Widow's Voice

As Long As I Don’t Do This

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I’ve been a recovered alcoholic for 30+ years.

Chuck was a recovered alcoholic, also. He died 5 days shy of his 25th sober anniversary.  The people who came to his bedside in southern California were some of those he’d sponsored. They presented him with his 25-year coin. Which he didn’t want to take, early, but I persuaded him that he needed to, for their sake, if not for his. He’d earned it. He stayed sober through the worst pain cancer can give a person because “I don’t want to pick up a drink again, and have my alcoholism take over and leave an ugly memory of me behind, for you. I don’t want you to be glad that I’m dead, because of the agony I might have caused”.

So. Sobriety.

There are so many times I could have picked up since Chuck died.  Numbed the grief and the soul slicing pain that comes with it.  Gotten fallen down drunk and slept through the days and nights of anguish.

It would have been easy to do.  A quick trip to the corner store to pick up a bottle or two of wine (I’m a very cheap drunk) and…unconsciousness for me.

The agony of Chuck’s dying time, the all-enveloping torture of living without him…yeah, I could have absented that from my life, if I just picked up a drink.

Temporarily, to be sure, but any time spent unconscious would have been good with me.

I even had the thought…stinkin’ thinkin’ is a thing in alcoholics…that maybe, if I picked up, that could be a thing that would piss Chuck off so much that he’d come back to haunt me. Which would be something, at least. In my tortured mind.

But.

I gave drinking up years and years ago. By choice. I wanted a better life. I wanted to believe in the Promises of AA, which told me that I would find a new freedom and a new happiness.

Chuck and I celebrated the same sobriety date. April 26.

About Alison Miller

My beloved husband Chuck died while we were full timing on the road. We’d rented a condo for our stay in southern CA, and I had to leave 3 weeks after his death. All I knew at that time was that I had to find a way to continue traveling on my own, because settling down without him made me break into a cold sweat. I knew that the only place I’d find any connection to Chuck again was out on the roads we’d been traveling for our last 4 years together. I knew nobody out on the road, I knew grief was a great isolator, and I knew I had to change the way I traveled without him, to make it more emotionally bearable for me. So I bought a new car, had a shade of pink customized for it, bought a tiny trailer and painted the trim in pink, learned how to tow and camp, and set out alone. My anxiety was through the roof, and all I knew to trust was the Love that Chuck left behind for me. I found Soaring Spirits early on, thank god, and the connections I made through SS helped ground me to some extent. I needed to know that other widow/ers were out there in my world, because I felt so disoriented and dislocated. Through Soaring Spirits, as the miles added up, my rig taking me north, south, east and west, I found community. I found sanity…or at least I learned that if I was bat shit crazy, I was in good company, and realizing that ultimately saved my sanity. PinkMagic, my rig, is covered with hundreds of names of loved ones sent to me by my widowed community, and I know it isn’t visible to the naked eye, but I’ll let you in on a secret…she actually illuminates Love as I drive down the many roads in our country, and I can see it through my side view mirror. Love does, indeed, live on~

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