Monday night, "Jacques" got his one-year cake. For the third or fourth time.
For more than twenty years, he's been an alcoholic, drug addict, and someone with severe mood disorder. For the last five, he's alternated between recovering and relapsing. (I've written before about Jacques in upFront.eZine.)
Alcoholics Anonymous members celebrate alcohol-free anniversaries among each other with a cake, a card with scribbled congratulations, and fellow members offering brief talks of encouragement. For this event, he'd chosen the phrase, "Success through failure."
(His first cake was a "two-year cake," several decades ago. Back then, he thought he was being clever in ripping off the AA. That attitude is one of the many reasons for his relapses.)
He'd asked me to sit in on this AA meeting, and give a brief talk about him. I'd known him nearly five years, been with him through two relapses. Just over a year ago, he'd lost his cell phone, which represented his lifeline and his work. Shaking his fist at God, he yelled, "How dare You let that happen? I'll show You!" and then in revenge went on a drug-taking binge.
As I visited him in the hospital's emergency ward, he told me how he'd tried to inject sufficient cocaine to bring himself to the edge of death -- but no further.
- - -
"Ralph G?" called the meeting chair. I got up to speak. If there is one word to describe Jacques, I thought, it is "persistence." Following each relapse, I have watched in amazement as he in persistence attacks his recovery from drug and alcohol misuse with a ferocious strength. He persistently works through his recovery from welfare dependence, even taking cruddy jobs, like wheelbarrowing dirt into newly-built greenhouses in the rain. (He took pride in hauling twice as much dirt as the other workers.) He is persistent in his faith in God, recognizing it's his fault, not His. He is learning humility.
Now it has been a year since he began his nth recovery, and he seems to have found success. In this last year, he discovered that he is good at house painting, able to draw a straight line without masking. First, he learned the trade from another recovering alcoholic, and now has struck off on his own.
Jacques shows off his latest house painting job to one of my daughters.
- -
A friend of Jacques' once described how he puts his anniversary date everywhere: on every calendar at home, at work, even in small letters on his license plate. He uses them to remind himself to keep going each day alcohol-free until the next anniversary.
One day, a young man working on his car at a local dealership noticed the date on the license plate. When he learned what it represented, the young man asked, "Could you talk to my dad?" Jacques' friend said, "Most of us have lived in that sort of a household, haven't we?"
- - -
In that church basement of alcoholics, the ones who touched me the most were the teenagers, some the age of my own children. At the end of the meeting, one teenager walks forward for his 5-month disc, another for her 9-month disc.
Next to me, a 20-something cradles her newly-acquired 6-month disc in her hands as she gazes at it for a moment, and then carefully adds it to the collection in her small purse.
"But now we still have faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love."
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