Tag: recovery

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

On February 15, 1976, I drove my red Toyota ten miles west from my Toms River, New Jersey, home to a small church meeting in Whiting.  I’d not had a drink for twenty-four hours. My head was pounding. I shook and shivered and sweated. I sat down but had one foot out the door.

Toms River shoulders the Atlantic Ocean. Most of life there happens near the ocean, its inlets, and brackish rivers. Whiting, known for the now-closed Nature’s Rest Nudist Colony, sits on unceded Leni Lenape land at the northern edge of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. It’s a defunct railroad town surrounded by scrub pines, that dreary little tree that never grows more than eighteen feet because of the sandy soil. No one goes there.

I drove to Whiting to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous because I wanted to be anonymous and not run into anyone I knew. I had an overwhelming urge to announce out loud to strangers that I was going to kill myself with vodka.

An active adult community, Crestwood Village, had risen up near Whiting. The eight men and women at the AA meeting were over fifty years old, which was a turn-off for me at twenty-nine. But I was banging on the bottom and had nothing to lose. I thought I’d spill the beans there and bug out for the liquor store on my way home.

The group of eight centered the AA meeting around me and how I could stay sober. They figured out a schedule of who could follow me home that night and stay with me for the next few days. Each day, a different soul appeared on my doorstep to feed me, talk to me, answer the dreaded phone, and connect me to an AA group in my neighborhood. Their messages were the same: you’re sick, we were sick, too. Drink water. Eat chocolate. Go to AA. They trusted me with shocking truths about their lives before sobriety. 

They traveled well beyond their small community in the Pine Barrens and re-arranged their comfortable lives to help a suffering alcoholic. The obsession to relieve my misery with booze lifted after about seven days. Each of them called every day for a month.

I never drank again. After a few months, I sold my house, gave away the dog, left an estranged husband, packed up my son and houseplants, and drove to Chicago.

I was a dead soul before I met that group of kind and loving saints in New Jersey’s outback. Every minute of every day, I thought only of drinking and not drinking.

In the forty-eight years since, I’ve met many people who have asked for help. I share the same love that was offered to me that first week. In very few cases, people have stayed sober themselves. Most have disappeared, died, or gotten pissed off and moved on. 

Love saved me. That’s all I can wish for others.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

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Day of the Living Dead

The Day of the Dead Mexican holiday, observed on November 1st celebrates the deceased with ofrendas (home altars) and festive gravesite visits. Tombstone gatherings include offerings of the deceased’s favorite food, drink, and music.

When I learned about my sister Mara’s death last spring, I reflected on our estranged relationship in a blog post. Since then, I’ve received a slew of messages from her friends that piece together a life I never knew, stories that give life to the dead.

Borrowing from the Mexican tradition, I offer an ofrenda to my older sister Mara Burke, with a sampling of those messages.

…we double-dated, attended formals at The Peddie School, and listened to music we loved. Her shop, where she helped us look stunning, but never as stunning as she looked, was where she generously gave us all our first credit cards! The slim silver bracelet she gave me many years ago is still my favorite, the many articles she sent knowing I loved cooking and gardening, and the tiny blue and white dish on my nightstand are fond remembrances of her love.

…I met Mara at the Catholic Home for Unwed Mothers.

…I interviewed Mara for a job a few years after her store closed in the early 90s. She was a talented clothier, but she showed up smelling of booze.

…Mara was on my mind,  i Googled her, saddened by the news i now read. I am happy to say that even though Mara and I were not close, we shared plenty of sobriety, laughter, and lots of very good coffee and pastry over the past 33 years.

… I met her in the 90s. We did a lot of meetings and healing through friendship with other recovering folks. She moved from Florida, and we lost touch.

…Mara came to care for me when I lost my mother years ago in a horrific accident. She has been through much with me and was selfless in her caring when my son died suddenly. My pain was her pain, and it was real.

…she always showed up for work even when she couldn’t stand up straight because of that hump on her back. She’s the best salesperson I’ve ever had.

… she was my neighbor for seven years. I set her up on a senior dating site. We laughed about all her dates. She never drank anything but coffee & ice water, attended Mass down the street and knew the priest. She said many times she wanted her ashes spread around her mother’s grave. 

…she had that beautiful speaking voice.

… we had a beautiful day to carry out Mara’s wishes. We buried a small crystal heart dish Mara had given me with her ashes. We planted daffodil bulbs to bloom in the spring, said a prayer, and sprinkled her ashes over her mother’s grave. 

Mara moved from Florida to Virginia for inexplicable reasons. Two weeks passed before her body was found on the floor of her apartment, and another week before I was called. The death certificate says she died of natural causes complicated by dementia and follicular lymphoma. 

 

RIP, Mara Burke. Born February 14, 1945, died March 13, 2023.

1971, 25 Years Old and Still Alive

In June 1971, I turned 25 years old and celebrated my first six months of sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous.

That same month, the release of the Pentagon Papers set off a firestorm of I-told-you-so outrage by Vietnam war protesters like me. All through the 1960s Washington insiders had been leaking to the press that the White House was lying about our involvement in the war in Southeast Asia. Anti-war organizations published newsletters and held NYT-pentagon-papermarches screaming at the government to pullout of Vietnam because there was no good reason for us to be there. When my son was born in 1967 I started sending streams of letters and postcards to the President and Congress begging them to end the draft. I didn’t want my son growing up in a world where he would be forced to kill another mother’s son.

My imbalanced emotional connection to the 60% of Americans who were against the war drove me to protest, argue, march and drink myself into oblivion. In December 1970, defeated, I finally collapsed, failing to escape the world of war, within and without.

Then, in my first year of recovery, the Pentagon Papers confirmed that Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson all lied about why we were in Vietnam. We stayed simply to save face, refusing to admit defeat. Troop numbers fell from 500,000 in 1968 to 156,000 by the end of 1971, the year The Pentagon Papers were published.

And so what? The world went on. Jim Morrison died in his bathtub in Paris. I read The Exorcist, rocked out at George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh and women were allowed to run the Boston Marathon.

The Pentagon Papers’ exposure of the government’s lying treachery slow-cooked beyond my consciousness. My AA meetings in Point Pleasant, NJ, seduced me with a new recipe for living, replacing the bitter stew of the wearying world. A wise woman at my meetings gave me two pieces of advice: 1) don’t comment at meetings about outside issues and, 2) wear a bra. I did both and managed to attract a ne’er-do-well fellow AA’er, ten years older. Ed professed some kind of love, so I moved in with him.

Julius Roehrs Garden Center hired me to make terrariums in glass bowls, a new fad. It 805160-03-1was my first job as a sober adult. I spent all day in a greenhouse planting miniature sedum and echeveria while having LSD flashbacks and dancing around to tunes only I could hear. My son, Joe, had been living with his grandparents for his kindergarten year and came to live with Ed and me. Disney World Orlando had just opened, so we read up on how to camp, then packed our new tent, camp stove and sleeping bags into Ed’s Mustang and drove down I-95 to the Yogi Bear Campground.

It rained. Ed and I fought. He got drunk and disappeared.

I drove Joe home—1,000 miles back to New Jersey.

When Ed showed up a few months later, we got married.

The Reunion by Regan Burke

In the locked ward of the Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital in Monmouth County, New Jersey, I was withdrawing from my demons – cheap wine, LSD, amphetamines and marijuana – when my long-absent father appeared before me. I was 24 years old. The last time I’d seen him, the week before I was to enter Monmouth College, I’d knocked on the door of his mid-town Manhattan apartment seeking money to pay my first year’s tuition. He was drunk, wrapped tight in a dirty blue bathrobe. He wrote me a check, then stopped payment before I could get to the Admissions Office in Long Branch, an hour down the Garden State Parkway.

Fresh out of a straight-jacket, I had no clothes or shoes of my own, having arrived at the public madhouse in an ambulance after a drug overdose. I wore a short-sleeved baggy muslin dress from the institutional collection designed and made by the permanent residents.

“You have a visitor,” the nurse said before escorting me from my cell-like room to the end of the hallway into a clean and airy space she called the Day Room. There were windows along the wall opposite the door, starting maybe six feet up from the floor and reaching the ceiling. For the first time I realized my confinement was subterranean.

My father turned toward me. His brown felt fedora, soft brimmed with a hand-creased crown, topped his elegant duds: white open-necked shirt, tweed sports jacket, gabardine trousers and cordovan wing-tips. A miasma of feelings engulfed me. I feared him. I missed him. I loved him. I hated him.

Why didn’t she say it was my father? I had no idea how to talk to him, or anyone else for that matter. My body shook and rattled as I searched for some kind of appropriate words. I knew only hippy language.

“Hey, man. Far out. You’re here. I’m a little strung out.”

He told me his story of recovery from alcoholism. He loved the effect from his first teenage beer. After that, once he picked up the first drink he binged until he was forced to stop. He had been in and out of jail for getting in fights, drunken driving and cashing bad checks. He couldn’t hold a job. In the end, he holed up in the New York apartment drinking quarts of scotch round the clock until an old friend knocked on his door.

“Had enough, Burke?”

After years of trying on his own, these bewitching words got him to open the door and allow a few men from Alcoholics Anonymous to enter his life. The obsession to drink lifted. “A miracle,” he called it.

He told me about an AA meeting at the hospital. He didn’t suggest I go, didn’t offer to take me, didn’t tell whoever was charged with moving me around my current existence. He just laid the words down. And then he left. He never removed his hat.

About 25 years into my own recovery — admitting defeat, examining resentments, practicing forgiveness, making amends and consciously increasing a spiritual life — that reunion with my father came back to me. I now know supernatural love and courage drove him to bestow his abundant legacy, the gift of sobriety.