In Wendy Williams I Saw My Father's Shattering Diagnosis

After watching the first episode of Where Is Wendy Williams?, the media icon's new reality docu-series, you would be forgiven if you thought there was nothing we could learn about her private life that would surprise us.

Right away, we see that Wendy is not herself—she is confused and combative with family and friends, she has been placed under a financial guardianship, and she has been diagnosed with dementia. Also apparent in episode one is her dependence on alcohol.

But it's not until episode two that Wendy's son Kevin, who is 23, drops a bombshell that fills in some vital information: Wendy's dementia—all the outbursts, agitation, dysfunction—is probably a complication of many years of addiction to alcohol.

Doctors told him "that because she was drinking so much, it was starting to affect her headspace and her brain," he said. "I think they said it was alcohol-induced dementia."

Colloquially referred to as wet brain for more than a century before the advent of brain imaging technology, alcohol-related dementia is an informal term for a few different kinds of brain damage that affects chronic alcoholics, people who drank excessively over many years or decades.

In 2020, I learned my father had developed alcohol-related dementia. While I don't know many details of Wendy's diagnosis or her drinking history, I do know that my father's dementia at age 67 followed decades of heavy drinking, despite dozens of attempts to stop.

It is a shattering diagnosis to take in, forcing patients and families to confront a deeply disturbing fact: That our loved one's condition is, in a way, by their own hand.

I know my father as warm, kind, social—the life of the party. I've felt close with him since childhood but even then there was an element of caregiving, a role reversal.

I would regularly worry if he was OK when he was out late at night—the way a parent would fret over their child. I always felt a compulsion to try to stop him from drinking, knowing it was a source of problems for our family and for his health.

I remember reading my dad's MRI report. The neurologist said part of his brain had actually shrunk in a way that is common among other chronic alcoholics.

Part of me felt crushed that I had not been able to save him from the consequences of the disease of alcoholism. Another part of me felt shocked, but I shouldn't have been.

Dementia is a very common yet under-discussed result of long-term drinking. But after so many years of watching alcohol breakdown his body and mind and multiple brushes with death, I thought I had no illusions left.

If he couldn't quit after stints in the ICU for everything from accidental falls to a massive stroke, then he would never be able to quit.

My father's chief complaint as long as I had known him was anxiety—which I learned can be a symptom of dementia.

On the surface, Wendy Williams and my father could not be more different. She is a groundbreaking, successful, beloved public figure whilst my father was never able to hold down a job. But they both got alcoholic dementia.

And it follows that I should have nothing in common with Wendy's son Kevin. But there is also an unspoken kinship among the sons and daughters who had to take care of an alcoholic parent.

Like many "children of" groups—children of cancer patients, children of Holocaust survivors, even children of parents who died young—this upbringing can become an integral part of our identity and how we learn to interact with the world.

I have met hundreds of other adults from alcoholic households. Sometimes we make fast friends only to find out later that we have this invisible wound in common.

I have also made it a point to meet the offspring of alcoholics wherever I go. I've attended support groups in 10 states and five countries across three continents.

I find that we all know the same lessons about maintaining the illusion of control in the face of maddening self-destruction and the desperate loneliness of having to keep another's secret.

And behind every surviving alcoholic is a group of people breaking their backs trying to save them or looking on in a state of helpless panic.

For us, it was my brother missing class to take him to medical appointments, our mother taking away his ATM card so he couldn't buy alcohol, my uncle taking away his keys to stop him from driving. But none of it made the problem go away.

But most apparent in Wendy's series is how her illness totally eclipses her son, taking center stage while his needs linger in the background.

In an intimate address to the camera, Kevin succinctly articulates his mother's deepest brokenness that drives her to drink.

"Self-sabotage occurs," he says with a sensitivity and expertise seldom heard from a young man his age, "when [her] loneliness sets in."

It must have taken Kevin years of observing—since childhood—to be able to boil down the complicated disease of alcoholism into just a few heartbreaking sentences. But so far in the series, we have yet to ask Kevin about his own loneliness.

"I think," Kevin says, "that my mom has done a great job making it seem like everything is OK always."

Kevin, no doubt, has played his own unsung role in the facade. I've played my role too, just not on TV: Of parent to my father. That New Year's gathering, pretending everything is OK when everybody can see that he is drunk.

But there is hope too. The sons and daughters of alcoholics can pull back the curtain like Wendy Williams and Kevin are doing—letting others see behind the curtain so we don't feel so alone.

Virginia Jeffries is a journalist in New York City. You can find her on Twitter @virginiajeffr.

All views expressed are the author's own.

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