Mr. SponsorPants

it's all I can think about right now: we don't get a 'because' for every 'why'

We don't get a "because" for every "why?" we ask-scream-cry-beg-demand of the world.

They told me when I first got sober that one definition of serenity is to live somewhat peacefully with unanswered questions.  Sometimes it's not easy to do that.  You lose your cool -- either dramatically or quietly, outwardly or inwardly -- and you have to find your way back to center.  It's a straight line out but the path back can meander and double back some, I fear.

Especially in the face of tragedy.

Guy I used to sponsor took his life just the other day.

I found out this morning.

A terrible waste of a shining spirit.

But another guy I sponsor is going to be turning four years sober before the week is out.  He's a real alcoholic, and his sobriety has been marked by a true spiritual awakening -- he has changed profoundly in his time sober.

Tragedies and miracles, tragedies and miracles -- the bittersweet AA gavotte.

We don't own that, I know.  Hell, this time of year is happy and hard by turns for just about everybody -- and any given day, regardless of the season, can bring party favors or land mines for anybody.

But alcoholics do seem prone to unkind or untimely ends.

All day I've thought about that guy as I knew him.  Helluva hard worker, earnest in his sobriety, a terrible wheezy cartoon of a laugh (like someone playing an accordion backwards), a heart full of love despite some rough times and a tough bottom. 

I'm as guilty as anyone of throwing the word "miracle" around -- sometimes I fear I sound phony or insincere.  As I type this, though, I've never been more earnest in my whole damn life when I say the following:

If you are an addict of any sort, and you are in recovery today, the word 'miracle' doesn't do that justice.

You're beating long odds against you with every single 24 hours clean and sober.

Doesn't give us license to play the martyr (even though there is much sweet mileage we can wring from that game).

But a sober life free from addiction is, indeed, miraculous.

 

Please,

seek a spiritual connection.

Tell your secrets to trustworthy folks.

Embrace what AA has to offer.

Try to help other people.

I mourn the untimely end of one alcoholic while I celebrate the life and sober anniversary of another.

And so it goes.

Tragedies and miracles.

Tragedies and miracles.

Some days it's like a whole damn life full of tragedies and miracles.

An amazing resource

THIS is an amazing resource.

Many thanks to those who put it together.

Five Star Generals

Five Star Generals don't ask for help.

A friend of mine with 34 years clean and sober in AA often makes this observation when the topic turns to alcoholics with long time sobriety who either relapse or take their own lives.  The first time she said it I confess it took me a minute or two to catch her drift -- then I understood what she meant.  Think about it.

10 months ago he called me from his Case Worker's office.

The book "Alcoholic's Anonymous" (AA's Big Book) states that the trajectory for an alcoholic ends in one of three places:  Jails, institutions or death.

For my friend DB, his path eventually included all three.

20 years ago he was selling expensive European sports cars to millionaires and movie stars in Beverly Hills, California.

Six years ago I fired him for being drunk at work -- and we were a long way from selling sports cars in Beverly Hills.  Actually, he was drunk at work a number of times.  Since I knew him from AA I tried to cut him some slack, but eventually I had to hold him accountable -- though I did fudge the paperwork when I let him go, so he didn't have a "not eligible for rehire" dogging him when he looked for his next gig.  It wasn't rigorously honest of me, and maybe it was shielding an alcoholic from the consequences of his drinking -- which never actually helps them, I know -- but I'd probably do it that way again, if I had it to do all over.  Sue me.

Four years ago I went to his "Transition" -- the graduation ceremony from a pretty tough recovery house he had been in.  Not the first, but ...  "This time it'll be different."  And it was.  For a while.

10 months ago he called me from his Case Worker's office.

Tonight I learned that he "fell asleep" in an alley and was run over and died.

Another Coroner's Certificate that will be inaccurate when listing "Cause of Death."

It's pretty easy to get all caught up in and distracted by the

No.  Stop.  Though I believe DB's death is a powerful illustration of what alcoholism does to a person, I'm not going to wax on about sobriety and the spiritual solution and what it is we're really doing in AA (trying to save lives, if you need it spelled out for you).

I'm just going to log off, and say a prayer for my friend -- a really great, funny guy, who tried and tried but couldn't stay sober, and wound up passed out in an alley, run over like a stray dog.

 

The Mayor of AA

As far as I know right now, the Death Certificate will read "Cardiac Arrest."

He had ten years sober.

Then he relapsed about six months ago.

As is often the case, it's even harder to come back once you have -- sorry, had -- some years behind you.

I found out this evening, at my regular Tuesday night meeting, that he died last night.

I sponsored him for the first three years of his sobriety.

I hosted his One Year AA "birthday party" in the back yard of the house I was renting at the time.  His family drove in for it -- well, the Mom and the sisters did.  The relationship with the Dad hadn't healed yet at that point (it did eventually).  The Mom and the sisters were so sweet to me.  They didn't really understand what a sponsor was, exactly, and gave me more credit than I deserved for his year of sobriety.  I stopped trying to explain and just gave them all hugs, which seemed to stem the flow of "thank you's."

I know when he very first came to AA he slipped around a bit.  When he asked me to sponsor him I said yes (of course) and told him to come over to my house the next day and we could start talking and go through the Big Book and figure out maybe what schedule of meetings he might go to (which is how I gently tend to ease into the whole "90 meetings in 90 Days" idea).  I remember I was painting the kitchen when he showed up.  At the time I thought I would just sort of paint and listen, but when he started talking I had to put down the brush and give him my full attention -- he had a lot he needed to share.

After he'd been sober for a little while and started sharing and speaking and telling his story he would often share that before he came up the walk to my house that day he had never before felt so desperate.  He decided that day -- at the foot of my walk -- that he would be completely honest with me.  Up until that point -- his time in school, his years in the military, the corporate adventures -- he didn't think he'd ever done that before.  I remember on several occasions pointing out to him that that was why he was able to stop slipping around and begin the steps and stay sober.  It wasn't anything I knew, or said, or did -- it was his decision to be honest that made all the difference.  I couldn't seem to clearly explain this to his mother that day at the party though, which is why I resorted to big hugs.  When words fail that's usually my secondary line of communication -- and often probably my more eloquent one, now that I think of it.

I used to call him "The Mayor of AA" -- he was very charming.  Ready smile.  Always seemed to have the right touch when it came to a gift or a card or a thoughtful comment.  If AA were a Beauty Pageant he would have been voted Miss Congeniality.  If he were here to read that comparison he would have found it very funny.

The details of his death haven't emerged yet.  It might have been an OD, or it might have been cardiac stress brought on by his relapse.  Crystal Methamphetamine is very hard on the heart.  But as I say, from what I was told tonight, the Death Certificate will not say OD.  Perhaps that will be a kindness of sorts for his family.

I don't need a piece or paper to tell me that whether he overdosed, or it was the cumulative cardiac deterioration from the six months relapsing and trying to get clean and sober again that stopped his heart, it was addiction that ultimately killed him.

What, who, how and the always hovering Why?  I don't know.  He was an alcoholic and a drug addict, that's the real "because" underneath everything else, isn't it?

AA is like a small town, I'll wind up hearing more about what happened no doubt, but right now it almost doesn't matter.

I don't know if it is ironic or appropriate, but I went to a 4 year sober anniversary party after the meeting tonight.  I chatted and made nice, but often I found myself thinking about him.

In an effort to express how I feel sometimes, and also to try to be helpful -- to be of service, which is really the whole point of this blog -- I try to illustrate things that have helped me, or share my experience on something in sobriety, or make an observation about what can happen in dealing with alcoholism -- or what can happen when you don't deal with it.  But I don't have any of that right now.  I keep thinking about him, and how right now his mom probably knows her son is dead.  And how awful those funerals always are, when a parent has to bury a child.

Sometimes it feels like I know a lot of dead people.

You have more choices than you think you do.

As a child, I never really trusted "The Wizard of Oz."

Not the man so much, though he was shady enough, but the story -- specifically the way it ended.

Yes, yes, very happy Dorothy made it back home.  Glad that the (very) scary witch was now a puddle in a mop bucket somewhere (one might surmise that it was a bucket rudely used by the flying monkeys as payback for having been the witch's personal Luftwaffe, but that's really just speculation).  Wonderful that the dog and all were safe and sound, great that the lion and the tin man and the scarecrow got what they thought they wanted.

But what put me off was this, Dorothy's final line, and really the "moral of the story" in the MGM film:

"Well I -- I think that it -- it wasn't enough to just want to see Uncle Henry or Auntie Em -- and it's that -- if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard.  Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with."

Huh?

Really?

If you think there's something important missing from your life, like your heart's desire, don't really search for it -- if you don't find it at home then you're just wrong -- there's nothing missing at all.  Just stay home.

Even as a child, though I didn't have the ability to put it into words, this was deeply emotionally unsatisfying and didn't make any sense to me at all.  So, budding nerd that I was, I went to the source and read the original book by L. Frank Baum, which of course led to reading all the rest of the series, "The Oz Books."  (Since when was an alcoholic satisfied with one of anything?)

Totally trippy.  Bizarre for any age, but mind blowing when you realize these were written between 1900 and 1920 (there are 14 books by Baum in all.)

I'm happy to report that Baum's Dorothy was a lot pluckier than the one written in the 1939 film.

For example, in the first book, Dorothy isn't nearly as disturbed by her relatives' failure to believe her as her movie counterpart is -- and Oz is a real place she visited and returned from, not a fever dream resulting from a head injury and maybe Em's questionable cookin'.

The subsequent books tell of Dorothy swept overboard by a tidal wave and swallowed up in an earthquake, among other things -- I'm telling you, that child was positively disaster prone -- but she's pretty much back on the farm, foregoing a land of music and magic for life in Kansas, and she's determined to make that work.

And although it took her a while, by the time we get to the sixth novel "The Emerald City of Oz" Dorothy changes her mind.

By book six Uncle Henry is going to lose the farm, since he can't pay the mortgage he had to assume after the tornado in the first book destroyed it (Take a moment with that -- go ahead.  No outside issues are really appropriate in this blog, keeping as close to the spirit of AA as I can here, but go ahead) so Dorothy decides to contact her old friend Ozma of Oz and move back to the Emerald City for good, taking Uncle Henry and Aunt Em with her.

(Ozma is both royalty and a good witch, but back in the second book had been transformed by a wicked witch -- there were a number of them running around in the series -- from a Princess of Oz into a little boy -- and then back into a princess when Dorothy and Glinda rescue him.  Her.  Possibly making for the first transgender protagonist in any literature of the 20th Century, let alone something considered classic children's literature.  See what I mean?  Totally trippy.  Should MGM have made a sequel to the original musical based on the second book, one can only imagine the song they'd have had to come up with to explain that little bit of character development.  "I've Got a New Kind of Wand!" might have been a good working title.)

So Dorothy tried to make Kansas work.  For Em and Henry's sake.  For the sake of what she thinks she's supposed to do -- but eventually things just aren't working out, and she changes her mind.  She makes a different choice.

When I first got sober there was this great gal who came into AA shortly after I did.  We were about the same age, had similar stories -- we clicked.  I will always remember her laugh, a great whooping thing that was absolutely impossible to resist.

She got sober for a while, found love, got too busy and fabulous for AA, drifted from meetings, drank and committed suicide.

Too abrupt?  Too neat?  Too simplistic to link the "drifted from meetings" to "committed suicide"? 

Actually, no, it's not.  I knew her well.  I was around.  I read the note.  I'm not saying that every person who drifts from AA meetings will drink, nor am I saying that every alcoholic who drinks will commit suicide (directly, anyway), the issues are too complex for pat answers and logic that's reverse-engineered to prove a pet point -- but I am saying that I was there, and in my (informed) opinion that is what happened in this case.

She was a true blue, real alcoholic, and when she drank her depressive side was running the show -- and although her sober friends sensed she was in real trouble and tried to intervene, apparently she decided that she had no other choice but to take her life.  This all happened many years ago now (if you stay sober long enough and have enough alcoholics in your life you may come to know a disproportionate amount of suicides and early, preventable deaths -- which will make you really fun at parties) but that's what I remember so clearly:  No choice.  She felt like she had no other choice.

At the beginning of my drinking I felt like anything -- anything -- could happen.  I had all the power to shape my destiny and I was completely free -- I could choose to be anybody, go anywhere, sleep with anyone, try anything... a million fun and exciting choices.  It was like being a character in a movie -- with a drink in my hand life went instantly from black-and-white to Technicolor, and I felt like any dream could become a reality.  Drinking made me feel like I had accomplished something without ever having to get up off the barstool.

I think that's the most clever and terrifying trick that alcoholism performs -- and it's as crafty a trick as poison poppies of flying monkeys.  It makes you feel as if you have every choice in the world at your disposal while it slowly, surely, removes them.

You feel like you can go anywhere -- but you always seem to wind up a at a bar.  Until you wind up never leaving the house.  You believe you can be anyone -- except you're too afraid and obsessed with what people think of you to be yourself -- and eventually you look in the mirror and have no idea who you are.

And for one girl I knew when you're drinking and using you feel like you have lots of choices -- until suddenly you really only have two, and you're sitting at home alone with a drink in one hand and a gun in the other, and you don't even realize that you could choose to put one of them down and pick up the phone.  Alcoholism made her believe that the only choices were the drink and the gun -- and when you can't stand to choose the one then you must choose the other.

I found the readings we had at my friend's service while I was cleaning out an old box today in an aborted attempt to bring order to my hall closet.  She hadn't been much for churches so we just had a little memorial in a park she liked.  Printed some things up to read, sang (badly, as I recall, which she would have found hilarious), told a few stories, said some prayers and said goodbye.  Sweet and sad.  It was so long ago now I'm not sure I could put names to everyone who was there -- but I remember how over and over people kept talking about how sad it was that she didn't feel like she had any other choice.  I suppose some of that is the reaction one always has to suicide -- there's often a "why?" and an occasional angry "how could you?" floating over every suicide memorial service I think, even when the cause is plain and the note clear -- or clear enough, anyway.

And then there's the unspoken "if only's" -- if only they'd said something, done this, tried that, gone there, asked for help... all the "if only's" are the choices they didn't see -- they couldn't see, or they could see but felt they couldn't make.

What AA has done for me is show me that not only do I have many more choices than I at first might see, but that I can choose, try, and if I need to, change my mind and choose again.  I'm shown my choices when I share in meetings and air my sometimes crazy, limited, black-and-white thinking out loud, so I can see it for what it is.  I'm shown that often it's not a question of the "right" choice and the "wrong" choice -- but rather that for every choice there will be comfortable stuff and uncomfortable stuff that goes along with making it, and I learn that by listening to other sober people walk through their stuff, practicing these principles to the best of their abilities in all their affairs.  I have clarity to choose how I want to behave in difficult confrontations by having learned to pause when agitated, and not to respond without thinking first (mostly).

The real adventure is sobriety, since a sober alcoholics has the tools to actually try anything they can dream up, while a drinking alcoholic lives in dreams and thinks they can try anything but hardly ever actually does.

It's in my sobriety when I look around my life and feel like, "Hey! Who turned my life Technicolor?" and realized how much my drinking and my alcoholic thinking had bled my life of any color at all.

As I wrap this up I'm bravely struggling against a cute conclusion about not being in Kansas anymore or going over the rainbow, just to pull it all together thematically.  I guess I'll simply close with a salute to the memory of my friend, who I wish had seen that she had more choices than that terrible, final one she thought she had to make all those years ago now, and a wish that anyone reading this today can see that, beyond whatever choices you think you have are perhaps even others.  You can choose, or even change your mind and choose again -- and if you can't see those choices, or can see them but think you can't make them, ask for help -- for me, I've always found that help in AA.

You have more choices than you think -- even if you choose to move to Kansas.

Cheers!

            

Reading "More About Alcoholism" with someone I sponsor.

A sponsee came over earlier.  We have a standing appointment to meet face-to-face once a week and go through the Big Book together, as I do with pretty much all the people I sponsor.  (We may speak on the phone a lot or a little, but if I can't meet with someone once a week to go through the Big Book how can we go through the Steps?)

We take turns reading paragraphs and comment on whatever resonates for us as we go.  In this way a sponsee gets to do the 12 Steps as they're laid out in the first 164 pages of the Big Book.  You would think that this process would have become dull to me as the years have gone on.  Quite the opposite, strangely.  (Though I keep expecting it to.)  I almost always get something new out of the book as I go through it with someone -- and since each person is different, the exchange is always fresh for me.

This particular sponsee and I had finished the chapter, "There Is A Solution" and we were going to begin "More About Alcoholism" which comes next.

Before we jump into the book I like to "check under the hood" -- see how AA meetings are going, ask about service commitments, inquire after my sponsees' sponsees, etc.  (I'm terribly afraid as I write that I'll sound stuffy or nosy or authoritarian -- while it's difficult to see ourselves as others see us I hope that, however any of the people I sponsor may describe me, those words would not come to mind.)  Usually we chat about whatever comes up.

Today my sponsee told me about a call he'd gotten yesterday, from a friend's mother.  The friend had passed away.  It was, as my sponsee described it, a sad, weird, awkward call -- but in a way no real surprise to either my sponsee or the mother.  They both had known for a while that this call was, if not inevitable, then certainly very likely.

My sponsee had known this friend for about ten years -- they'd met on a job.  Hitting it off as only a pair of drinking alcoholics can, they became pretty tight.  Eventually my sponsee began down the road to sobriety, encountering a few speed bumps along the way (er, poor choice of words, that) but overall, staying the course.

The sponsee's friend had made several aborted attempts at getting sober, doing the whole check-yourself-into-rehab-and-then-check-yourself-right-back-out routine.  From what my sponsee described there had been semi-regular phone calls over the years from the friend's mother, asking for advice about interventions or treatment facilities... all the things a desperate parent tries to help their addicted child.

Apparently the last couple of years the friend had been living in their mother's house, pretty much drinking around the clock.  The mother had tried whatever you can in those situations.  (If, as you read this, you're thinking phrases like "tough love" I would like to humbly suggest that it is one thing, while comfortably sipping your coffee and reading a blog entry on your computer, to think about getting hard-ass with people, even if it's in an attempt to save their life -- but it is quite another to look into a family member's eyes and put them out on the street while they're sick and miserable.)

Years of this kind of drinking had damaged the sponsee's friend's health pretty badly, as one would imagine -- serious trouble with both the liver and the pancreas.  And so... the friend died.  The friend was 37.

No tears from my sponsee.  They weren't best friends, as tight as they had once been.  No tears from me.  I don't mean to strike a tough guy pose, but this is hardly the first of these stories that I've heard -- let alone been a part of.

So my sponsee and I opened the book, and started reading "More About Alcoholism."  Not the first time for either of us, actually.

He's reading aloud, as is our routine, and he comes to this, in the first paragraph of the chapter, on pg. 30:

"The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker.  The persistence of this illusion is astonishing.  Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death."

He stopped reading and we just looked at each other for a long minute.

Then he went back to reading, and we carried on.

Man, I don't want to write this one...

No, really. I don't want to write this one.

You know, there's a part in the 'Doctor's Opinion' in the Big Book which says "There are many situations which arise out of the phenomenon of craving which cause men to make the supreme sacrifice rather than continue to fight."  Took me years to figure out what that was saying.

'The Doctor's Opinion' is in the very beginning of the Big Book, after the Forewards, and it was written by Dr. Silkworth, who worked at Towns Hospital where Bill Wilson would be admitted to dry out.  Dr. Silkworth was very conversant with alcoholism, as he'd specialized in the field for a long time. It was Dr. Silkworth who introduced the idea to Bill that an alcoholic's body (brain) has a physical reaction to alcohol unique to the alcoholic -- that is, an "allergic reaction," as they put it then. This used to confuse me, since when you said "allergy" or "allergic reaction" to me I thought in terms like, oh, someone gets stung by a bee and their throat swells shut, or they eat strawberries and break out in hives, or like nowadays, the kids eat peanuts and they go into anaphylactic shock (how overnight what seems like half the kids in America became allergic to peanuts is a topic of discussion for a better blogger than I, I'm afraid). But the allergic reaction that Dr. Silkworth was talking about they termed "the phenomenon of craving." When I, as an alcoholic, start drinking alcohol, the drive to drink is not just a mental desire, it is an actual physical craving, was their theory -- and the experience of most alcoholics and drug addicts (backed up by the research done in recent years examining dopamine and serotonin levels and such in the brain) pretty much supports that idea. One component in the disease of alcoholism -- or the 'theory' of the disease, if you're an argumentative sort -- is that there is a physical element to it.

So in the passage where Dr. Silkworth talks about 'the supreme sacrifice,' I believe what he's saying is that there are times when fighting the craving to use is too much for some people, and they take their lives rather than continue to struggle with using and/or relapse.

I'm stalling. I'm nattering on about Dr. Silkworth and the phenomenon of craving because I don't want to write about H.

A couple of hours ago I was sitting at my computer, where you can often find me. Ostensibly I was writing, but actually I was playing "City of Heroes," my most recent addiction. (No, not everything is an addiction for God's sake. I just like it a lot. A Lot.) Right now it's just me and the cat, and she won't narc me out for playing when I should be writing. Well, she would if she could, she's really not a very nice cat... I'm stalling again.

So I was sitting here, and D. called. I've been sponsoring him for a while now. He had relapsed about a year ago after having a good amount of time sober, and he's really back on track and doing great, imho. But he was pretty sad/freaked. He told me that H. had killed himself.

Now let me interrupt myself right here to say something. A cynic might think this is a pretty melodramatic story. It fits nicely into the overall direction of this blog, and isn't that handy.  Well, let me just say, I wish I was making this up. It would be a much better state of affairs if the facts were that I was a big effing phony, spinning some bullshit melodramatic tale of relapse and suicide to puff up my damn blog rather than the truth -- which is that a really nice guy, only 29 years old, who'd been in and out of AA for about the past ten years, decided to kill himself last night.

Now, I have to tell you, I find it repugnant in AA when people use stories about suicide to make tidy homilies about staying in Meetings and staying sober.  Suicide is not a simplistic thing.  So, no cautionary tale here, where I wag my finger at you and trade on H.'s tragic decision to add gravity and drama to what I'm writing. Instead, how about just the facts, as I personally know them to be true:

Smart, funny, nice, articulate, good looking kid. (I always thought of him as a kid, he had that boyish thing going on.) 29 years old. In and out of AA for about ten years. I first met him when he was maybe 19 or 20. He'd hit bottom pretty hard and got sober. After about a year he got a good job, started taking some classes at school, and got kind of busy -- as I remember him sharing it later on when he spoke about that time in his life, a little too busy for AA Meetings. Eventually he relapsed, and that became his pattern for the last ten years give or take. Maybe about a year or so ago I heard him speak at my regular Saturday night meeting. At that time he'd just gotten a year sober again. I have to say, to me he sounded really great, then. Seemed like he'd turned a corner.  I won't try to quote him exactly, my memory is not that good and that would be a cheap stunt, but I recall that to me he sounded like he really had some insight into some of what drove his relapse cycle. He and I were not too much more than acquaintances, really.  Friends in the way that AA allows you to be, which is to say we had both the 'ism' and the solution in common, and saw each other on and off at meetings, and occasionally around town, but we didn't really hang out together. We'd stop and say hi, catch up a bit, and go on our ways.

And last night, apparently he decided that continuing to live was too much for him, and alone in his apartment he put a plastic bag over his head and took his own life.  I include that detail not to shock, but to clarify. Because for all the petty dramas and bullshit high school dynamics that can occur in AA Meetings, for all the mixed motives of some recovery centers, the vulgar vaudeville of celebrities in rehab on reality TV, the pop stars falling out of limos, or what have you, what Dr. Silkworth wrote in the mid 1930's is as true today as it was then. There are many situations that arise out of the phenomenon of craving which cause men to make the supreme sacrifice rather than continue to fight.  I don't know what situations H. felt he was in that made the supreme sacrifice what he thought he needed to do. What I do know is that while he may (or may not) have had other issues operating, if you are struggling with relapse your thinking is not clear, and you don't see all of the choices you have before you, until maybe you think you really only have one choice left.

So regardless of what you think of AA, or the 12 Steps, or addiction, or recovery ... this really and truly is a life or death issue.  A disease that kills.  It will likely not list "alcoholism" as H.'s cause of death. And again, I will not presume to simplify his tragedy for the sake of making a point .  But while alcoholism may not have been the only factor driving him -- God knows, I saw him over the past ten years struggle and struggle with it -- if it was not the only factor driving him, in my observation it was certainly a pretty powerful one.

And finally, it seems to me, after hearing a lot of shares and stories over a lot of years, although it sounds like superstitious tripe, if you have alcoholism it really is trying to kill you. And given the chance, it really will.