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Bonus Articles
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An Unlikely Hero
From the January 2001 Grapevine
My father passed away this year, just two
months before he would have celebrated thirty years in AA. As we cleared
away his desk littered with stacks of Grapevines, notes for AA meetings,
and dozens of Serenity Prayers, I am painfully saddened that he
didn’t live to celebrate this milestone.
Up until the day he died, my father attended three
meetings a week. Over the past three decades, he sponsored hundreds of
people in our community.
After the wake, we retired to our family home, my
brothers, sisters, and I with my mother and a few cousins and friends. I
sat outside under the apple tree with my brothers, soaking in the unusually
warm October air. We planted that tree when we were children, and at the
time it was no bigger than ourselves. Now it towered over the house and
spread over the entire backyard like a protective umbrella.
That night, we met many of the first names we had
gotten to know over the telephone. We grew up accustomed to phone calls in
the middle of the night and to my father’s abrupt departures to
attend to one of his sponsees. My father would drive ninety miles at one
o’clock in the morning to take someone to a drying-out facility. So I
always knew who he was and what he did, but the full impact of my
father’s life’s work in AA didn’t hit me until I met the
hundreds of people whose lives had changed because of it.
Growing up, I had a love-hate relationship with
Alcoholics Anonymous. My father had stopped drinking when I was nine, and I
was too young to understand much of what had gone on in our chaotic
household. As a university professor, he was a highly functional alcoholic.
What had the most effect on me were his absences when he binged, as well as
the pressure on my mother, who raised eight children more or less on her
own.
But I felt his absences more keenly when he joined AA,
clinging to it like the lifeline it was, and later on, dedicating his life
to helping others stay sober. For much of my youth, I resented AA, not only
for taking my father away from me, but for changing him.
When I became politically active as a young adult, I
often met people who described snippets of my father’s social
activism before he joined AA. He was involved in numerous just causes, all
of which he gave up when he joined AA. And although I understood that AA
kept him sober, I never understood why he gave up working for social
justice when he gave up alcohol.
Then, as I went through his papers in the weeks after
he died, I was bowled over by the extent of his activism. I found articles
he wrote in the early fifties arguing for a just “living wage”
in the postwar era. A newspaper clipping from the early sixties recounted
how he organized a campaign among teachers to protest the appointment of a
public school superintendent perceived as racist and
“unacceptable” to the minority population the system served. In
the early sixties, both my parents also had been active in setting up
anti-racist committees in the newly built suburb where they lived. While he
drank, he had fought against McCarthyism, and had sat, as an economics
teacher in a Catholic university, on dozens of boards and committees.
In some ways, it was a joy to rediscover my father.
Reading about his work almost meant more after his death, because if I had
asked him about it he would have brushed it off casually or summed it up in
a few minutes, giving me the impression that everything he did before AA
was unimportant.
I felt that AA had become his life, and I resented the
fact that his involvement snuffed out so much of the important work he had
done, even though I respected him for helping people stay sober. He bailed
them out of jail, out of bars, out of hell. Drunks were deposited at our
door by police and even their own relatives, puking and crying. They jumped
off bridges, only to recover, asking for him.
Some of them we grew close to, and they became part of
our family. Many others we never knew; they remained first names on the
telephone. But my father suffered with them, and I often marveled at the
fact that we, his own children, never caused him as much grief, as much
trouble, as much pain as his AA sponsees. I looked up to my father, but I
sometimes felt a confused envy. He had a bond with them, and I feared they
knew him better than I, his own daughter.
About ten years ago, at my youngest sister’s
graduation party, Jim J. called from a bar seven miles away. My father
brought him home and put him in the basement to sleep it off.
Unfortunately, Jim J. decided he wasn’t ready to sleep it off and
kept emerging, covered with filth and urine, clutching a thirty-dollar
bottle of champagne meant for my sister’s friends. I couldn’t
help thinking of the madwoman in Jane Eyre’s attic as my sisters and
I vaulted fences, coolers, and partygoers to catch Jim as he stumbled down
the street in search of alcohol. “He’s our cousin,” we
explained in embarrassment to our astonished friends when my father guided
him back to the basement.
Several hours later, my father drove Jim to a treatment
center one hundred miles away. I still can see him in my mind’s eye,
leading Jim away by the arm. Jim stumbles, his six-foot frame towering over
my seventy-year-old father who steadies him. My father is an unlikely
looking hero, his polyester pants bunched above his walking shoes. But I am
struck by his droopy-drawered dignity and assuredness.
When he returned, my sister walked into the kitchen to
see my dad looking despondent, defeated. Alarmed, she asked him what was
wrong. “I saw a six-pack on the stairs, and suddenly I wanted a beer
really badly,” he told her.
After so many years, I took his sobriety for granted,
and I think after that I understood him more. It was difficult having to
share my father with the world, but eventually I learned to give up my
resentment. AA was his lifeline, and he in turn gave more to the world as a
recovering alcoholic than he did in all his years of political activism.
At the wake, I saw dozens of young men walk trembling
up to the casket, wiping their eyes. They were often alone, and they looked
more shook up than I felt. Sometimes they would approach the family in the
receiving line hesitantly, even reluctantly. “Your father saved my
life,” they’d say, voices quivering.
I heard over and over the line spoken as simple truth:
“Your father saved my life.” If I had any lingering resentments
over my father’s dedication to AA, they disappeared as I watched his
life’s work pass by.
The other day I took my young son to the swimming pool
and taught him how to bounce up and down keeping his little chin above
water. As a child, I had spent many summers at Lake Michigan with my
family. Every year my father would point out the sandbar to me: “See
that light patch of water?” Then we would walk out to it, and when it
got too deep, he would hold my hand while I bounced up and down keeping my
mouth closed to keep out the water. Suddenly, I would hit solid ground, and
he’d let go of my hand so I could walk with delight on my own. I
loved being that far out into the lake, looking back at the shore and
seeing the distance I had come.
At the wake, I spied a young man standing in the back
with his wife and baby. As he approached the casket, I was struck by his
serene sadness. Though his grief was obvious, I sensed a strength in him,
deeply rooted.
Later I learned his identity: he was one of the first
names I remembered on the other end of the telephone. Eight years ago, his
car struck and killed an eight-year-old. He was twenty years old and stone
sober at the time of the tragedy, and his recovery had been difficult
enough before the accident.
I remembered that turmoil — and how my father had
grieved for him as he would his own son. He stuck by him, and Tommy pulled
through. Seeing Tommy with his young family, his serious but steady grief,
I understood my father’s life in a fullness I had never thought
possible.
Hannah H., Chicago, Illinois
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