CLOSER THAN EVER

CLOSER THAN EVER

It didn't get any better as I had hoped it would after attending my fourth AA meeting in two days.

After the massacre in Newtown, CT^* Friday, I knew that I would be attending more than my usual fill of AA meetings around town to quiet my inordinately agitated mind. I was in shock and my usual cynicism was entirely inadequate to the task of fending off the onslaught of unwanted emotion from the event.

My daughter had been in town for an appointment and as she returned it had come on the news and its direness struck us both to the point of speechless stupor. We were dumbstruck in disbelief.  The insanity that seemed to infect the rest of the country had finally come home to roost in the bedroom communities of Connecticut.

But how close it had come had not registered until my wife returned from work and she mentioned that one of her colleagues had a daughter at the Sandy Hook Elementary School who was in the kindergarten class next to the one in which the children had been slaughtered. And moreover, she had known one of the children who was killed!

Then yesterday morning I went to a men's meeting where one of my friends reported that the wife of his employee was the psychologist at the school who was killed trying to stop the gunman.

At this morning's meeting another friend mentioned that his son had a playmate who was killed in the incident; and this afternoon I returned from a meeting at which the chairwoman told us that one of the little girls who used to take riding lessons at her stable was one of the victims and another guy was telling us of another young boy whom he knew who was also killed.

Jack, who was telling us about that young boy, was saying about how his son and his friends were asking questions that you would never have thought would be asked like:

What are they going to do with their beds? and, What are they going to do with the Christmas presents that the parents bought for the kids that were killed?

Innocent but pathetic questions and, no doubt, probably, the same questions the adults are asking themselves between beating themselves up for reasons they have no good reason to be beating themselves up for.

When Mary Beth opened the meeting, she said that although it was a meeting about Step Four, it was clear there was no way that this meeting was going to pass without mentioning the dreadful events of the past several days. And she went on to tell us how she supervises horseback riding lessons for these little kids and how one of them was due for a lesson this morning until they realized that she was one of the kindergarteners who was killed on Friday.

And she broke down in tears.

This event has made many things clear to me in my evolving sobriety and about what things used to be like.  And I know why I drank so much. It was to avoid all of this pain. I know that in the past during events like these I would have been plenty sarcastic about all of the people who acted so devastated about all of the children who were killed and how they took the situation to heart.

My attitude would have been to say "buck up"! "Suck it up! People out there are crazy, you can't predict these things and you've got to pick yourself up and move on!"

I'm now thinking that how can anyone be anything but paralyzed?  How can anyone think of anything but death, doom and destruction? How can anyone who has their lives invested in their children even think of moving on? But then I think, how else can one move but on? What else can one do? Nothing else will serve. Standing still, howling at the wind, taking up arms, taking up drink, nothing else will make anything better...really.

Just to be able to feel the pain and seek relief in the comfort of others, I never believed that having that available would be of any use to me. But I was wrong. I now wonder what do people do who don't have groups like I have in AA to spill their grief at? How do they manage to cope? The pain they must go through! And the loneliness!  

If there is anything that these past few days has taught me it is how closely we are connected to each other. People with whom I scarcely have any relationship I find are but two handshakes from me and to this sorry event.  

I used to believe that there were greater distances between me and the rest of the world; which is to say that I wanted to believe that was the case. But if distance and time become practically meaningless how can I face down such reality? That was the case when Stephen Jay Gould, (noted Harvard Paleobiologist), realized that he was but three handshakes away from Charles Darwin.

And when I thought that the shootings in Portland, Oregon had separated me in space I had to remind myself that my wife's best friend lives close to that mall and could have been a victim there.

So escape into alcohol is no longer an option, and, of course, its value as an alternative to dealing with reality is, as it always was, tenuous.  A drink never made any situation better, and surely in these circumstances a drink for me is no solution to the pain of the reality.

The President just said in a memorial speech for the victims, that in the end, all we have is the love we have for our children and each other. The material success and wealth is but a pale shadow of what is real and important in this world.  And if we cannot protect what is most important in this world, then all we have is a pale shadow. And a pale memory.

My pride and progress is that I am here to be able to feel today and mourn for those who lost their loved ones.  I would rather have been able to celebrate their greatest fortune. But that was not to be.

But for me to be able to be here, in the moment, at the ready, to help and be of service, if needed, is what I can do today.

And feel.

©  res 12/16/2012

rev: 12/25/2012

^{*Shooting of 20 kindergarteners and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012}