make an about-face, and follow the AA path with God and his people as my guides?
It was not a decision made lightly. I agonized over the emptiness of life without all my good drinking friends. Where would love and romance come from? Love and romance were important to me. Where would laughter and fun come from? Laughter and fun were important to me. God didn't like gaiety, I rationalized. God frowned on frivolity. The church of my parents had said so. Was I capable of living out my allotted time in solemn, somber sobriety?
My mind flooded with memories of the price I had always paid for the fleeting gaiety, the hollow laughter, the pseudo loves. I made the decision. “Okay, God. You win. It's AA all the way—starting tomorrow.”
That's the way it was. The decision, I mean.
I pulled anchor, steered my little boat landward, and never looked back at the tranquil spot, the tiny cove with its tree-filled shores, its quietness and majestic calmness.
Heading to the nearest bar to celebrate my decision, I drank the rest of the day, while driving back to my home in Northern Indiana.
The next morning, June 9, 1961, there was a note of finality to that hangover. I had drained the last dregs from the cup. I had had enough. It was finished.
That was thirteen years ago, and each morning since that day, when I have awakened, I have had the feeling “I have had enough.”
Let me tell you about my mornings now. Upon awakening, I take my cup of coffee to the patio of our small, pink house nestled under great oaks and hickory trees along the shoreline of a tranquil cove on a picturesque lake in Illinois. Soon, my husband joins me. My husband—the first boy I ever loved, the idol of my high-school days, returned to me through the divine grace of the Higher Power I came to know through a program of Steps to recovery. We have our morning prayers and meditation in harmony with the birds and God's little critters scampering about.
My gaze fixes on a spot out in the cove. I see a woman in a small boat. I feel again her loneliness, her fears and frustrations. I hurt for her; but there is a sweetness to the pain, the sweetness of gratitude, for she lives only in my memories. May she always abide there. I have gone full circle, returning now to the exact location where I made the weighty decision that changed my life.
I write now to that new woman—and to any woman new in our Fellowship today. That lonely, fearful woman, who cannot envision life without alcohol and all the familiar ramifications of a drinker's life. Thirteen years ago, forty years old, twice divorced, all I could see stretching ahead was an empty path for me to trudge alone.
Go to work; come home; meet the family's needs; go to AA meetings alone; come home alone; go to bed alone. Do the best I could about an inventory of self. Relate the sordid details of a seemingly wasted life to another human being. Make humble petitions for forgiveness to those I had harmed. Each morning, day after day after day, ask the God of my limited understanding for his guidance “today.” Some days, almost hourly, renew the plea for his way in my life.
But, ever so slowly, I could feel myself changing. Things that had seemed important were no longer important. There was inside me a warming, a softening, a stirring, as the petals of a rosebud stir almost imperceptibly into a blossom.
You, too, can live, new woman—really live. There will be love and laughter and a delicious sense of well-being down deep inside if you will abandon yourself to the business of recovery—not just recovery from the disease of active alcoholism, but deeper than that, recovery from a former self. Such thorough recovery can be realized, I believe, only through the fearless application of spiritual principles to our daily lives.
I hear the katydids, the buzz of the locusts, and I am reminded of a passage I read about a man named Joel. The locusts had devastated his lands year after year, but God said to Joel, “I will restore to you the years the locusts have taken.”
My heart swells and tears of gratitude fill my eyes, for I, too, have had restored to me the years of the locusts, through a blessed Fellowship called AA.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a Fellowship of men and women who share. Thank you, Grapevine, for letting me share.
N. G.
Neoga, Illinois
Close Shave
December 1998
In the fall of 1971, I was on my usual holiday drunk. It was the kind where I appreciated being able to go to a bar and not feel uncomfortable because I was shaking and looked like warmed-over death. A simple statement to the barkeep—“I really hung one on last night”—was enough to get a little sympathy and a double Bloody Mary. After about six o'clock, I'd start to get the eye, and it would be time to leave, but I was all right now.
After upsetting Thanksgiving dinner for my beloved wife and beautiful little daughter, I promised I would go to the basement rec room and get myself straight and give them a good Christmas. I lay on the couch with my wine bottles to help me taper off and went out the back door once a day to get more wine and a fastfood dinner or such. Occasionally, my wife would stick her head down the stairs to see if I was still alive. After a couple of weeks of this, I started the usual process of not being able to sleep; I was shaking and puking. I tried drinking nothing but sherry wine very slowly and sipping warm beer but nothing would stay down. I knew if I could just get a little alcohol in my system I would stop hurting so much. Nothing seemed to work. As fast as it would go down it would come back up.
Sometime on the eighteenth of December, I apparently became psychotic and took a 32-caliber pistol and put a bullet into my right temple. It is probably the grace of God that I don't remember it, and an even greater grace that my wife and daughter were out doing some Christmas shopping. When they got home they found me with what appeared to be a scalp wound, so 911 was called. The exit wound was hidden by my thick hair. While in intensive care, the pressure in my head started building up and I was rushed to the operating room for emergency surgery. I was in a coma for almost a week. When my wife asked the doctor what the chances of my surviving were, he said I had a thirty percent chance—if I regained consciousness. When asked what the quality of my life would be, the doctors wouldn't even discuss it. I finally regained consciousness on Christmas Day.
For twenty-five years I've tried to find the words to express the emotional and physical pain that I felt that day. What does a drunk do when he hurts and wants a drink? I didn't have anyone I could call to bring me something to drink and I had no money. But my wife had left my shaving kit with a bottle of shaving lotion in it. Don't scoff unless you've tried it. Two fingers of shaving lotion and four fingers of water and it will make up milky white, and it will do the job. Next, I needed to figure out how to get some more. I decided I could break the shaving lotion bottle and then I'd be given another one. If you want to break a shaving lotion bottle, you'd better get a sledgehammer. I banged it on the metal side of the bed and on the floor until I was exhausted. Finally, in sheer disgust, I threw it on the floor with all my strength. It hit the floor, bounced up to the ceiling and come down on some metal hospital chairs. One big racket! Since I was directly across from the nurses' station, they all came running. “What happened?” Nothing, I just dropped my shaving lotion bottle.
Somehow, this is what it took for me to be reduced to the point of hopelessness and helplessness. In disgust and desperation I lay back on my pillow and cried into the darkness. “Lord God, if you are there, take this life of mine and run it.” I knew nobody could make a worse mess of it than me. This is probably the only time in my life that I've been totally devoid of any ego. As I lay there, I began to realize that every time I'd been in trouble I'd been drinking. Every time I'd wrecked a car, been in jail,
