A home group becomes a community when an anchor of the meeting dies
Most of us who are regular members of an AA group feel ourselves to be a part of a community cemented together by common desperation–to paraphrase the Big Book, like passengers from a sunken ship who find themselves in a lifeboat on the open ocean. That sense of cohesiveness and mutual interdependence is particularly strong in my home group, which meets at 7 A.M. six days a week and numbers among its members people who have been showing up, sharing and making themselves of service virtually every day for years. That they are anchors goes without saying–but what does a group do when it loses one of its anchors?
Recently, we were faced with just such a circumstance. If there was any one individual whose presence seemed to define our meeting it was Stevie G., a tall, vigorous 61-year-old computer wizard with a heart of gold. It was fortunate he was also stubborn, for in the early days some members of the group, AA “purists,” were reluctant to welcome a man who talked a great deal about drugs and made liberal use of profanity while sharing. He did stay, chalked up sober time and established himself as a person willing and capable of working with difficult, poly-addicted sponsees. He volunteered at the jail, performed many tasks for the home group and found time to fix innumerable ailing computers for his friends.
His love and devotion to his wife and six children set a wonderful example. One could write a book about Stevie as a paradigm of the extraordinary capacity for goodness found in ordinary people.
My purpose in writing, however, is not to eulogize our friend–others have done so very ably–but to describe the effect that his recent illness and death had on our local AA community.
Last fall, Stevie, who was rarely ill and avoided doctors, was persuaded to seek medical attention for disorientation and mental confusion that looked to outsiders like a relapse on drugs.
Doctors diagnosed aggressive brain cancer, with a poor prognosis. A week after surgery, Stevie was back in the meeting, looking like Frankenstein’s monster with all those stitches.
He reported cheerfully that he’d never felt better in his life and thought that some long-standing barrier to serenity had finally been removed from his skull.
That euphoric state didn’t last. Chemotherapy and a spinal infection left him, by the middle of December, confined to his house. He was in pain so severe that refusing drugs was no longer an option, and facing the stark reality of his own death. He declined steadily from then on and died at home on Feb. 28, surrounded by his loving family.
I will always remember how much he was able to continue to give to us, his AA community, during those final three months, and how we as a community came together in support of him and his family. All of us are grateful to his wife and grown children for the graciousness with which they included us, even when their desire for privacy must have trumped their need for assistance.
Early on, a group of his sponsees and AA friends held regular AA meetings in the sick room. Several came from considerable distances, witness to the feeling of kinship that ties some sponsors to sponsees long after one has moved away.
After Stevie was confined to his bed and was losing his ability to converse, people continued coming in ones and twos, sitting for hours at the bedside, talking with the patient when he was able and with each other when he was not. His sick room became almost a place of pilgrimage. Friends and family created a kind of museum of Stevie’s life, with hundreds of photographs lining the walls and mixes of his favorite rock music playing on the stereo.
Even while dying, Stevie was still in the midst of life, which was where he wanted to be. His courage and good cheer were infectious. It was impossible to be grim and dolorous in his presence and it seemed almost sacrilegious to revert to that state away from it. A number of people commented in the meeting that being a part of this unconventional but somehow very functional deathbed scene helped them to better handle the illness and death of their own family members.
Many of us, I am sure, are a little less apprehensive about our own aging and death after seeing Stevie’s journey. One home group member organized a relay of cooks to take meals to the family and another established a fund to help defray expenses. Others collaborated with the family to organize a moving memorial service attended by nearly 500 people, followed by a benefit concert. We learned that when you mobilize the resources of a community this large, you can have an incredibly meaningful experience at almost no cost. We learned that we are not sheep who go astray when something happens to the shepherd, but more like geese. If you watch a flock of migrating geese, you will notice that there is always an identifiable leader, but that individual changes in a fluid and seamless manner. There is always some goose ready to step in and take responsibility.
I’ve lost both parents and many friends and relatives over the years, and this is the first time I felt that the surrounding community functioned fully as a support group. Churches didn’t do it. The workplace didn’t do it. A scattered and distant family didn’t do it, and the medical establishment certainly didn’t do it. My AA group, on the other hand, proved itself a true community. I am profoundly grateful that my home group was there for Stevie and–provided I remain an active participant–will be there for me when I face life’s inevitable difficult transitions.