I’m not sure when it started happening. My mom always smelled like baby powder and Wind Song. A fantastic mix of pure comfort to a child who grew up to those snuggles.
One day I noticed she smelled sweet. Not a good kind of sweet….somehow I knew it was a bad sweet. She wasn’t bathing much. She was losing her hair and weight. I don’t know if she brushed her teeth at all. But she smelled…sweet. This smell increased. Her apartment smelled that way. The smell of sweet even covered up the smell of sick, cat pee, and whatever was rotting in her refrigerator. I couldn’t put my finger on it. What the hell was this smell. I hated it. It smelled like death – but I didn’t know what death smelled like.
It wasn’t until long after we found my mother dead in her apartment that I learned about Alcoholic Ketoacidosis. The smell made me sad and scared and I think it’s part of our intuitive, animalistic instincts that tells us this isn’t a good smell.
I hugged my dad a couple of months ago for the first time in a long time because of Covid. He smelled sweet. THE sweet, the same one. I know what’s coming. I’m grieving this, too. But he’s still here.
Loving an Addict 