the cirrhotic hemorrhage and the unvisited mother — "Ten-plus years have gone like that…"

The end-stage of the mother's alcoholism and the shame it leaves in the son. The cirrhotic hemorrhage — blood shunted up the throat "in a high-pressure jet," which seventeen-year-old Gately first mistook for a stabbing — is the Disease's physical terminus, the body finally refusing the poison; and the jaundiced "deep yellow of quality squash" is the same coloration the book gives its other dying addicts. But the deeper wound is the aftermath: "ten-plus years" of not visiting her in Long-Term Care, unable first to face her, then unable to face why he hadn't come. The theme's inheritance is not only the drinking but the abandonment the drinking authors — a son who can't visit his ruined mother becomes a man who understands, in sobriety, exactly what that cost.