The next of the 3 is John…a man I have already introduced you to.  After Betsy died and her husband had moved on, it was just John and I.  We spent lots of time together traveling all over the place going to different meetings, talking and talking, dinners and things. 

It’s not normally the way or even often a good idea for men and women in AA to spend time together like this.  Betsy had warned me years before, “Don’t ever hang out with a guy alone unless you want something to happen.”  I heeded that advice and still do, it’s just the way the cookie crumbled in this specific situation.  John always treated me with the utmost respect and I, in turn, appreciated him greatly.  And I’m grateful.

He adored my daughter.  She would color him pictures to hang on his fridge and he would be ecstatic to receive them!  He would get us little gifts on our birthdays.  A gesture that didn’t go unnoticed.  One birthday he bought me a number of books all to do with writing…he believed in me even when I didn’t believe in myself (that in itself being the ultimate gift).  In one book he wrote, “I hope I can read something you write and…thanks for being a friend in sobriety & the world.”  I didn’t find that message until after he was already gone…

Once after a meeting a group of people were going out for pizza, and they asked us to join them.  We looked at each other and both shrugged our shoulders, “Ok.”  In all honesty, neither of us had anything better to do at the time.  Maybe it would make for some good conversation on the ride home, I thought.

We got to the restaurant (which was surprisingly nice) and looked inside to see if anyone was there, they weren’t.  We waited outside.  After a while, it was clear that we were at the wrong restaurant.  As we were about to leave, a car pulled in.  A woman got out and approached us…it was a woman we recognized from the meeting.  She was fairly new in sobriety and also ended up at the wrong restaurant.  The 3 of us decided to stay.

We were seated at a table by a window.  The lights were low and there was a candle lit with some fresh flowers.  Under a different circumstance it would have been quite romantic. The music was soft and rather enjoyable…

As it turned out, though, this woman was hard of hearing…

We were twelfth stepping her as it’s called in AA, just trying to help her.  We were asking her how long she had sober, if she had a sponsor, and how many meetings she was going to…she wasn’t sober long and didn’t have a sponsor and wasn’t making many meetings.  John was telling her that he had cancer and was in pain every day, but his sobriety was still the most important thing to him…he had more to say, but she couldn’t hear him…

“What?  Huh?” she said very politely.  He said it again a little louder this time.  She still couldn’t hear.  His patience was gone now and suddenly he was yelling in this nice restaurant, “I HAVE CANCER!!!”

I swear the music, along with the whole restaurant, stopped and someone turned on the lights…”Oh my gosh,” she said.  “I’m so sorry.”

I’m not sure what was so funny about this to me.  It was all the absurdity rolled into one I suppose, but I started laughing and for the life of me, I couldn’t stop.  And because I couldn’t stop, this woman didn’t believe that John had cancer, which made me laugh harder.  And because I still couldn’t stop, John too started laughing and eventually got to snorting.

Later, he thanked me.  It’s my favorite John memory…

Another time after a meeting, we decided to pull off into a wooded area to go for a walk.  We came upon a picnic table and sat on top of it.  I was struggling badly then with losing Betsy and her husband, still uneasy with feelings and processing them.  I got it all out the best way I could at the time.  Then it was his turn…

(I hope you have learned by now that I will only disclose things that I feel hold meaning in one way or another…this, I feel does and I think that John would agree.)

While he was many great things in life, he also held much anger.  This worried me for him.  He was fighting terminal cancer and soon his time would come, we knew…I just deeply wished that he could’ve made peace with his past before he left… 

His childhood was rough…when he would talk about it, it made me anxious because his anger and resentment was so enormous that it was scary.  He told me how abusive his mother was…unreasonably and unimaginably. There was little love.  He hadn’t talked to her or his siblings in years because of it…

That, I thought, was fine.  We shouldn’t be around anyone who isn’t safe for us to be around…however, he wasn’t fine.  He carried this trauma, this pain everywhere he went, and it affected him.  When members of his family would reach out to him to try to have a relationship, it would bring it all back.  He would freak out.  We would talk about it, and he was unable, unwilling, under any circumstances to forgive. 

Though, in the end, it was evident that just by not drinking and going to meetings and starting to talk about it all, a beginning was made.  He started to surrender and was thus able to tap into his true strength…you could absolutely see a change in him.

In the last few years, he met a woman.  I was happy for him that he wouldn’t be alone.  It was then kind of the natural course of things for us to disconnect to a certain extent.  Though, our bond remained.

One of the final memories I have of John is of me and 2 of our friends showing up at his girlfriend’s house where he now lived.  He loved chocolate ice cream, and we thought it would be nice to take him for some.  His girlfriend disagreed.  “Do you see him?!!  He’s going to die any day now! Do you really think he should be having ice cream?!”  She was screaming and it was shocking. It felt bad in that house and John seemed like a scared little boy.  He put his head down in a way that brings tears to my eyes in remembrance…no, he wasn’t alone anymore, but there are worse things than being alone…he was close to the end, and he wasn’t happy or at peace either…

We took him anyway.  In the car we asked him if he was ok there and if he wanted us to take him somewhere else…”No, no,” he said…

My friend deserved more, but he didn’t have enough time to work through his darkness and know that for himself so, for him, the end looked an awful lot like the beginning…nonetheless, he still left behind a great legacy…

A true testament of Alcoholics Anonymous…a story of one alcoholic helping another and not picking up a drink under any and all circumstances. A man who truly cared for others and selflessly gave of himself, expecting nothing in return. I pray that through this chapter, his life will continue to help others…