HOW WE LIVE

HOW WE LIVE

How we live is as important as how we die.  How we live in the face of death in particular is as important as how we die that death.

This quandary of being confronted with death was the topic of discussion at our men’s meeting this morning since one of our members  was facing this very problem when his sister called him up this week and delivered the  news of her impending demise.

He was shocked. He was speechless and unbelieving. He wanted to scream at the injustice of his younger sister having to die before him – receiving a sentence from her physician that she had but a year to live.  And since he was the closest sibling to her it fell to him to tell the remainder of the nine sibling family the news; not because he was the eldest but because of their special relationship and because it had taken all of her emotional reserves just to tell him and now  her emotional account was depleted.

What reserves remained she needed to carry her through this ordeal for herself and her family.

The topic of terminal illness and its corollaries of life and death have been salient ideas that have occupied me over the past week. In my day to day existence I do not typically dwell upon these matters.  It is only when confronted by the story of a peer who has to deal with the consequences or the sudden   intrusion into my life of a relative or friend who is ill or dying or suddenly dead that it comes, unbidden  to make its claim upon my consciousness.

 But it has forced its  attentions upon me this past week and I have resented it not because I am afraid of the feelings but because, like the rock that gets thrown into a still pool of water, it creates ripples in my serenity. As long as the irritant remains, its ripples disturb my placidity.  Not to mention that in many cases I am called upon to be an actor to help resolve many of the issues that involve the people affected by these  turns of events.

People, suddenly confronted by their own mortality, mulling through the process of grieving, feeling like  deer frozen in the headlights, and then being forced to get their act together in order to save their own lives. 

And if you are an alcoholic, you are tempted to just sit back and pity yourself and let your sobriety fall by the wayside and say that you don’t really need it anymore. If your higher power has dealt you a deathblow, why fight it? You can drink now. Who is going to care… after all, dead is dead. Whether you die sober or not will not have any effect upon the outcome.

But then I heard the plainsong of E. to whom I have been listening for the past eight months and today who, for the first time,  gasped in desperation that she finally had to admit that her life was unmanageable.  A woman who has that unhealthy “glow” that you see in people who have been drinking so long that their skin carries a pigmentation that almost looks like a tan.

When I mentioned it to her three or four months ago she said it was tanning oil to give an artificial tan.  Frankly I did not want to comment that a product that would give a person that kind of sheen should be quickly removed from the market.

But people hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest, and despite the urging that she should perhaps have her physician check her liver enzymes my concern was greeted with a polite not to worry type of put off. The kind you get when you know that your concern and suggestions are not taken seriously because the person does not take their own condition seriously. Yet…

Folks like her hover on the periphery of AA meetings coming and going not wanting to admit they are alcoholic but not willing to fully dive back into that abattoir that is grinding up their  body and soul every day and week that they continue to drink.

So today her life was finally unmanageable as manifested by the fact that her family has asked her to decamp from one of the many apartments that they own because they find her an unworthy tenant. One has to have a pretty fertile imagination, even for an alcoholic to conjure up how that scenario came about. But we alcoholics sure do know how to distance ourselves from our families, friends and associates.

We know.  We have been there.  We know how that desperation feels! And E. was defiant in saying that she had thirty days without drinking and she was not going to drink because of this.  She couldn’t drink;  she just had to stay sober to keep her life from getting more unmanageable. (She did frame it in the negative. She did not say that she needed to help keep her life more manageable!)

And after this litany of woes she said “But I still don’t think I’m an alcoholic”.

Plunk!...

Beat … Beat… Beat…

And then the moderator of the meeting took a long pause as if stunned by a blow to the gut. But he took a breath and then went on to the next topic of discussion.

What more was there to say?  For after nearly a year of coming and going in and out of the rooms with life clearly not getting any better, her drinking clearly getting worse and worse she finally came to admit that her life was unmanageable.  That is the second part of step one but  she fails to see that her life is unmanageable because “she is powerless over alcohol”. Why else would she be attending an AA meeting coming week in week out? (But that she is still not an alcoholic?!)

And I say this in full knowledge that I maintained the same thing for years myself not even getting the idea that my life was unmanageable. I was more willing to admit that I had a problem controlling my drinking than believe that it was causing my life to be unmanageable! Because if I admitted that, then that would mean I could never drink again because that would mean I was an alcoholic and alcoholics could not control their intake of alcohol because IT MADE THEIR LIVES UNMANAGEABLE! Whew!

What a concept! But it took me years. And here I am taking, what we call in AA, “somebody else’s inventory” meaning judging someone else’s faults rather than look at your own. Why? For two reasons, one, it is less painful to look at others’ faults and difficulties. And two, it is easier to see other people’s faults than your own.

Just as it is easier for your sponsor to help you with your problems than for you to see the solutions to your problems yourself so it is easier for you to see the fault lines in the geography of others’ personalities.

So for the new comer one has to sometimes “fake it ‘till you make it”. You go through the motions of the program until just by repetition you begin to make sense of it.  You pray even if the prayers don’t make sense nor have meaning to you. With time they may. Why would that be?

The act of prayer, kneeling or prostration is an attitude of humbling and humility. Especially for the person who is not used to doing it. Humiliating for someone not brought up in that tradition, for sure, but not without precedent if one scours his memory.

(I, for instance, baulked and said that Jews did not kneel in prayer. But on further thought, I would remember that on the high holidays the rabbi and the chazzan would indeed kneel at the climax of prayer on Yom Kippur. The time when prostration is indeed the time to show the greatest humility before the will of “the Lord”.

So if one needed precedent within one’s tradition, even the most Orthodox Jew would have no trouble in prayer. But of course an Orthodox Jew would not.  Only the secular Jew would have an “intellectual” aversion to getting on his knees and praying. And finding then that it isn’t in the “Jewish tradition” to do so. But that, of course, is a false finding.)

And when faked discomfiture turns into familiar comfort, then that is the beginning of humility. And you can start to begin to live a life differently than you were than when you were drinking and perhaps drugging.

The steps show us that there is a way to live a life filled with joy and love; filled with peace, less drama and lots of beauty if we allow it in. But we have to make the effort.  The effort is living a life of the twelve steps.  Admitting that we are sick and we need help. Admitting that we need to clean up our act. Facing up to those acts. Asking others to understand that we apologize for those acts and we take responsibility for them as we will try to make amends to the best of our ability. We then try to carry this message of self reliance, self respect, responsibility and personal faith to others and especially other alcoholics and that this can be done with the help of AA and the spiritual help of a higher power. And through this you can find a peace in this life that you had heretofore not been privy to while under the influence of the drink.

But all this could change in the face of life threatening disease if we should lose our faith in the goodness of that very life. But if we have worked our program well we will finally understand that even at life’s end, there is nothing in this life that a drink is going to make better; but it most assuredly will make things worse.

We think that we can die deaths of dignity but those dignified deaths are best served by having lived lives with serenity and dignity and goodness. Then the dignified death is practically a given.

© res 10/31/11

Post Script

Alcoholism is such a selfish disease that it would push the most thoughtful person to turn inward to self destructive  acts. When we receive bad news we act out by turning that news upon us and lashing out at the closest agent to express our hurt and anger. And that agent is usually ourselves. So when we are unhappy we drink to drown our unhappiness, drink for oblivion, to self destruct; to dull, dumb down and to numb.

Which is where I would ‘normally’ have gone had I not been practicing my program. At my professional meeting tonight I received the news that a colleague, about seven years my junior had died of renal cell cancer. One day he has a pain in his neck and then three months later he is dead.

And ‘normally’ I would turn his misfortune into a reason to pity myself for no other reason than to think the worst that life had to offer me and so I therefore will hasten the day when this would be true for me. Where is the sense of that? And what, by the way, is ‘normal’ in that thinking?

So it is a terrible thing that happened to Dr. T.. But it happened to him, not me. And tonight I will celebrate his life and his deeds for all the good that there was in it and not dwell on the reality that I cannot change. That is a fruitless endeavor and it ill serves the memory of T. by making his death all about me and not about his life and how he lived.

© res 11/1/11