Quo Vadimus

This book is dedicated to the following, my daughters Tabea and Meyra, my ex-wife Kerstin, my mother, Eleanor, the three sponsors I have had the privilege of knowing in my sobriety, Larry, Mark, and Ray and those that I had the honor of sponsoring, especially, Simone, Sabina (Sam) and TJ (Trevor). All of the above have shown me a different and wonderful facet of love, and for that I am truly grateful to my God, thank you

Preface:

It is not my intent to write a “self-help” book. I am perhaps the most helpless person I know, so I doubt that my knowledge would be of any use in the help department. Nor is it my intent to write another book on the topic of the twelve steps and how to, etc, etc, etc, if you want that, read the Big Book or go to any treatment center and grab one of their handy dandy do it yourself, fill in the blank, checklists. What I hope this turns out to be is my experience in life, and how the tools I have acquired in sobriety have helped me to live a rather joyous and full life. This is a book I will pass on to my daughters, and those I sponsor, of my journey in sobriety. That they may learn from my mistakes, and through the course of reading this book, learn a little of what has taken me twenty-two years, so far, to piece together, and save them a little of the hassle and pain that came with these lessons.

This is a book about belief, my beliefs and experiences. As such I will try to back up my beliefs with bits and pieces of my life that have led to me to believe as I do. It is not up for interpretations or debate, as my experiences are just that, my experiences, and are not conjecture or theory but memories of the life I have lived up to now. Thrown in with my beliefs are a few facts that I know to be true. The first is that God is good. All other facts that I have learned and all my beliefs stem from this primary truth. The second is that God is love, undiluted, one hundred percent pure, no room for anything else, Love. This truth is known to my heart, but my mind still has trouble grasping the fullness of it. The God of my understanding is neither male nor female, but for the purpose of this book I will use the male vernacular.

Well, it has been about four years since I started this book. Funny thing happened. I almost died. Yep, car accident, weeks in an induced coma, couple weeks being paralyzed and couple weeks getting my brain to work. Was about 2 to 3 minutes away from being dead (actually less than that, for a split second I had no brain activity), very strange because I have no memory yet of this event. Oh well, I am sure I will remember in God’s time, when it is time for me to, not before or after.

Unmanageability: Whose life is unmanageable? Not Mine!

Sanity: Didn’t need it then, why now?

            I almost died.   Funny how those words look on paper, but the reality of it is, that I was as close to having someone pull a sheet over my head as you can get.  The doctors at the hospital did not think I would last the week.  Daily, they told my ex-wife that I was going to die. This went on for two weeks and yet every day my lungs kept going up and down and my heart kept beating (thank you machines).  Crushed skull, induced coma, paralysis on my left side was what they saw.  Obviously, since I am still among the living, it was not my time to be with Him yet, for if He had thought so, I surely would be among the deceased and not the living.  This is in by no means a statement that I have some special gift or mission from God.  It means that I am dam lucky to be alive and I really should avoid getting into car accidents in the future.  I don’t read anything into it except that I should count my blessings and say a very loud thank you.

            I truly am blessed, but not in the way most might think. That is to be alive, but I am sober, which use to not be the case. I live the life I always wanted to, happy for the most part and grateful most of the time.  I have two daughters who are turning out to be great young women.  I have an ex-wife who is a dear friend.  I work in a job where I get to help people, doing something that keeps me interested in the work at hand. 

            In the seventeenth year of my sobriety, the following happened: my thirty something cousin, high on dope, I think, committed suicide; my uncle, died because of alcohol induced or related  side effects; my marriage of 8 years (at the time) imploded and dissolved; my brother, at Christmas time, died of a heart attack, at the age 52, probably helped by his past battles with alcohol and drugs; then on April 2, 2007, I was driving into town with my oldest daughter in the back seat, and was pushed off the road by another driver not looking where she was going.   Faced with the decision of hitting her and her car, the truck I was passing, or trying to make it to safety by driving and stopping on the side of the road, I chose the later, and ended up driving off the road, rolling the car, and hitting a large non-break away road sign.  Big sucker too, road sign was large.  By God’s grace, my daughter was not hurt.  I, on the other hand, had the roof the car smack my skull and crack it open, and was left to die, kind of.  For you see, my God, works in peculiar ways.   The car behind me stopped, and the driver was a hairdresser, and I think some sort of paramedic and he basically kept me alive till the police and medical help arrived. His wife and him are also the only reason I know what happened for I have no, none, zip, memory of what happened.  God spared me that pain for the time being.  But having no memory left me with doubts.  Had I done something that almost killed my daughter?  Thankfully it has come out that the accident was due to no fault of my own, his own statement and the police report, state there was basically nothing I could have done to avoid what happened.  So while life had said it was my turn to have a car accident, God worked in his way, to give me the help I needed to see it though to the best result possible.  So let’s take a look at unmanageability and where admission of that fact has led me in this life.

            So life is unmanageable by me, alone.  No surprise there, is there?  I mean most of us like to think we have some control over our lives.  The way I drank showed I was powerless over alcohol, but it took some work to get unmanageable into my system.  I always put it down to bad breaks, if only things had worked out differently.  Toward the end of my drinking I missed the cut off for promotion to Staff Sergeant by one point.  Reason enough for a good drunk, I mean one point, come on, waiting all that time and it came down to one point.  Instead of looking for where I could gain a point, I thought of who was to blame.  I can give you a hint, my name wasn’t on that list.  So instead of working to find a point, I worked on a bottle of Jim Beam.  Didn’t get me promoted, but it did keep me from looking at the mess my life had become for a couple of months at least.  I never wanted to look at my responsibility in any matter of my life.  Work, play or family, I was a go-to guy who could be counted on or so I had convinced myself and so I never had to look at my mistakes, only find those in others and exploit them to my advantage. 

            Interesting thing about mistakes is that they have a tendency to accumulate and then hit all at once.   It was just that way with me, when I hit my personal bottom and got sober.  Thing is, one doesn’t look for a solution, unless on has a problem.  So as the beginning of the first step says” Who cares to admit complete defeat? Practically no one, of course. Every natural instinct cries out against the idea of personal powerlessness. It is truly awful to admit that, glass in hand, we have warped our minds into such an obsession for destructive drinking that only an act of Providence can remove it from us. No other kind of bankruptcy is like this one. Alcohol, now become the rapacious creditor, bleeds us of all self-sufficiency and all will to resist its demands. Once this stark fact is accepted, our bankruptcy as going human concerns is complete.” My personal bottom was my last drunk driving offence, a broken relationship, broke monetarily, humanity wise, and when drunk, thinking that suicide was an option.  Holding my ex girlfriend off the floor in both arms and looking at the plate glass window and realizing that I had thought of harming her, and seeing myself as I truly was, at that moment in time, woke me up partially.  For this was not the first time I had been broke, or had a falling out with a girlfriend, or even gotten into legal trouble from my drinking, but it was the first time I had thought of violence especially toward someone else.   All of it related to my drinking, so being locked into a treatment center for the military, a result of a DUI that I received on 1 April 1989 (April Fool’s day) while driving after my promotion party to see this ex girl friend, having a chance to seriously look at my life, gave me the opportunity to see what real choices I had. 

            I only had two real choices.  Stay sober or drink.  I knew I could go through the treatment program, be considered cured, as far as the Army was concerned, and then move on to the next duty station and pick up a drink or I could stay sober.  Not as strange as it sounded.  For, while in the treatment center, I was exposed to AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) for the first time, and found that I liked what they had to offer. First, they use to drink just like me, glass in hand with or without a good reason, just to drink.  Second, they did insane things while drinking, just like I had done, which while they were drunk made perfect sense to them.  Strangely, it made sense to me also, scary that.  And lastly, while they still had the problems life threw at them, they did not need to drink in order to get through them, and they seemed to be able to handle them with a degree of dignity that I did not possess.  So I was curious.  After my last DUI, I did not know if I would be allowed to stay in the Army.  They frown on those DUI’s, especially when it’s not your first and as you get higher in rank, they expect you to maintain a degree of decorum. I was facing a mandatory jail sentence from the state of Hawaii for driving with no insurance, 3^rd time I had gotten caught on that, and all sorts of legal and civilian expenses. It would have been a good time to escape, and drink.  Weird as it sounds, an old army saying helped me and that was my fun meter was peaked out, and all I could do was laugh.  Realizing I had absolutely no control or power in that situation I did the one thing I could think about, follow my sponsor’s suggestion, get a lawyer.  Thankfully the court saw I was sober and my lawyer did his plea bargain thing and I was only tagged with the drunken driving charge.  Now I went to court roughly 4 months after the DUI, and my arresting officer was there to testify if needed.  We talked after court and he commented on my general appearance and asked how I was doing.  I said I had gotten sober and his reply surprised me, saying “that it was good” because he remembered me and how rough I had looked when he had arrested me.  What surprised me was that he remembered me after 4 months and what got me thinking was, how bad must I have looked for him to remember me? What also occurred to me at that time was no one was asking me to out and party with them.  The friends I still had were all glad I was sober and did not drink.  They could see the physical and mental difference in me.  As a matter of fact, no one that ever saw me drink has ever offered me a drink since I got sober.