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Saturday, March 5. 2011
Life, And Death
There was something else planned for this space today, something of import in the great struggle between the left and the right, but at the end of the day, all that’s really important in life are the relationships with the people in our lives.At one time there were eight brothers and sisters in our family, now there are only seven. Nearly five years ago my brother Carl passed on, finally succumbing to the heart disease that runs roughshod through our family. We all have it, the seven remaining: four brothers and three sisters. I love’em all.
Cheryl was just here in Sandy Eggo for a week, going to a conference at a hotel on Sandy Eggo Bay. Didn’t get to see her much, except for dinner last Saturday Night and then Thursday when she had I sat in the Kansas City BBQ, the place where the sleazy bar scenes for the film Top Gun were filmed.
Great food! Man, we were stuffed! For most of the time, about three hours, Cheryl and I talked — about everything and anything. Matters spiritual most prominently. She’s a great one for that topic. Lately I’ve been having “challenges” going to work every day. She and I discussed that from the spiritual angle and let me tell you, that was the most potent part of the day — aside from the awesome barbeque.
The food stuck with me for hours, I ate so much, but dammit! Those ribs were falling off the bone tender!
Putting a sign on my bedroom door that reads, “I Need the Money” wasn’t exactly a positive affirmation. And she was right. It’s been up there for a couple weeks now and only recently have I been making it to work on time every day.
How does showing up for work every day make me feel about myself? How do I think of myself when I do make it to work every day? That’s what I should express with my little motivational posters. Forget how I feel and what I think of myself when I miss work, those are negative thoughts and what we focus our attention on is most likely what we will get in life.
Now, Cheryl is not the Dalai Lama, but there’s a good chance her information and, dare I suggest, advice, in these matters is every bit as spiritual and true as that which comes from His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama. In other words, Cheryl’s affirmations are ones I can try to live by in my daily routine.
There’s nothing wrong with having a routine in life; routine makes it easier to be spontaneous when the need or desire arises and routine makes living life on life’s terms easier when life is anything but routine.
And that routine helps sustain me through the good times and the difficult times, like today. Early Friday Morning, while getting ready for work, I received a text message from my friend Scott’s phone, but it wasn’t Scott. It was a woman informing me that Scott had passed away Tuesday. So I immediately called.
This wasn’t a prank, wasn’t a hacker fucking with Scott’s phone, it was a family member passing the information on to “us,” Scott’s friends in sobriety.
At first I was angry. Several of us had been reaching out to Scott, trying to help him put a cork in the bottle. We’ve been doing so for a couple years now, but he never really got “it.”
It’s hard to find statistics on the percentage of people who suffer from substance addictions in this country, but 15% is a good guess. Some of those people get help, be it through psychiatry and/or psychology, their religions or Twelve Step groups. And the statistics say about 5% of addicts recover from their seemingly hopeless condition. That’s about 2.5 million people. And that’s still pretty much of a guess.
Split that figure up between all of the addictions and then that figure seems even smaller. You gotta figure alcohol and drug addiction will take up the lion’s share of those recoveries, but the last time I checked there were over 200 Twelve Step programs, each devoted to a specific addiction; from the granddaddy of them all, Alcoholics Anonymous, to Clutterers Anonymous and Debtors Anonymous — I kid you not. It’s easy to make jokes about them all, especially for people addicted to love and sex. Oh yeah, there are 12-Step programs for love and sex. And pornography, online and otherwise. We all make jokes about them, well, except my sister Cheryl, but for most, it’s a life or death struggle and that is most evident with people addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. But this isn’t a time to make jokes.
Okay, Charlie Sheen is the elephant on the monitor. His delusional and grandiose ranting is, at the very least, entertaining.
Getting back to the point, which is my friend Scott, his dying from addiction isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. For a person addicted to drugs and/or alcohol (and these days most addicts can claim both) there are but four choices: jails, institutions, death or recovery.
Many of my friends have chosen recovery, but some do not, like Scott. He tried it here and there, but in the end, his end was death. On Friday several of us gathered together and Scott was the subject of discussion. On several occasions I nearly broke down in tears, but didn’t. My emotions were betrayed when my voice cracked and stuttered.
My initial reaction was, “Fuck him! He chose death!” But that’s really just a front for the sadness of it. The anger is just a cloak for the grief that lies over my heart like an old, collapsed Army tent.
“We could’ve done more …’ No, we couldn’t. I couldn’t. The addict has to want to recover and unless that threshold is met, there’s nothing anyone can do, short of locking the person away in an asylum. I’ve been friends with several people who have died from their addictions, primarily alcohol, including one who received a liver transplant.The best that can be said of Scott, from these quarters, is that he was a kind and generous person and in the time that I knew him, just over two years, he did his part to keep me clean and sober. That’s an important point to remember; it does me no good to carry any anger or resentment over his passing.
Cheryl will no doubt have the right words and affirmations. I’ll give her a call.
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