The call

Handed the whole thing down a phone line, then left holding it.

The call is not the hard part. The hard part is the hour after it, when there is nobody to hand any of it to.

Talk it through If it is happening now

First, the part that is not a conversation

If while you are on the phone he becomes unresponsive, cannot be roused, is breathing strangely, has a fit, is vomiting blood, has hit his head, or has taken alcohol with other drugs or medication, stop and get an ambulance to him.

You do not need to be a relative. You do not need his permission. Emergency services can be sent to an address that is not yours, and they are used to being called by somebody on the other end of a line. Give the address, say alcohol is involved and what else may be, and stay on your phone.

If he talks about ending his life, take it seriously no matter how drunk he sounds and do not try to judge whether he means it. The safety page names the routes, and it is reasonable to make that call yourself if he will not.

What a drunk call can and cannot do

It cannot make a decision. Nothing agreed at two in the morning survives to nine, and quoting it back to him in the morning is how people lose the contact they still had. If something needs deciding, it gets decided sober or not at all.

It cannot be a therapy session and it cannot be an intervention. There is no combination of words available at that hour that produces a changed man by breakfast.

What it can do is be one hour in which he is not alone and not lied to. That is not nothing, and it is not everything, and confusing the two is what leaves people destroyed by the third call in a fortnight.

While it is happening

  • Say less. Long answers do not land. Short ones do, and you are not being tested on your wisdom.
  • Ask where he is and who is with him. Practical, answerable, and worth knowing if it becomes an emergency.
  • Do not argue with the facts. The amounts will be wrong, the timeline will be wrong, and correcting either turns the call into a fight he can win by hanging up.
  • Do not promise what you cannot do — not money, not a bed, not silence towards somebody who has a right to know.
  • Do not agree to keep a secret about a child’s safety, or about somebody being hurt. Say plainly that you cannot.
  • It is allowed to end. “I am going to bed now, I will ring you tomorrow” is a complete and decent sentence, and repeating it is fine.

Afterwards, which is the harder half

The call ends and you are holding all of it with nobody to hand it to. That is the actual problem of this position, and it is the reason people in it burn out faster than the family who live with it.

  • Write down what he said, plainly, the same night. It stops you re-running it, and it stops you doubting your own memory in a fortnight when he says none of it happened.
  • Tell one person — your own partner, a friend, a doctor. Not to spread it, and not to build a case. Carrying it in secret is what damages people here.
  • Do not ring him back at seven to check what he meant. He will not know, and being asked is humiliating enough to cost you the next call.
  • Put the phone in another room for the rest of the night if you can. The dread of a second call keeps people awake more reliably than the first one did.

If he does not remember

He often will not, and it is not necessarily a lie. What was the most significant conversation of your month may be genuinely absent for him, which is one of the strangest and loneliest parts of this.

You do not have to pretend it did not happen. You also do not have to reconstruct it for him line by line. “You rang me on Thursday and it worried me” is enough, sober, and once.