FreeOwl

This week, a Michigan state Representative was arrested for his second DUI under Michigan's superdrunk law.

The next day upon his release from jail, he hanged himself with a belt.

He was a really good man. He cared about others greatly. He did good things for his community, his family, his constituents.

And I understand honoring him for that. I am moved to feel he deserves that recognition, too.

Yet I'm conflicted.

There is tremendous focus on how great he was. And as an aside there is a message of 'addiction needs to be talked about more. He suffered and did all these great things and gee this can happen to anyone'.

I wonder if the celebration of his life would have been the same if he'd killed a family on his way out.

I wonder why the message isn't LOOK AT WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO PEOPLE!! first and foremost.... instead of a footnote to the accolades of a great man who in the end hung himself with his own belt, leaving behind two children and a loving wife....

I don't know.

I'm feeling angry and I guess I don't really understand quite why. I see close friends of his - guys I went to school with and know personally to be huge problem drinkers - grieving publicly and suffering their loss and his struggle..... yet none seem to be looking at how very like him they are in their own relationship to alcohol.

I think I'm angry because the societal context isn't 'WHAT IS OUR ROLE IN THIS'.... Instead of - well, this guy with addiction was great. We should help 'them' more.

Addiction doesn't hit everyone as deeply as it did him or me..... but every single day I see alcohol taking such a prominent role in people's lives.... in the lives of everyone.... in the fabric of society.

I have to wonder if addiction isn't at least in part a societal disease as much as an individual one.

Thanks for putting up with my rant today.

Between the loss of a friend and watching the continued decline toward death of another all in one week, I'm feeling a bit off balance about this stuff.

Treerat66

It seems to me that no one knows how to enjoy themselves any more unless they have a drink in their hand.

Maudcat

Well, two things. Media tends to lionize public and semi public figures who have died tragically and unexpectedly. It gets eyes on the computers and TVs and sells newspapers.
Sadly, their real story often gets blurred and lost in the telling.
Second, and this is my opinion only, society finds it easy to look away from alcohol addiction and its costs. Only someone who has experienced it themselves or through family or friends can understand the wreckage caused.
I am sorry that your friend is so ill. Losing someone to addiction is hard.

Grymt

"I have to wonder if addiction isn't at least in part a societal disease as much as an individual one." - undoubtedly this is so.

There is a place near the Himalayas where opium is legal. It is used by the elderly to ease the pains of late life. Young people are not interested in it as they have a vigorous life to live.

I think it is about what relationship we have to the sensations that we all experience on our mind-body phenomenon moment to moment. When that is correct, when the morality of our lives are correct and our thinking is correct the addictive component of our behaviour is neutralised. We don't need any intoxicants to live a happy life.

Therefore we can abstain from intoxicants and adopt a correct lifestyle and not be in any need of any intoxicants and live a happy life. However in our society we are taught a wrong way of living and given poor examples of how to live.

tomsteve

heres a thread of mine from a couple years ago

http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/...bit-angry.html

i was a wee bit messed up by it for a while. greiving brings out a gamut of emotions and feelings. but greiving and experiencing those feelings and emotions was necessary.

FreeOwl

thanks tomsteve.

I'm gonna go to my home group this morning.

it had become his, too.

I'm sure there will be others who share where I'm feeling I'm at with this....

ScottFromWI

I think it's much more common in our society to recognize/idolize people for their lives after they have died than while they are alive, regardless of what they die from. The fact that this particular person died from alcohol related issues is certainly sad, but I don't think that's the reason for all the press. The same thing would have probably happened if he died from natural causes or something completely beyond his control.

It is certainly sad though, and i understand the conflict you feel.

Anna

I refuse to judge people anymore for any reason. We are ALL people who are struggling with life.

I feel enormous empathy and compassion for this man. This man lived a life, a public life and did things that people are celebrating. This is great. I doubt that anyone is celebrating the fact he died an alcoholic.

I lost my brother to alcoholism last year, a situation where he literally chose to drink himself to death. I feel no anger at all, just sadness for his life.

Delilah1

First, I'm sorry for the loss of your friend, and for his family's loss.

It sounds like the is being remembered for the good things he did in his life, which we all hope for one day. Perhaps remembering the positive is helping in his family to get through this very difficult time.

I hope that some may reflect on their own addictions/problems while thinking about him and start to make some changes.

Sending prayers your way.

❤Delilah

FreeOwl

It feels like maybe my words came across wrong. I'm not at all angry that he's being celebrated he was a good man who did great things. I think what makes me feel angry is for one thing that he died for another thing that despite all of the support all of the people cared all of the positive he had in his life he still didn't really do the work to get and stay sober.

And I feel like the little footnote The Little Owl by the way gee we should really feel more sorry for people who are alcoholics... I don't know it seems like they just don't get it.

It feels like with all the notoriety and all the people he knew and all the visibility that he had this could be an opportunity to really hold up a mirror and a lens on our regional Society and our national psyche around alcohol. instead it just feels like a little sidebar.

It was good to be among friends who understand this morning in the myhomegroup group or people knew him.

Maybe what I'm feeling more than anything is simple grief

MeSoSober

"It feels like with all the notoriety and all the people he knew and all the visibility that he had this could be an opportunity to really hold up a mirror and a lens on our regional Society and our national psyche around alcohol."

Who's to say it won't be? I think when someone dies, many feel it's in poor taste, in the immediate aftermath of the death, to focus on the person's failings or fatal flaw or what have you more than on the person's good points and accomplishments, of which this man had many, apparently.

I DO think it would be a great legacy, after a little time has passed maybe, to use his death to spotlight the horror of addiction and how people can and should seek help for it. Maybe the people he left behind will do something to raise awareness.

Please understand I'm not saying this or that way to react to addict's death is the correct one, only offering up a possible explanation for what you're observing in the wake of this man's death. For what it's worth.

FreeOwl

Yes. Thank you. A good perspective.

atalose

Several years ago a local politician died of an opiate overdose and at the gathering after the funeral a group I was sitting with had an open discussion on this issue. While some thought it was a great opportunity to point out just how far into all walks of life this epidemic has reached others felt it was ill to speak of the dead and tarnish his reputation.

I do think when we've had personal hands on experience with addiction touching our lives we see things from a very different perspective then those who haven't.

I can only imagine how his family feels, being run over by his alcoholism then hit again with his suicide. I think it would be up to the family to discuss it openly in public or remain private.

Ariesagain

I read an article his daughter had written about his alcoholism somewhere...I can't find it now, but maybe you can google his name and find it?

The essential problem is that booze is big bucks to many, many industries. Add in that the defining symptom is denial and the fact that alcoholism doesn't have easy answers...as a society, we don't want to hear about it, because if it happened to him, maybe a Mommy and Me To Go Wine cup isn't so innocent, after all?

I share your frustration.

Sending you a hug.

nochein

I was thinking something similar to Ariesagain. For the majority of people, the fact that alcohol is legal means that drinking is ok (except for those poor alcoholics.). I really never noticed how ubiquitous it is in visual media, popular songs and so on until I decided to stop drinking.

Not only is it touted as essential for celebrating and enjoying yourself, like your happiness isn't complete without it, it's also viewed as virtually medicinal. You're stressed and it's high stakes, have a martini. This is really hard news, let me get you a scotch. You're sad, it's definitely time for a margarita. You have a cold, let's put some brandy in your coffee. A shot of courage! Drown your sorrows! For every emotion or even physical sensation we'd rather not feel, there's some folk wisdom that tells us a drink would help.

So talking about how alcohol is often a problem, even during an unhappy time directly caused by alcohol, flies in the face of years of social (and marketing-reinforced) belief that alcohol is a cure.

-- It's also frustrating that speaking about alcoholism is thought of as speaking ill of the dead. No one would say it was speaking ill of the dead to say someone had heart disease or breast cancer or that it was inappropriate to use the moment to raise awareness, just the opposite, which speaks to the idea that people still consider alcoholism to be a choice and a reprehensible personal failure rather than a condition.

FreeOwl

Exactly.

This is exactly what frustrates the hell out of me.

A good man, a great man!!

Yes. Who hung himself with his own belt because of alcohol.

Yes. A great man whose drinking was frankly not all that unlike many of those mourning him. Many, in fact, who have been mourning him by drinking.

One of the folks loudly proclaiming how badly it hurts - an owner of two bars.

Another - a close friend with an elaborate bar in his basement at home who drinks heavily, daily, and often throws huge booze addled parties.....

None of them are saying: 'my god. How alike we are!!'. 'Look! This could easily be us one day!'

It's all a short aside to his greatness. 'How awful that he had these demons he hid'. 'If only he'd KNOWN how much we all loved him'.

It just feels like a societal turning away from an obvious chance to be real about a huge issue. In a town with more places to buy alcohol than water.... where every new business seems to be a brewery or a tap room or a bar restaurant.... where each year brings a new major festival focused mainly on drinking.... it is really hard to watch us all just collectively ignore how easily this could be so many of us.

Group denial.

FreeOwl

Funny you mention that cold remedy thing. I have a bad cold and have already lost track of how many people have prescribed me whisky as a 'cure'.

The only thing whiskey ever cured was presence, awareness and happiness.

MissPerfumado

Great thread. This is tangential but I feel a related point. The stigma of alcoholism and the ignorance about what alcoholism really looks like are so prevalent that even a constructive discussion about it can get lost in a mire of hasty assumptions and stereotypes.

I went to a public event some time ago where one of the speakers was a news anchor who had inadvertently come out publicly about her alcoholism and recovery. The backstory is that she was signed up to a site similar to this and had written a long post describing her recovery experience. What she didn't know was that she was also logged in via Facebook, and her entire post simultaneously publicly posted to her FB profile. Hours later when she checked in, she had hundreds of comments on her FB page.

The "damage" was done. She was outed. So she has used this as an opportunity to speak widely about her struggles with alcoholism. Which she did at the event I went to.

She is a brave lady and to me her talk was illuminating and educational. Or so I thought.

I bumped into someone I know recently who was at the same event, who in our group of friends proceeded to talk about the event and this lady with an edge of disdain and no recognition of what this lady has gone through. She made it seem like the same old "alcoholic" story. "How awful for her to have her struggle made public like that, how terrible that she couldn't hide her dirty secret etc."

It was depressing to hear. We have so much to overcome in educating others about this disease.

tomsteve

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems
today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some
person, place, thing, or situation—some fact of my life
—unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until
I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being
exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world
by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I
could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely
on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate
not so much on what needs to be changed in the
world as on what needs to be changed in me and in
my attitudes.
Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and all
the men and women merely players.” He forgot to
mention that I was the chief critic. I was always able
to see the flaw in every person, every situation. And I
was always glad to point it out, because I knew you
wanted perfection, just as I did. A.A. and acceptance
have taught me that there is a bit of good in the worst
of us and a bit of bad in the best of us; that we are all
children of God and we each have a right to be here.
When I complain about me or about you, I am complaining
about God’s handiwork. I am saying that I
know better than God.

tomsteve

Perhaps the best thing of all for me is to remember
that my serenity is inversely proportional to my expectations.
The higher my expectations of other
people are, the lower is my serenity. I can watch my
serenity level rise when I discard my expectations.
But then my “rights” try to move in, and they too can
force my serenity level down. I have to discard my
“rights,” as well as my expectations, by asking myself,
How important is it, really? How important is it compared
to my serenity, my emotional sobriety? And
when I place more value on my serenity and sobriety
than on anything else, I can maintain them at a higher
level—at least for the time being.
Acceptance is the key to my relationship with God
today. I never just sit and do nothing while waiting
for Him to tell me what to do. Rather, I do whatever
is in front of me to be done, and I leave the results up
to Him; however it turns out, that’s God’s will for me.
I must keep my magic magnifying mind on my acceptance
and off my expectations, for my serenity is
directly proportional to my level of acceptance. When
I remember this, I can see I’ve never had it so good.
Thank God for A.A.!