First, there's the drinking. Tom died of complications related to cirrhosis of the liver - which affected his lungs (hepatic pulmonary syndrome), his kidneys (hepatorenal syndrome), low blood pressure, and sapped his strength and stamina. When Stage 4 prostate cancer was diagnosed, the good news (such as it was) was that the cancer was not going to be the thing that killed him.
We're not really children of alcoholics (that I'm aware of) - but in my own therapy work over the years I did notice a lot of ways or family of origin acted like an alcoholic family. Dad died in his 40s from heart disease, but smoking and drinking were certainly factors. So there was probably something there, maybe kept quiet, maybe a generation upstream. And so we look at how the family chose to deal with (or not) Tom's drinking.
Mom, when she was alive, set the precedent. In 2011/2012 when Tom's drinking first became an issue (causing work absenteeism and finally resulted in medical retirement) Mom would just not deal with it. There was some sort of story about a rare form of hepatitis (possible, he worked in a prison and was subjected to assaults by bodily fluids) but mom's official line was "I don't think he's drinking that much". I know when he was released from hospital back then he went to live with mom, who nursed him back to health - partly through food and companionship and a clean / safe place to live, but mostly through keeping him from being alone and drinking. Mom was in her 70s then, so not a spring chicken.
I don't recall visiting Tom at all during that time - not really understanding the nature of his drinking, knowing that Mom was kind of in charge of his situation. I did not know that it was tearing apart my brother (who would witness the mess and often be the family first responder, cleaning up bloody apartments and throwing out empty liquor bottles) apart. And my sister, who married a child of an alcoholic with not a lot of patience for it, was also kind of checked out.
What I do know is that while Tom may have stopped drinking for a time, he never really got sober. He blamed his drinking on his work, PTSD, etc. and refused the more traditional treatments (12 step groups, rehab, therapy) because as law enforcement, he was different. I recall trying to talk with him when his medical retirement came through - talking of second chances, with a monthly income, health insurance, etc. He could go get a small job aligned with his passions - trains, cars, guns, knives, hunting, barbeque, etc. or go back to school for something - to stay connected, make a few bucks, give him a reason to get out of the house. Unfortunately most of his social circles also revolved around booze, and it's no fun being the one sober person at the party.
When mom died, she let each of us know, individually, that she expected us to not abandon Tom. She knew he was difficult, she knew we were kind of done. It did not help that Tom was not able to deal with mom's year long transition from independent living to assisted living to death - he denied ("you're pushing her to the grave"), he pushed back, he disappeared. He was drinking again, of course - not sure if he had stayed sober until then or if booze had crept back in over the years. I do know that by the time we went to PA in the summer of 2017 to inter mom's ashes in the family grave, Tom was openly drinking, but professed to having 1-2 per day. Lies of course.
When you get sick or die, your heirs get access to your records, and we found a fairly reliable record of Tom's alcohol consumption - he made all his package store purchases by debit card. My brother and I are both numbers nerds, so we were able to chart it out. It's remarkably consistent (the slope of the line) - without a lot of fits and spurts, binges or purges. Looked like about a fifth of vodka per day. What was interesting was that Tom frequented three different package stores - mixing it up perhaps so that no one store owner might realize the extent of his drinking. I worked in a package store during my college years; we know anyways, trust me.
The gap around 5/1/18 was a family wedding in Texas; not sure about the gap early in 2019. His last purchase was 4/1/19; he got checked into the hospital on 4/8/19. Interesting in that we each heard some story given to the medical staff about stopping drinking many weeks or months prior to his hospitalization. We also noted that his dates were skewed - turning a 2012 hospitalization into "12 years ago" (2007 or thereabouts).
We were only able to download 18 months of data but it would be interesting to see how it looked during mom's decline and before.
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