Remembering Michael F.

     I'm on vacation this week. Which means of course that I'm working — another Rotary magazine article to finish, my fourth over the past year. But I can't let my EGD responsibility slide, so I'm looking over pieces that I wrote but decided for some reason not to post. This was written four years ago — I know why I held it back; because I didn't want to poke a stick into a wound that was still fresh. But four years is a while, and I think I can post this now with a minimum risk of upsetting anybody. With time comes perspective, ideally, and an ability to see the saddest situations in a positive light.

     "To have a problem in common is much like love and that kind of love was often the bread that we broke among us. And some of us survived and some of us didn’t, and it was sometimes a matter of what’s called luck." 

                                                           —Tennessee Williams, Memoirs

      Only one friend came over the house that first horrible week, after I was allowed to come home. Then again, Michael didn't have very far to come: out his front door, turn left, walk a few steps, up five stairs, knock on my door. Bearing two cans of raspberry soda water and a bag of potato chips.
     We sat on the porch and talked. Which is what you most want to do when you first go into recovery: talk and talk and talk, trying to sort out how the greatest thing in your life has suddenly become the worst. How it somehow snuck up on your from behind and bit you, hard, in the ass. How to pry its jaws off you.
    It was October, 2005, so I don't remember anything we said. But I do remember, when we were done, we stood up and Michael hugged me. He was much taller than me, a good four inches, and I had a face full of plaid flannel.  Geez, I thought, not only do I have to give up booze, but now I gotta hug guys too?
      Afterward, we would go to meetings for more talk. Sometimes walking to the church around the corner. Sometimes he would pick me up in a big old car, some 1970s Cadillac he inherited. It was like an inverted echo of high school, but instead of one of my buddies who had a car coming to get me so we could hang out and delight in the combination of beer and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, we were two newly sober adults on our way to AA meetings in the Northwest suburbs.
     Meetings, meetings, meetings. How I hated them. Michael liked them. He believed. He had a sponsor, and diligently climbed the 12 Steps, and was an avatar of How It Works.
     Only it didn't work. Not for him. Not long term. For some unfathomable reason, sobriety didn't stick with Michael, while it worked for me. Who knows why? Maybe it was simply professional pride: I had a recovery memoir coming out and didn't want to make it into a lie. "I don't want to fuck up my memoir," was how I put it, along with not wanting to be another Kitty Dukakis (an editor at Simon & Schuster, in rejecting my book, said I hadn't been sober long enough to write a memoir, saying that they'd published Kitty Dukakis's recovery memory, and she rewarded them by drinking nail polish remover on her book tour). 

     Maybe it was luck, some combination of neurons and random chance. Or some other aspect of my circumstance.
     Maybe it was mere necessity. Michael came from money. That could be what did him in. Because I had no choice but to pull myself together and get back to work, while he could retreat from life and climb into the bottle and the bills would still get paid.
    When the news came that Michael was in the hospital, I only thought of the good stuff. He was our neighbor for, geez, 17 years. We'd sit on the porch and talk and smoke cigars, hour after hour. Of course he had his quirks. 
    "You know, I sometimes sneak into your yard at night and shoot your rabbits," he once said.
    I chewed on that, weighing my reply.
    "Just don't shoot the boys," I finally muttered.
    He had taste, humor, integrity. Qualities that fluttered back to mind when I heard about the failing liver and kidneys.
      "Maybe this will be a wake up call," I said to my wife, half-heartedly.
      "The divorce was the wake-up call," my wife replied, grimly.
      A wake up call that he let ring and ring. Michael died a few days later. A few days after his twin boys had left for college.
     So what do you say? The important thing is, to me, to remember that he was like before: a good man, considerate, methodical, a runner, who took care of himself and adored his children. He was the sort of neighbor who would hurry over to your house during a flood and help pump out your basement. Who helped you clean your dryer vents. His bad end didn't come because he was a bad person, but because he was a person, period, a person who fell in a hole and couldn't get out. The thing about alcoholism is, it's a disease that looks like a decision. To the uninitiated it can seem that Michael pondered his options — hmm, should I stay with my beautiful wife and three great kids and see them off to college? Or should I go drink myself to death at my mother's house? — and made the wrong choice. 

     But that isn't a choice at all, not one that any rational man makes. Addiction is another word for diseased thinking. When I heard the bad news, I thought really of all the happy times, and what a good, decent man he was, and not what happened later, toward the end. I hope his wife and kids do the same. I hope the kids realize that how well they turned out is a reflection of the man he was, at heart, before the disease took him. And if his memory has to be a scar as well as a comfort, well, then it should be a scar worn with pride. Because he certainly fought the thing, hard, for years, before it overwhelmed him. I was there, I saw him fight. He fought hard but he lost, that's all. Sometimes people lose. A difficult truth, but one worth remembering.