An Unlikely Hero The Grapevine - January, 2001My father passed away two months before he would have celebrated 30 years in AA. As we cleared away his desk littered with piles 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 unusual warm October air. We planted that tree when we were children, and at the time it was no bigger than ourselves. But 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 other end of the telephone. We grew up accustomed to phone calls in the middle of the night, and my father's abrupt departures to attend to one of his sponsorees. My father would drive 90 miles at 1:00 in morning to take someone to a dryout facility. A part of us always knew who he was and what he did, but the full impact of his life's work in AA didn't hit me until I met the hundreds of people who's lives had changed because of my father's work in AA.
My father stopped drinking when I was nine, and I was too young understand much of went on in our chaotic household. As a university professor he was a highly functional alcoholic. His absences when he binged probably had the most effect on me, as well the pressure on my mother raising eight children more or less on her own.
I felt more keenly his absences 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 just for taking my father away from me, but for changing him. As a young adult I became politically active, and often met people who relayed snippets of my father's active life before he joined AA. I heard about his numerous involvements in just causes, all of which he gave up when he when he gave up drinking.
I understood that AA kept him sober, but I didn't understand why he gave up working for social justice when he gave up alcohol. Going through his papers in the weeks after he died brought it all back - wondering about the things he did before AA and why he gave them up. I thumbed through yellowed typewritten letters of protest, agendas to groups I never knew he belonged to, and carbon copies of petitions he circulated. Both my parents were active in the early sixties setting up anti-racist committees in the newly built suburb where we lived. While he drank, he fought against McCarthyism in the fifties. As an economic teacher in a Catholic University he sat on dozens of boards and committees. I found articles he wrote in the early fifties arguing for a just "Living Wage" in the post war era. A newspaper clipping from the early sixties recounted how he organized a campaign among teachers to protest the appointment of a newly appointed public schools superintendent perceived as racist and "unacceptable" by the minority population the system served. In some ways, it was a joy to think about this again, to re-discover my father.
It almost meant more reading this after his death, because if I asked him about it in life he would have brushed it off, or summed it up casually in a few minutes, giving me the impression that everything he did before AA was unimportant. AA had become his life, and I resented the fact that his involvement snuffed out so much of the important work he did, even though I respected him for the dedication he had in helping people stay sober.
All through my teenage years, he bailed people out of jail, out of bars, out of hell. Drunks were deposited at the 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 became close to, and they became part of our family. But many we never knew; they were first names on the other end of 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 sponsorees. I looked up to my father, but sometimes felt a confused envy. He had a bond with them, and as his own daughter I feared they knew him better than I.
About 10 years ago at my youngest sister's graduation party John J. called from a bar seven miles away. My father brought him home and put him in the basement to sleep it off. Unfortunately, John J. decided he wasn't ready to sleep it off, and kept emerging, covered with filth and urine, clutching my sister's $30 bottles of champagne. I couldn't help thinking of Jane Eyre's madwoman in the attic as my sisters and I vaulted fences, coolers, and partygoers to catch John as he stumbled down the street in search of alcohol. "He's our cousin," we explained in embarrassment to our astonished friends as we turned him over to my father who would guide him back to the basement.
After several hours of this, my father decided to drive him to a treatment center 100 miles away. I can see him in my mind's eye as he leads John away by the arm. John stumbles, his six feet towering over my 70-year-old father as he steadies him. My father is an unlikely looking hero, his polyester pants bunched above his Nike walking shoes. But I am struck by his droopy drawered dignity and assuredness.
In the darkened yard behind me, the low hum of voices and mellow laughter lingers seductively in the warm June night. I remember that my father forgot to string up the colored lanterns in his rush to rescue John J.
Not long after that 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, but he in turn gave more to the world as a recovering alcoholic than he did in all his years of political activism.
But I didn't really know this until he died. At the wake I saw dozens of young men walk trembling up to the casket, wiping their eyes. They were always alone, and looked more shook up then I felt. Sometimes they would approach us, the family in the receiving line hesitantly, even reluctantly. "Your father saved my life," they'd say simply, in quivering voices.
I heard over and over again, that line spoken as simple truth: Your father saved my life. If I had any lingering resentments they disappeared as I watched my father's life work pass by.
The other day I took my small son to the swimming pool. I taught him how to bounce up and down as he walked, to help keep his little chin above water. As a child we spent many summers at Lake Michigan. Every year we'd look for the sandbar, and my father would point it out to me. See, that light patch of water underneath the sky? Then we would walk. Eventually it would get too deep, and he would hold my hand while I bounced up and down with my mouth closed to keep the water out. Suddenly, I would hit solid ground, and he'd let go of his strong grasp and I could walk with delight on my own. I loved being so 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, he struck me with his serene sadness. Though his grief was obvious I sensed a deeply rooted strength, like the apple tree in our backyard that was once a hardly more than a twig. Later I learned his identity, and remembered him as one of the first names on the other end of the telephone. In the early days of his recovery his car struck and killed an eight year old child. Tommy was 20 years old then, stone sober at the time of the tragedy but walking that thin line when every baby step forward is overshadowed by the slippery abyss so close to the heels. The child's family pressed charges; Tommy stayed sober.
I remember that turmoil - how my father grieved. He testified in court for him, and I remember seeing him walk away from the telephone in tears whenever Tommy called. Tommy pulled through, joined the army, and they wrote religiously in the years that followed, like father and son.
Seeing Tommy with his young family, his serious but steady grief, I understand my father's life in a fullness I never thought possible.