Grace

I'm a day late. I just didn't feel like sitting in front of the computer yesterday, after the hellish week I had at work. I work for a tiny, Mom & Pop cable company, and last week we changed our entire system so that all of our customers now require digital boxes in order to get our service. One of our service areas is a retirement community, where we have somewhere between 400 and 500 elderly customers, which means that our phones have not stopped ringing since Tuesday. It was so insane that I contemplated quitting more than once. The only thing that stopped me was the thought that I would lose my health insurance if I quit. Next week will be just as bad, if not worse, but I suppose things will settle down eventually, as everybody gets used to the new boxes. But our 95 year-olds will probably always have trouble. One woman had her box installed by our technicians and it was working perfectly until she pushed the wrong button and lost the signal, whereupon she called me, crying, to ask me to send the technician back. Our technicians have been working fourteen-hour days, trying to get all the old people installed, but I sent one back over there. He fixed it for her, and then she called back a few hours later to say that she'd lost her signal again. "Why can't you put it back to the way it was before?" she wailed. "I didn't do anything to deserve this!" I really felt for her, but I couldn't spare another technician. Fortunately, this time we were able to talk her through the solution and help her get the channels back. But I know that she will be calling us every other day for the rest of her life, asking us to send a technician over to fix whatever she did wrong. And that's only one customer!

So. Anyway. Here I am, unrefreshed and unready for the work week to begin tomorrow. At least my viral load is still negative. My white count was acceptable as of my last labs, last Monday, so that's good too. The count is still low, but Judy said it's within acceptable limits for treatment. If it goes lower, I may have to go in occasionally to get a shot to stimulate white cell production. As for my hemoglobin, well, I'm slightly anemic, but Dr H seems to think that an ordinary multivitamin with iron will take care of the problem, so I started that on Tuesday. Normally I think vitamins are a waste of money and just give you really expensive pee. I can get all the nutrition I need in my food, as long as I eat well and avoid fast food and processed foods, but I recognize that my current situation isn't normal. I'd rather take an iron supplement than eat a slab of cow meat, although I will do my best to eat more tofu in the next eight months. I've discovered that Judy is a bit of an alarmist, so the next time she calls me with news of something unusual I'll reserve judgement and wait until I talk to Dr H about it. He wasn't nearly as concerned about my low red and white counts as she was.

Currently I'm serving as the secretary of the Saturday night meeting, which means that I have to arrive early to unlock the door and set up the room if it needs it. Last night I was doing just that when I got a phone call from a friend who told me that a friend of ours had died the night before. I knew before I picked up the phone that someone had died -- I've developed a sense about it, from years of practice. The man who died, my friend Matt, was an addict with a story somewhat similar to mine, only he sank even lower than I did before he got clean. The man was in a coma for six months after contracting tetanus from a dirty needle, for God's sake! And he had a head injury from falling down the stairs which caused him to be legally blind, not to mention all of the broken-off needles he had in his neck. I would have thought that if anyone had the credentials to stay clean for the rest of his life, it was Matt. But it doesn't work that way. A program of recovery is a daily thing. At about six years clean, Matt stopped going to meetings, saying they were "too negative." I tried to talk to him about it, but he was adamant. And then he married his girlfriend, a chronic relapser, and I didn't hear from him for over a year, until I got the news last night. I don't like to assume that people are using just because I don't see them or hear from them, but usually that's what they're doing, and that's what Matt was doing.

It was a blow. It always is, even when it's someone, like Matt, whom I'm not close to. We were never close friends, but I've known him for nearly thirty years. Losing him is like losing another piece of my youth. I'm tired of going to funerals. I sometimes think that the biggest difference between addicts and those so-called normal people is that the "normies" don't have to go to the funerals of young people every year. Last year I went to two funerals, one for my nephew Joel, and one for my old friend James. Both of them died of the disease of addiction, and there's at least one every year. It scares me when people stop going to meetings, and when I hear the voice of the disease in their words.

It makes me grateful, though, that I've been granted the willingness to do what it takes to stay clean a day at a time. As I said, a program of recovery is a daily thing. Every day I practice the principles of the program to the best of my ability, and I reinforce the habits I developed in my first couple of years clean. It's repetitive, and I hear many addicts say, "It's boring. It's the same thing over and over." Okay, it's the same thing over and over, but how much variety is there in the life of a using addict? I don't know about anyone else, but my life when I was using was incredibly narrow and predictable. It was like a really sick, indie version of Groundhog Day. The thing about working a program is that it goes against my natural inclination. That's why I have to exercise discipline in order to practice it, and why I need continual reminders of how bad it is out there where the using addicts are. If I veer off the path for awhile, my thinking starts to change and using doesn't seem so bad after all. That's what happens. I know, because it happened to me the first time around. It took nearly two years, but eventually I relapsed, and it was a hellish six and a half years before I was able to get clean again. That relapse nearly killed me, and I seriously doubt that I'd be able to make it back to recovery if I relapsed again.

But I can't take credit for my own recovery. There's a mystery at the heart of the twelve steps, and I like it that way. I don't want to understand everything. I don't know why I have the willingness to do what it takes to stay clean and Matt didn't. He had it for a long time -- he had seven years clean a year ago -- but somewhere along the way he lost it. As far as I'm concerned, it's grace. I was graced with desperation when I first got clean: I was desperate to get and stay clean and that made me willing to do whatever it took, no matter what. And it's grace that I continue to be willing a day at a time. I can't judge Matt for having turned his back on recovery. I didn't judge him at the time. It's cause for grief and for compassion, not for judgement. He lost the precious gift which every addict has who stays clean no matter what, the gift of willingness.