Sometimes meetings can be really scarey. Take today’s meeting. It was not about alcohol or the solution. It was about a woman and her son. She brought up the topic. The worst thing was that almost everyone in the room seemed to know something about parenting. It’s like the topic of relationships. And we know just how much alcoholics know about that subject. Yet we persist and insist that we know just what to do.
But that really wasn’t the worst thing. There was a new man there, as well as one man I knew, who had recently come back. No one was talking about the best thing; that there was a solution to their problem. It was like no one in that room had come there to learn how to stay sober and help another alcoholic to try to achieve sobriety.
What is it about us that we try to avoid a subject, which can sometimes be painful? It must not be easy for us to come in day after day and talk about and remind each other about the truth of our situation. We sometimes want to avoid what is most important to us; that if we drink again we just might die. Or, at the very least, go insane.
I once had a twelfth step call to a man, who was still drinking. We walked into the apartment, where he and his mother lived, and found him sitting with a pail between his legs. He had a full bottle of whiskey, which he drank from and then would puke into the bucket and take another swallow. We asked where he had gotten the bottle and the mother said that she had bought it for him. She said she couldn’t stand to see him cry, when he had nothing to drink. So she would go down to the liquor store and buy him two bottles at a time.
We took the man to the hospital, where they detoxed him. He’d bounce back like nothing had happened. He looked healthier than my partner and myself and we had been sober a number of years. Then he’d return home and go back to the same routine. Him drinking and puking and his mother supplying him with the necessary whiskey. We tried to help him a number of times. Taking him to the hospital and then to meetings. But it would always end up the same. One day we had to go to a mental institution and talk to him. This happened a number of times, until one day we went and he couldn’t respond to us. The last time I saw or knew of him, he was a permanent resident. The bounce back was gone. His eyes were vacant and he sat his mouth moving in a reflex of tasting what wasn’t there. That was my last sight of him. His mother so loved him that she loved him into insanity.
It’s good to go to meetings. There’s a lot of give and take before and after the meetings. It’s nice. But at the meeting, I hear things I need to hear to remind me that I never have to go to where John (the man’s name) went.
I thouight about John during the “meeting”. I was glad I did. I was always sad about what had happened to him, but I knew he was in the grip of a powerful urge that had overwhelmed him. It had deafened his ears. It had blanked out any information given to him, which could have brought him back to life. It had left him a hollow man, sitting in the halls of a locked ward, dead to all that is life and its possibilities. I could have been that man. I came very close. Right up to the edge. Only God and the program rescued me. That is why, at the very end of the meeting, I raised my hand and said that I had come to get sober. That this was about alcohol and the solution…some heard me and said so. I needed to express my gratitude.
__________________________________________________
http://mail.yahoo.com