M
y father died a few months before his thirty-eighth birthday. I was fifty-three at the time. How could I be fifteen years older than my own father? Because the most important birth date our family celebrated was Alcoholics Anonymous birthday.
I have thought a lot about what it means to me to have grown up in a family that simply didn’t work long before the term “dysfunctional family” was coined. When I was little, I learned lessons that helped me survive at the time. I am still unlearning some of those early lessons.
Last summer, while working in the garden, I shifted a large stepping stone over onto a patch of grass and forgot to return it to its place. When at last I remembered to move it, the grass underneath was sickly pale and stunted. The grass still lived, and with time, water and the sunlight it needed to survive, it grew healthy. Had I left the stone there, the grass would have died and been replaced by grubs, snails and bare earth.
Parts of me are like a lawn where stones have been scattered at random. Some patches didn’t get what they needed to grow strong and healthy. While finding and moving those stones, I have often been resentful and I angry. There are spots where grass will never grow. It hurts to admit there were things I just didn’t get when I was a little kid.
But in the course of all that work, I have come to appreciate how much sunshine did fall on me, and even how to grow plants more exotic than grass in the bare spots. And for the first time in my life, I wish I could remember more.
I’ve tried to remember how I felt in 1958 when Daddy stopped drinking. Instead, I wasn’t even aware of what was going on. And when I did begin to realize something unusual was happening, I was skeptical, even cynical. No expectations for me! I had been sadly disappointed too many times before. Even in the beginning, my family was I wise enough to realize that stopping one particularly destructive behavior doesn’t mean instant cures, only freedom to work on the deeper issues that inevitably underlie “The Problem.” So nobody ever promised anything that I remember. I wouldn’t have believed them if they had.
As months went by, I slowly suspected change was possible. Then one night, as my mother and I were driving home, we saw my father’s beat-up old blue panel truck parked at the neighborhood bar. I knew it was all over. Mother said, “I have to go see.” She parked the car and left me sitting outside while she went inside. Through a window I could see Daddy, leaning against the bar, a tall, ambercolored glass in his hand. Everything inside me went into a protective crouch -deep, dark and hidden away.
Mother came out of the bar with a strange new expression on her face. She climbed into the car and said, “He’s drinking iced tea. He needed to check up on some of his old friends. He’ll be home in a little while.” Something inside me was able to relax a little.
After Daddy’s best birthday, by God’s grace, and thanks to Daddy’s hard work, he never did “fall off the wagon.” Following the Alcoholics Anonymous slogan “one day at a time,” he and mother truly lived one day at a time, working on their problems and helping other people through A.A. Daddy never became financially successful, and sometimes he said how sorry he was that he had no inheritance to leave his children. But he didn’t brood over lost opportunities. When he turned eighty, he joined a fitness club and worked out on the weight machines to improve his golf swing.
Then at an A.A. retreat, he fell and broke his hip. He and Mother fought his deteriorating condition for three years. A big man, and always physically fit, Daddy hated the indignities of not being able to walk or care for himself. Slowly, slowly his body shut down, and with Mother and a few other family members by his bed, he died. Later, Mother said, “He can walk again. And I know he walked into heaven clean and sober.”
At my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary some years before his death, the reception hall was filled with children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins and hundreds of friends from A.A. and church. How clear that memory is. How different it would have been if he had not been brave enough in 1958 to ask for help.
Daddy was wrong to think he had nothing to leave his children. He gave us over thirty-seven years and nine months of sobriety - almost fourteen thousand days -one day at a time. His courage is his legacy, our inheritance.
- Nita Sue Kent