NEW MAN

NEW MAN

One of the preliminary formalities of an AA meeting is to ask if there is anyone new to AA or to that particular meeting.  Homer raised his hand and admitted that today was his first day sober. This usually brings a hearty round of applause and today was no different; but Homer was no spring chicken and for today's meeting it seemed like a qualification was a minimum age of forty.  So the applause was warm, deep felt and sincere. And it was surprising how for the remainder of the meeting this was to set the tone for how people would shape the tenor of their sharing.

We don't always come in on wings of Angels. Kicking and screaming for me was my path as I recall. I was not a happy camper and the first time I came into AA it was under threat of a divorce. So were the second and third times. The final attempt was much more serious and it had to do with health, life and death.  I had a craving for life so I had to finally want to give up the fight to have everything my way and compromise with life's exigencies.

Today this was a theme that was repeated over and over again.

Charles, a man I had not seen before, told a story of things that I had seen as a physician but chilled me to the core since he is the only person who I have seen to live to speak about them. All my patients are dead. Of course, I saw them twenty years ago when we did not have the techniques to keep people alive as they do today.

But Charles drank until people stopped wanting to be around him. But that didn't stop him from drinking. He then noticed that his liver was getting large and his doctors said that he had to stop. So he stopped for a few months and slowly the liver recovered; but he returned to drinking - again hard.  Still refused AA - not for him - he thought AA was for losers.

Then he noticed that his eyes were getting dark yellow, his skin developed spider angiomas and he bruised easily, his palms got blood blisters, his belly swelled to four times normal size and he had to go into the hospital and get twelve liters of fluid tapped from his abdomen.

His liver was a mess, his doctors told him he would die if he kept up this pace.  He said he would stop. He didn't. He just kept drinking until one day he vomited blood and he had to have the esophageal varices sclerosed through an endoscope. But even as the varices were healing Charles was sipping his vodka. Until all hell broke loose and all of the bursting varices almost caused him to bleed out. Twenty units of blood later and there was little change.

Even then that wasn't the end of the descent into this personal hell but it gets dreary even for those of us who have been battle scarred either by profession or by avocation. I got exhausted listening to him and wondered why he wasn't dead and frankly just how long he had to live given what I know about the level of permanent damage he must have caused and yet remains even as he has sobered up.

Yet Charles seemed grateful that he had finally arrived at this meeting on this day to tell his story to this new arrival to let him know about the "yets" that were waiting for him, if he thought that he had not had fallen as badly as some folks in the program and that perhaps he might not be an alcoholic.

Jasper confessed that he was 50 years old and first came into the program at age twenty six. Yet he was today only 15 years sober and that was because he thought he could get sober his way.  First he had gone to rehab and read the big book in one and a half days and finished the twelve steps in four days. And it was only 48 hours after leaving that rehab facility before he was making his next score thinking what losers all of us suckers were!

 

Behind all of this was the haunting specter of his industrialist father, captain of industry who drank most of his life and it never got out of hand. Why couldn't he drink that way? And yet, and yet...

And yet there was Martin whom I have never met before but who shared that he goes to a meeting in another town off and on, and in between the off and the on he was informed that one of the members who had been a struggling chef who had been coming in and out of the program first succeeding and then getting off the beam, had died.

Committed suicide.

Shot himself.

Could not get his act together and in desperation shot himself.

His mother had come to the group to ask to address them for just ten minutes to let them know that he had spoken very highly of the group, that they had kept him as sane and as sober as possible during his struggle. But that he, in his meticulous fashion, had bought a shotgun and rented a room in one of the ritziest hotels in Manhattan and took his life.

His mother took this to mean that she thought that he did not want any of the family to have to clean up after him and he was so fastidious that way.

Mel nodded concurring " Yes, I know that for myself, I'd rather that people know that I died  than that they know the person that I was when I was alive."

"Mad, sick"! said Ed, whose army days in the seventies  allowed him to see any number of suicides from drugs, alcohol and officer fragging. It was a time of madness and his only solace became the trees, the river and the earth.

"You may call me crazy for speaking to the trees and the river, but no crazier than holing up in the Ritz Carlton or other fancy hotel and shooting myself because I couldn't or wouldn't get sober. When you don't have a higher power to turn to you think you can solve the problem yourself. And that kind of solution does not seem helpful to me!"

Ralph then talked about gentler pleasures, those that are the gifts of the program if you pay attention once you have discarded the detritus of the past.  He said that his wife had been complaining that their sons never call, to which Ralph suggested that sons never call parents, sons being naturally wayward with low expectations of continued family connection. But his secret fear was that they did not call because of his early alcoholism and their recollection of it. 

But to his surprise about a half hour after the comment, his son did call and the conversation maundered for hours into the night like a normal family discourse about normal familial "palaverables". No hint of any antipathy. He punishes himself in his head more than his children ever can remember to do. Why? Because he is the alcoholic, not them.

So if Homer felt as if in entering the room today he was approaching Hades, the conversation certainly had a stygian tinge to it. But it is better that he should hear the worst now. He knows that what got him his ticket to the room this morning was not his stellar display of citizenship. So what he heard either confirmed his determination that he was in the right place or convinced him that he needed to do some more 'better living through chemistry'.

I hope that he does not have to cross this river before he has witnessed the best things that life has to give.

 

© res 9/1/2012