Should you make it clear in advance if the invitation is to a 'dry' event?

Okay. In the end I went ahead and called the hostess of this gathering, with the excuse that since it was the first time she’d hosted anything like this, and a couple of years had passed, so maybe she’d forgotten something and would appreciate the offer to schlep things like paper napkins and wipes and drink cups and the eternally needed bags of ice … and ended up getting the full story.

Which is very sad, and she kept saying she didn’t want people to know because it would cast gloom over the get together but it she just kept going back to it – I think she really needed to unload about it. I assured her I wouldn’t pass it along, with the mental reservation ‘to anyone in the family or who might be there because they know us.’ Which I doubt includes any Dopers other than me.

For about the past year her mother has been experiencing stomach pains. It wasn’t severe at first, and it came and went, and it seemed to her to be related to what she might have eaten or how her system was just acting up. Plus she had a lifelong dread of hospitals due to a childhood thing, and there was that ‘covid thing’ so hospitals were centers of contagion and already over burdened and… Basically she convinced herself it was No Big Deal and did nothing. Until the pains got really bad and didn’t come and go any more. In brief, she has pancreatic cancer. Which, if you don’t know, is one of the worst. It advances quickly, is easy to overlook the early symptoms, and then it kills you quickly unless you were one of the very lucky ones where it is caught early.

According to her oncologist, she might make it to Thanksgiving or Christmas, but not in a state to really enjoy or celebrate them. So this party is really, really important to the hosts – it’ll be her last chance to be with a large family gathering, and one that is a ‘normal’ have a good time get together instead of a death watch gloomy thing.

An added complication. She and her husband were high school sweethearts and have been married more than 40 years. What I never known fully before is that her husband (lets call them Art and Bea for convenience, and their daughter/son-in-law/hosts Chris and Debbie) had been for the first couple of decades of their marriage what is apparently called a ‘high functioning alcoholic.’ Art started and ran his own business, earned a good living and supported his family – and basically slowly but steadily got drunk every night, from dinner until he’d ‘go to sleep’ on the couch. Apparently he wasn’t abusive, and never drove drunk (or at least never got caught at it) but he wasn’t really there for them as a husband or father. When Debbie (the youngest of their children) graduated and left for college, Bea gave him an ultimatum: stop drinking or we get divorced.

Obviously he stopped drinking, with the help of AA and therapy. What ‘outsiders’ such as me saw was nothing much. Yeah, Art used to be one of the heavy drinkers at parties, but not so that he stuck out. And then he stopped, but not in a showy way. He would just make excuses for why he didn’t want a drink just then – needing a clear head to deal with tax matters later on, feeling a bit queasy that day, just in the mood for some non-alcholic something, cutting back because he’d developed too much of a gut, things like that. Maybe others, especially those who socialized with them more often, realized what he was doing, but I just took it at face value, and gradually Art was mentally tagged as just one more of the non-drinkers in the family. No biggie.

On top of this, Bea has ALWAYS wanted to travel the world. In the early days they couldn’t because there wasn’t enough money, and then Art couldn’t step away from his barely started company, and then there were young children, and then, well, a lot of his time vanished into getting drunk and sleeping it off. And after he quit, he found out his business wasn’t running as smoothly as he’d always insisted it was and now he had a lot of work to fix old problems and rebuild and his hours at work expanded to eat up most of the time he’d regained and… So they never did any international travelling. Occasional weekends at some beach or lake or mountains, but nothing more. Bea wasn’t happy, but Art kept telling her ‘just a could more years’ and he can sell the business and then they;ll go everywhere! They’ll cruise and rent a house in Southern France for a month and go anywhere you want.

And it hadn’t happened yet. And maybe never would have. For sure now it never will. If it weren’t for Covid they could maybe manage some travel before Bea gets too weak, but as it is…no.

Art is devastated and guilty and he fell off the wagon. Managing to put himself in the hospital in just a single binge since he didn’t think at all about his system having long lost its habituation to alcohol. So far this was a single lapse, but Debbie is terrified. Her mother will need him, more and more and more over the next months. If he can’t be there for her…

So that is why the party suddenly went dry. She doesn’t want him to be tempted in any way, but he and her mother absolutely must attend the party. She thought saying she was just ‘reminding’ people about no alcohol would draw less attention and not lead into telling about his lapse/her mother’s cancer and thus spoiling this last family party for her mother.