OKaysez

 

Made A Decision


(96)


                                                 The Grim Reaper and AA

     The longer we are in AA the more funerals we will attend of those who relapsed and died of our chronic, terminal illness, or of its side effect, suicide.

That's a fact.

And it never gets any easier for those of us who knew and loved them, in or out of the fellowship.

Many of us also have still-drinking friends and relatives. Some make it into recovery. Most do not.

That's also a fact.

So how do we handle their deaths when we get that horrible news?

We do what one of my dearest AA friends, a woman with long-term sobriety, is doing right now following the death of her brother:

She called her sponsor and they cried together.
She took her pain to her home group.
She's praying for him.
She has prayed for his very-emotionally ill ex-wife and for her own strength in having to deal with her right now.
She's examined her feelings of guilt and loss to see if any applied to her.
She is accepting the loss while struggling to release the guilt we all feel after the shock of such news. Her mind has raced down many corridors of self-recriminations, but her heart knows there truly is nothing she hadn't done in trying to help her brother overcome his addiction. 

He had all the information. He chose not to use it.

The end product of that kind of self-examination in the wake of tragedy is acceptance. 

And all the above is what we mean when we say someone is "working the program."

Our program works to keep us sober through all of life's events - when we continually work it.

It is said that: "Grief is love with nowhere to go." 

 We have somewhere to go.
We go to meetings. We go to our sponsor and AA friends. We share.

Pain shared is pain halved.

Suicide is the end result for many caught in a drinking life. Depression, caused by daily consuming a liquid depressive, dogs their heels. Alcohol literally inflames and swells the brain, so drunks make decisions while "thinking" through a swollen brain. They are NOT thinking clearly when they conclude the world would be better off without them. They have no solution for their life's problems other than choosing that permanent solution for essentially temporary problems. 

Alcoholism is the villain here. They are not at fault.
Nor are we who loved them.

Sometimes our friends still inside the rooms of AA chose suicide over staying sober, too. 

Perhaps they suffered "problems other than alcohol" (30 to 50 percent of us do) after the depression they thought would lift in sobriety dug in its heels instead. Long-term drinking is linked to a range of mental health issues, from depression and memory loss, to suicide.

Chronic depression can sap anyone's will to live. Many of us used alcohol to self-medicate against it, unaware booze is itself a depressant. (With the exception of tequila, which appears to work as a stimulant, but few if any of us were exclusively tequila drinkers.)

A few years into my own sobriety, after a series of deaths and other major life losses dropped me into what felt like a bottomless black hole, suicide looked more and more like a viable option. Depression is a killer and drunks suffer from it more than most people. 

(Scientists say people suffering depression are roughly three times more likely to be alcohol dependent than the rest of the population.)

Luckily for me (and for those who love me) I had the fellowship of AA to get me through that dark time, even though I didn't then appreciate those who tried their best to help. I went from wallowing in self pity to drowning in it, too stuck in my grief, anger and self-will to see that others were incredibly worried about me. That's because, as our AA literature tells us, our disease is also one of perception.

My turning point came when, after sitting through a meeting feeling nothing but rage, I didn't even stay for the closing prayer. It was the dead of an Irish winter, but I felt no cold with all that anger burning inside me. I was still in that horrible head space the following morning when from my window I saw a group member walking through the falling snow toward my house. 

I knew the woman lived a good two miles up the road, so her visit - unwelcome as it was - required at least the courtesy of my answering the door. When I did, my visitor smiled and handed me a bunch of daffodils still tightly in bud.

"There are for you," she said, "To remind you that even after the darkest winter, spring always arrives. By the time these are in full bloom, I've prayed you'll be feeling good again."

I don't easily give in to tears, but that morning the darkness inside me broke and ran wetly down my face. Because my plan for that afternoon had been to walk to the nearby train station and artfully "accidentally" fall in front of a train.  She - literally - saved my life that morning.

So do I know the power of AA friendships?
Yes.

Do I value them?
Yes.

Do I wish everyone exposed to AA would "be fearless and thorough from the very start" and embrace this program fully?
A thousand times yes.

But they often don't.

My friend mourning her brother today has lived as a sober example for him for decades. He couldn't, or wouldn't, try sobriety for himself. 

There have been other similar losses this week in my own small group of AA connections. Worldwide there have certainly been many more.

We all hear about riding the pink cloud in recovery, where we float happily above the cares of the world, held aloft by our program and our AA friendships. It's a wonderful place to be and learning to climb back on after we inevitably "fall off the pink cloud and hit the pink concrete" is part of our work in recovery.

Recovery IS wonderful, but learning to live life on life's terms - and God's terms - means there will be "lessons" involved, lessons needed for our continued spiritual growth. Some of those lessons can get pretty harsh. My Higher Power doesn't flinch from Tough Love when it's needed, and nor, I'm sure, does yours.

I hope your recovery is always filled with light and love. But should you ever get to a dark place in sobriety, force yourself to keep going to meetings, keep sharing, keep expecting the miracle of recovery to grab hold of you again - because it will. As we old hippies used to say - "Keep the Faith, Baby."

And as AA oldtimers always say: "Keep on doing the doing.

 It (always) works when we work it!"