I was drinking a five-litre cask of wine a day when my 17-year-old son took his own life. For years, I blamed myself for his death

The morning after her only son died, Sharlene Lynch sat on her bed with a spiral-bound notebook, trying to make sense of everything that needed to be done.

Scott was just 17. There were people to contact, a funeral to arrange and decisions to make that no mother should ever have to face. Sharlene couldn’t seem to hold everything in her head, so she began writing it down. Each name, each task, each small thing she was frightened of forgetting went onto the page.

She would normally have sat at her desk, but years of hoarding had left her office so crowded with possessions that she could barely spend time in there. Instead, sitting on her bed, she found herself writing something beyond the funeral arrangements. She began making a list of the things she wanted to change about her own life.

She wanted to stop hurting herself, clear the clutter from her home and give up drinking. She also wrote down an ambition that seemed a world away from the life she was living: to become a world-class transformational speaker. She had no idea how she would get there, and giving up alcohol alone would take her almost four years.

Sharlene was just 12 when she discovered what alcohol could do for her confidence. Already 5ft 11in, she felt awkward around other children, particularly the school friends whose families had more money than hers. She was desperate to fit in, and when a group of about eight children gathered at a friend’s house during the school holidays, she found herself drinking wine they’d discovered in the cellar.

At her worst, Sharlene was drinking a five-litre cask of wine a day, sometimes starting at 10am, sleeping through the afternoon and waking to drink again

From a young age, Sharlene says drinking gave her confidence, but very quickly the habit spiralled out of control

By the time she’d finished two bottles, any shyness had disappeared. She was running towards cliffs at the edge of the property, with her friends chasing after her, before turning back towards the house and crashing straight into an open window. Her head went through the glass and, as she threw up her arm to protect her face, she badly sliced her wrists. The babysitter fainted at the sight of the blood, leaving Sharlene to pull off her own top and wrap it around the wound.

An ambulance took her to hospital, where doctors were concerned she might lose the use of her hand. She needed surgery, but what Sharlene remembers just as clearly is the attention that followed. She slipped out of hospital and turned up at school, where her injuries made her something of a celebrity. Suddenly, the girl who had always felt awkward and out of place had a story everyone wanted to hear. She loved every minute of it.

‘It gave me confidence. It gave me bravado. It gave me an excuse for bad behaviour,’ she tells the Daily Mail.

Looking back, Sharlene can see how quickly she began associating drinking with the feeling of being someone other people noticed. Even the frightening consequences of that first experience hadn’t been enough to put her off.

By her early 20s, Sharlene was working at a share registry, often taking paperwork home to finish in the evenings. On the drive home, she’d pull up outside a bottle shop and hold a $20 note through the car window. Someone would hand her a bottle of scotch, which she’d take home and drink while working through the paperwork. By the time she finished, the bottle would be empty.

Over the years, alcohol worked its way into almost everything she did. At her worst, Sharlene was drinking a five-litre cask of wine a day, sometimes starting at 10am, sleeping through the afternoon and waking to drink again.

She also charged through her days with strong coffee, drinking as many as eight cups a day amongst the alcohol. She thought of it as balancing her poisons.

Despite struggling with alcohol, Sharlene had a very close relationship with her only son, Scott. (They are pictured together)

She visited different bottle shops so nobody would realise how much she was buying and disposed of empties in her neighbours’ bins. Even a day at the Adelaide races required planning, with drinks at breakfast, more in the limousine and bottles hidden beneath skirts to get them through the gates.

‘It was like moving pieces of the chessboard around and the game was to get more alcohol into me,’ she recalls. ‘It was the only thing that I thought about.’

For years, people knew Sharlene as the loud, sociable woman who loved a good time. They didn’t necessarily see the alcohol hidden in coffee flasks, or how she arranged lifts and planned ordinary chores around her next glass.

Eventually, her business suffered, relationships deteriorated and she struggled to work full-time because she wanted to get home and drink.

Scott was the centre of Sharlene’s world. At 17, he was almost 6ft 3in, loved rugby and took his fitness seriously. He had started working part-time at Hungry Jack’s while attending high school, before leaving the job to begin an apprenticeship at a local butcher. But what his mum remembers most is the way people gravitated towards him. His friends came to him with their problems, and he was always ready to listen or help.

For all the difficulties Sharlene faced, Scott remained the person she loved most. He knew his mum well, including her habits and the things that made her laugh, and she remembers a boy who was thoughtful beyond his years. Their relationship wasn’t without its difficult moments, particularly when alcohol was involved, but the affection between them was unmistakable.

Sharlene has now been sober for 11 years and works as a motivational speaker

Scott was very aware of how much his mother drank. He had grown up watching her settle into the familiar routine of alcohol, afternoon naps and more drinking when she woke. Once, after Sharlene drank heavily at one of his birthday parties and became aggressive towards his friend, Scott waited until the following day to confront her. He knew there was little point trying to talk to her when she’d been drinking.

On September 24, 2011, Sharlene drove Scott to rugby. His under-18s team had already won their match, but he wanted to stay and support another age group. Before leaving, she offered him some extra money for lunch.

Scott knew his mum’s habits well, including how much she loved her coffee. When she offered him the money, he turned it down.

‘No, you keep it, Mum. You’ll need it for your coffee,’ he told her.

Sharlene went home and drank before she attended a friend’s 30th birthday party that evening, but those celebrations were interrupted when her then-partner’s pregnant daughter was involved in a car accident. They left the party and went to the hospital where they stayed for hours, long enough that Sharlene was unusually sober by the time they headed home.

She was pleased with herself and couldn’t wait to tell Scott. For once, she would be walking through the front door early enough, and sober enough, to have a proper conversation with her boy.

When Sharlene got home, she went straight to Scott’s bedroom, eager to tell him she’d come home early and wasn’t drunk. His door was locked, which was unusual, but she assumed he was playing computer games with his headphones on and couldn’t hear her knocking. She asked her partner to look through the bedroom window from outside.

Standing in the laundry, Sharlene watched him approach the window and saw the colour drain from his face. She knew immediately that something was terribly wrong. She ran to Scott’s bedroom and somehow found the strength to force open the heavy, locked door. Inside, she discovered that her son had taken his own life.

Sharlene desperately tried to revive him until the ambulance arrived about 15 minutes later. She remembers the paramedics coming through the door with their arms full of equipment, then being moved into the hallway while they worked on Scott.

She prayed as she waited, hoping they could save him. When one of the paramedics finally came out of Scott’s room, Sharlene couldn’t take in what he was saying. His expression told her what she needed to know. She collapsed to the floor, sobbing and still praying.

‘I crashed to the ground and I was still praying,’ she recalls.

It was at that moment that Sharlene remembers hearing a single word: forgive. She understood it as something she needed to do for her son, although she was still struggling to comprehend what had happened. Some time passed before she was able to return to Scott’s room to say goodbye. When she did, she rested her head on his chest, told him how much she loved him and that she forgave him.

But finding that same compassion for herself was another matter. For years, she questioned whether her drinking, or something she had done differently as a mother, might have changed what happened that night. She had no answers, but the guilt was terribly difficult to let go of.

Sharlene hadn’t touched alcohol in the days after Scott’s death. But at his funeral on September 30, someone handed her a drink, and she started again.

In the years after Scott’s death, Sharlene kept returning to the promises she’d written in her notebook. She was making progress with her hoarding and self-harm, but giving up alcohol was proving much harder. She tried putting a glass of water between each wine, mixing her drinks with lemonade and diluting them to make the alcohol last longer. Sometimes she managed to cut back, but when life became difficult, she found herself drinking heavily again.

She told friends countless times that she was going to stop. Eventually, some began laughing when she said it, having heard the same promise so often. Sharlene wanted desperately to change, but by 2014, despite making real progress in other parts of her life, drinking was still something she couldn’t seem to get under control.

Finally, she settled on August 1, 2015. That would be the day she stopped. The night before, she went to a friend’s party and drank heavily, knowing she intended it to be her last night with alcohol. She had made the decision before, but this time she was determined to see it through.

On August 1, Sharlene stopped drinking. She had cleared every drop of alcohol from the house and stopped without medical supervision, completely unaware of how dangerous withdrawal could be after decades of heavy drinking.

The headaches came first, followed by vomiting and diarrhoea. Then things became frightening. Sharlene remembers watching the walls appear to move and feeling as though something was crawling beneath her skin. She scratched at herself, desperate for relief. At times, she thought about having another drink just to make it stop, but she was too unwell to leave the house and there was nothing left to drink.

For much of that first week, she could barely function. Alcohol withdrawal after prolonged heavy drinking can be life-threatening, and Sharlene now urges anyone in her position to seek medical supervision rather than attempt what she did.

Once she was well enough to leave the house, she began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, taking her first steps into a life without alcohol.

Sharlene had expected giving up alcohol to change her life, but she hadn’t imagined how many people would disappear from it. Invitations to dinners, parties and nights at the pub gradually stopped coming. Some of the friends who had stood beside her through Scott’s death drifted away, while relationships within her family changed too. Most never told her why, leaving Sharlene wondering what she’d done wrong.

One close friend admitted she missed going to pubs and listening to bands with her, but Sharlene never had those conversations with everyone else. She suspects some friendships had been built around drinking, although she still doesn’t know exactly why people pulled away.

‘There was a cost to giving up alcohol and it was my relationships,’ she says.

More than a decade later, those losses still hurt, particularly because Sharlene hasn’t lost the personality her friends once loved. She still goes to parties, loves a laugh and happily makes cocktails for her guests, keeping an alcohol-free version for herself. She’s every bit as sociable as she was before.

As she likes to tell people, she’s still the life of the party, just a little tidier about it now.

Sharlene says she ‘crashed to the ground’ the moment she found out what had happened to her son

Giving up alcohol changed Sharlene’s health, too. She lost around 25kg, her skin improved and the digestive problems she’d lived with began to settle. In January 2017, she started working as a professional speaker, but soon realised she wanted to offer audiences something they could take away and use. That led her to visual models, helping people turn complicated ideas into something easier to understand and remember. In May this year, she bought ThinkRAPT, the company she now runs as CEO, helping experts and organisations make their thinking visible.

It was the ambition she’d written down in her notebook, back when even giving up drinking felt beyond her reach.

Now 60, Sharlene is married and has found enormous joy in the family she’s built around her. Scott was her only biological child, but through her blended family she has stepchildren and five grandchildren. There are also young adults in her life who regard her as a mother.

Sharlene’s birthday falls just two weeks before the anniversary of Scott’s death. In September 2011, she’d celebrated with a party, never imagining that the photographs taken that day would become some of the last she had of her son. It would be another five years before she could bring herself to celebrate again, finally marking her 50th birthday.

Over time, birthdays became a little easier, although the memories were never far away. But this September, as Sharlene prepared to turn 60, she found herself facing the 15th anniversary of losing Scott. The thought of celebrating was suddenly too much. Instead, she and her husband, David, went to Bali for five days, leaving the birthday celebrations behind.

Fifteen years have passed since Sharlene sat on her bed with that spiral-bound notebook, writing down the things she desperately wanted to change. She couldn’t have imagined then that she would one day stand in front of audiences as a professional speaker, or run a business built around helping people share what they know. Nor could she picture a life without alcohol.

There are still days when she misses Scott so much that celebrating her own life feels difficult. But the woman who once struggled to see a way forward has built much of the future she wrote about in that notebook. It hasn’t taken away the grief of losing her son, and she has never expected it to.