GrouchoTheCat

I first found this somewhere here on SR and it always touches me deeply. I just found it again and it brought tears to my eyes yet again...


We died of pneumonia in furnished rooms where they found us three days later when somebody complained about the smell.

We died against bridge abutments and nobody knew if it was suicide and we probably didn't know either except in the sense that it was always suicide.

We died in hospitals, our stomachs huge, distended and there was nothing they could do.

We died in cells, never knowing whether we were guilty or not.

We went to priests, they gave us pledges, they told us to pray, they told us to go and sin no more, but go. We tried and we died.

We died of overdoses, we died in bed (but usually not the Big Bed)

We died in straitjackets, in the DT's seeing God knows what, creeping skittering slithering shuffling things.

And you know what the worst thing was? The worst thing was that nobody ever believed how hard we tried.

We went to doctors and they gave us stuff to take that would make us sick when we drank on the principle of so crazy, it just might work, I guess, or maybe they just shook their heads and sent us to places like Dropkick Murphy's.

And when we got out we were hooked on paraldehyde or maybe we lied to the doctors and they told us not to drink so much, just drink like me. And we tried, and we died.

We drowned in our own vomit or choked on it, our broken jaws wired shut. We died playing Russian roulette and people thought we'd lost, but we knew better.

We died under the hoofs of horses, under the wheels of vehicles, under the knives and boot heels of our brother drunks.

We died in shame.

And you know what was even worse, was that we couldn't believe it ourselves, that we had tried.

We figured we just thought we tried and we died believing that we hadn't tried, believing that we didn't know what it meant to try.

When we were desperate enough or hopeful or deluded or embattled enough to go for help we went to people with letters after their names and prayed that they might have read the right books that had the right words in them, never suspecting the terrifying truth, that the right words, as simple as they were, had not been written yet.

We died falling off girders on high buildings, because of course ironworkers drink, of course they do.

We died with a shotgun in our mouth, or jumping off a bridge, and everybody knew it was suicide.

We died under the Southeast Expressway, with our hands tied behind us and a bullet in the back of our head, because this time the people that we disappointed were the wrong people.

We died in convulsions, or of "insult to the brain", we died incontinent, and in disgrace, abandoned .

If we were women, we died degraded, because women have so much more to live up to.

We tried and we died and nobody cried. And the very worst thing was that for every one of us that died, there were another hundred of us, or another thousand, who wished that we could die, who went to sleep praying we would not have to wake up because what we were enduring was intolerable and we knew in our hearts it wasn't ever gonna change.

One day in a hospital room in New York City, one of us had what the books call a transforming spiritual experience, and he said to himself "I've got it ." (no, you haven't you've only got part of it) " and I have to share it." (now you've ALMOST got it) and he kept trying to give it away, but we couldn't hear it. We tried and we died.

We died of one last cigarette, the comfort of its glowing in the dark. We passed out and the bed caught fire. They said we suffocated before our body burned, they said we never felt a thing , that was the best way maybe that we died, except sometimes we took our family with us.

And the man in New York was so sure he had it, he tried to love us into sobriety, but that didn't work either, love confuses drunks and he tried and we still died.

One after another we got his hopes up and we broke his heart,
Because that's what we do.

And the worst thing was that every time we thought we knew what the worst thing was something happened that was worse.

Until a day came in a hotel lobby and it wasn't in Rome, or Jerusalem, Or Mecca or even Dublin, or South Boston, it was in Akron, Ohio, for Christ's sake.

A day came when the man said I have to find a drunk because I need him As much as he needs me (NOW you've got it).

And the transmission line, after all those years, was open, the transmission line was open. And now we don't go to priests, and we don't go to doctors and people with letters after their names.

We come to people who have been there, we come to each other. We come to try and we don't have to die.........


Thank You Bill and Bob for all you did to get the ball rolling.

barb dwyer

Thanks Ted!

I think this ought to be on some kind or self - rotating post ...
so it pops up every couple of months or so.

citychick

Thanks..that is just so Powerful...I'm gonna copy it and send it to some people who I know will appreciate it as much as I do.

miss communicat

I, too, remember the first time I read this here on SR....it touched my heart. My father died a tragic early death from this disease at 42, and it reconnected me to the immense reality of alcoholism, and the need for compassion as well as recovery....one day at a time.

snowgoose

Yup, to keep it we give it away. Thanks for that post which really brings home an aspect of recovery that doesn't always get the light of day.

Blessings from the Snowgoose.

Rowan

Thank you, Ted. I had never read that before, and am going to share it with friends in the fellowship.

kelsh

I had a friend in AA that drowned in her own vomit all alone. She was 37. I had another friend sober up a while after I did and then she died from cancer a couple years later.

kelsh

snowgoose

Everything I've read and heard and experienced over the years, makes me shake my head with amazement that Bill and Bob could have come up with the particular formula that is AA. It just has to be divinely inspired. Amazing that it works the way it does!

Anna

I get teary every time I read that poem. I think Jack McCarthy so captures the pain of alcoholism and the huge desire we have to be sober. It's hard to read.