Recovery

Step by Step

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Six years today …

* * * *
Every alcoholic in recovery has a collection of anecdotes that can be simultaneously heartbreaking, outrageous, and hilarious. Perhaps they are hilarious only to fellow alcoholics; perhaps they can not even be listened to by outsiders. For an outsider, most alcoholic anecdotes may as well conclude with the same dark punchline, an interchangeable rubber-stamped ending: “And then I got away with it again.” Or, “I didn’t die that time, either.” And then comes the next hair-raising—or eyebrow-raising—tale.

Every alcoholic in recovery is living a story with a weird ending, if they remain in recovery. It is that two-word pair there, “in recovery,” that provides the surprise, the weirdness, a period of life as surprising to behold as some of the antics, the many bizarre actions and activities and inactions and inactivities that were surprising for outsiders to watch unfold in the previous life.
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A Day (Un)Like Any Other

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

No other word will do. For that’s what it was.

Gravy.

Gravy, these past ten years.

Alive, sober, working, loving, and

being loved by a good woman. Eleven years

ago he was told he had six months to live

at the rate he was going. And he was going

nowhere but down. So he changed his ways

somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?

After that it was all gravy, every minute

of it, up to and including when he was told about,

well, some things that were breaking down and

building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”

he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.

I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone

expected. Pure Gravy. And don’t forget it.”—Raymond Carver, “Gravy”

“Gravy” was not published until after Raymond Carver’s death in August 1988. It appeared in The New Yorker that month and it is on his tombstone in Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles, Washington, along with one other poem that is given the title, “Late Fragment.” Either Carver himself or his wife Tess Gallagher—who was also his literary executor—treated his tombstone as a final publication, which, at its plainest, a tombstone indeed is.

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.—Raymond Carver, “Late Fragment”

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Love vs. Terror

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

After years of domestic abuse, a lovely young woman (a friend of my girlfriend’s, but I met her several times) took her own life today. She leaves behind children. Her husband, the person from whom she was trying to escape for years, is today posting sympathy-begging messages on Facebook, the likes of which are stunning. At least, I am stunned.

Perhaps I should not be, as I have been writing columns for years about human rights violations in nations controlled by repressive regimes around the world. Repression and torture do not need a national policy to make them real. Repression happens on a sliding scale, from the size of a nation to the size of the back of a man’s hand. And no one can measure the cruelty of words.

I am angry, I suppose on her behalf, little good it does now. Angry that there are individuals who treat their world and their “loved ones” like a repressive nation treats its dissident citizens: he threatened her with overwhelmingly expensive legal battles to extricate herself from the pain he was inflicting on her, and she felt driven to make attempts (plural) on her own life. And then, his hands clean because he did not end her life (he also did not save it) he began to fill the airwaves with messages posted “more in sorrow than in anger” about how his wife abandoned him today. (I have this fantasy that my friends in Anonymous will launch an “Ops” attack against him. Pah. To what end?)

Maybe someone who feels the need or desire to hurt themselves today—perhaps to strike out against someone who is hurting them or perhaps because they may not want to die but they can not imagine continuing to live—may read what follows.

Perhaps publishing this phone number right here, today—1-800-273-TALK (8255)—is the only reason for this website’s existence. It is the national suicide prevention hotline number.
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