A friend of mine from The Program has been watching her daughter suffer with her alcoholism. The younger woman has been coming to the meeting on and off for a while but not marshalling her reserves sufficiently to stay sober. She came back yesterday and I had a chance to talk to her after the meeting. She had a seizure. Her heart stopped. Ambulances came and got her internals working again. "I hit my bottom," she said. Whew and wow. The lengths we go to get ready to get sober . . .
I put a lot of effort into lightening the mood in my A.A. meetings. A common reaction from new people is surprise at the levity and lightness in The Rooms. No one walking into their first meeting feels light and levitated. We skulk in, ready to join the group of silent, grumbling old men in trench coats, the residue of the paper bags that once held their Mad Dog 20/20 still stuck on the soles of their shoes. It's hard enough to keep people sober and a dour group of pissed individuals wouldn't help. This is especially hard if you're young as so much of socializing revolves around establishments that serve alcohol. Some of us tentative people never developed the skill of talking to other people without some lubricating fluids.
So it's always a shock when someone dies or nearly dies or goes to prison or OD's on fentanyl. I forget that this is a deadly serious business at its core. There were a few instances in my drinking life where I came uncomfortably close to death. Sometimes at the wheel of a car and sometimes when I mixed the wrong combination of drugs and way too much alcohol. There are no bottles of medicine that say: "Yeah, we know the dose is one tablet but you can take eight of them and wash it down with a quart of Jim Beam. Seriously - you're good. ABSOLUTELY no problem."
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