She had a golden glow which drew your notice first when she spoke. And then you noted the slow careful speech of someone who was not quite sure how the sound would actually come out had she let her free will have its way.
The glow was not a healthy one, as one would expect of anyone in such an institution. She had been admitted only a day before and her speech still bore the affect of the residual alcohol as the glow revealed the ravages of the poison on her body; that sickly golden “tan” of the chronic alcoholic, acquired after years of many-downed drinks insulting and assaulting her liver.
And now, having given up this round of the fight and admitted herself to this detox unit, she sat there glumly telling those of us sitting in this circle, how she arrived at this point in her life, this evening, at this meeting, mumbling her pitiful story.
“I was not always a drinker; in fact I hadn’t started to drink heavily until ten years ago, and I cannot remember why I started. But when I did, I did so with intensity and singleness of purpose. I drank until my parents wouldn’t speak to me or even let me back into the house. I got so bad that about a year ago I wound up at a psychiatric hospital in New York and then was sent to an AA rehab in Northwest CT. After that I spent six months in a sober house in Ableville.
"But I had to go to a family function and on the way back to NYC I knew I would drink. I don’t remember how I wound up back at that psychiatric hospital and then another sober house but that one was really classy; a nineteenth century restoration with a library and a swimming pool and it is there that I truly got sober.
"I went to AA meetings and took on commitments and stayed sober for eighteen months and all was going so well. Everything was great. And then I went to another family meeting but I never got there because I “knew” I was going to drink on the train ride down there. And here I am.”
I had begun the meeting with my typical (mild) harangue that people get sober because they want to. They choose life over death. They choose the work of sobriety over the laziness of going back to drink and excuses for not choosing an alternative means of avoiding those people places and things that drive one to drink in the first place.
And here we were again, the same story.
“I guess I’m just not doing something right”, she whined.
And as I listened to the slow slurring of her speech I realized that it would be pointless to engage her in any meaningful discussion of the true nature of why she “went out”, her motives, her “choice” to dismiss using the tools that she presumably had developed over eighteen months during her previous sobriety… just to drink again. And we in the rooms know that she “chose” to drink because she “knew” she was going to pick up before she actually did and did nothing to avoid it.
This is the kind of behavior that sends me ballistic. It is chocked full of all of the excuses for behaviors so characteristic of drunks, self pity, self centeredness, self delusion, denial, and on and on. It is the type of behavior that I have excoriated, lambasted and castigated in the past; if not particular people then to the room in general at that sort of behavior in general. And I have been likewise berated by the audience for being unsympathetic, cold, haughty and superior for holding opinions of these as “failures”.
What these personal criticisms left out was that these “failures” frightened me. What the others in the rooms do not see is that I hold these same weaknesses which for some selfish reason, or anger, fear, retribution, or a behavior to strike back at another by drinking “at” them, seem like an appropriate behavior when it is really not. Realizing all the time that the only person that I could possibly hurt would be myself, and that is who I exactly am aiming my gun at.
But instead of acknowledging this shared behavior in a sympathetic way, I get angry, eager to ignore all the evidence that people like this woman and I have a thought disorder which does not permit straight thinking all the time. Actually, straight thinking at any time for me and those of our ilk, is a rather tenuous affair. And to blame her for the disease that she has, (that I have), would be like blaming the victim of a tsunami for the wreckage of his home.
But how do I square that with the notion of responsibility in recovery?
When we finally admit we are alcoholics, we finally accept the fact of alcoholism and that we must stand ready to do anything to become and remain sober. Having done that, we then pledge ourselves to a plan of rehabilitating the way we think, the way we behave, conduct our affairs, run our day to day lives, who we associate with, where we go and how we go about doing these things. And if we are successful, we have come up with a plan for living.
So my sympathy for the alcoholic presents itself in works, commitments to bring the message of sobriety and all of the techniques to remain sober through the offices of the society of Alcoholics Anonymous. The sympathy and empathy are integral to helping those who want to get sober. And once sober, I have a responsibility to help others to get and remain sober as well as to maintain my own sobriety.
My sympathy and empathy for those who slip in their program should be to try to return them to the program, not to feel sorrow or pity for them, and not necessarily to help them to dig a deeper hole for themselves with handouts of money and shovels full of kindness that will be blithely ignored because the drunk is in no shape to reciprocate. It is almost a squandered effort and most assuredly will be ignored again and again for those who do not want to return to the fold to try harder once more.
So I had very little to suggest to this woman tonight. Her story sounded like she was yet on the merry-go-round and would not be coming off any time soon. For her there were too many rides left in the amusement park.
Still, there were three other gentlemen awaiting the results of their liver tests, each expecting to hear bad news, each resigned to drastically foreshortened life spans. Yet each seemed willing, when asked, to “do anything” to stay sober, for they had hit their bottoms. But they had determined that they wanted to live out the remainder of their lives awake and aware of the world around them. And their skins all had that rather gray hue to it, the kind that hangs on unhealthy looking people before attaining death or achieving recovery.
Yet our woman had that golden glow, which hovered somewhere between liver overload or failure. And that face that shined like a golden apple in the sun looked like it had not yet seen death up close.
© res 6/8/2011
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