When she was 39, Cathleen Caffrey saw a brochure at her Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It showed people who’d got sober in their 70s, talking about “how wonderful their lives were. That gave me a hope that I hung on to for a long time,” she says. Caffrey turned 80 this year, and is decades into her sobriety, but only now feels at peace with herself.
All her life, Caffrey had assumed she was “a bad person, not a lovable person, not a likable person”. Her parents separated when she was 10, and “at that point, some voice in me said, ‘Nothing’s ever gonna work.’”
