our credit rating and almost left my mother without anything looking at all like a retirement fund.
He used to skip work sometimes to go drinking - he would claim that I was having some kind of school event, like a concert or something. It was pretty normal, really - I just kinda took it for granted that sometimes my dad would go to the bar instead of eating dinner with us, or that he'd get in shouting matches with my mother.
Looking back, I have to wince a bit; I took finding my dad's stash of empty wine bottles he was hiding from my mother in stride (there was something like twenty empty bottles there). What makes it worse is that he can't hold down a long-term job anymore - and he was always a workaholic.
I guess what really made this click home for me was looking back at older family paperwork when I was going through and shredding it - watching it go from thank-you notes praising my dad's work ethic to letters from credit card companies asking him if he needed financial support (because he hadn't paid the bills in several months) was a little heartbreaking.
I mean, I spend time worrying about being as undependable as my dad. Not much, granted - but I can't really trust myself with anything potentially addictive. I can't trust myself with relationships because, shit, my main role-model is who he is. I sit and squirm a bit whenever I watch something and it tries to play off alcoholism or drunkenness as a joke - fuck, anything that deals with addiction is too painful to watch. I can read that kind of thing, but I have to take breaks every once in a while.
And it's not as if I can tell people about it. I mean, if someone asks me why I don't go out drinking, I'll tell them that I have a "family history" of alcoholism... but I don't go into it. They don't want to know - they just see it as an evening's fun, after all. They haven't watched their alcoholic father tear his life apart, ruining their mother's life, and leaving them and their siblings with all kinds of problems.
They haven't watched someone go from reading four newspapers a day, holding a great job, and being a genuinely friendly go-getter to a husk of himself with a steadily decaying grasp on reality. They were lucky enough to grow up with a father who was actually there for their family.
...
I guess what I'm trying to say, brujon, is that you should try to take control of your life now, while you still have a chance. I wouldn't wish that kind of sickness on anyone.
I would like to thank everyone for being... god, this is the first time I've actually told anyone this stuff. I'm having problems seeing the screen through my tears, so I guess I should stop.
