Me Naiset journalist Malla Murtomäki has written a deeply personal column about her father, an alcoholic who in the end died of his illness. Her piece starts from a scene she is ashamed of, a moment when she laughed along with her friends at the street drinkers they call puliukot. Standing there with the group, she did not dare tell them that one of the mocked men was her own father. She admits she had reduced a whole person to nothing but his sickness, though she of all people should have known better. The column turns on the shame that keeps the children of alcoholics from ever speaking up about their families. Her father's long decline gave her an insider's view of the disease, and she still fell into laughing at those who share it. The text blends self-criticism with a plea to see the person before the diagnosis.