Last night as I was about to walk into the 5:30 AA meeting, a flyer taped to the door caught my eye: "Please join us to celebrate the life of Richard S."
"This can't be," I thought, stunned! But the picture on the flyer confirmed it… the Richard for which the memorial was being held was the very same Richard I had asked to be my AA sponsor just before leaving for two weeks of business travel recently.
Richard!!! What happened to you??? You were one of the most decent, cheerful, uplifting, calm, rational, and encouraging people I've met since joining AA seven weeks ago today. What took you away? You haven't touched a drink in over two years!
It didn't take much Googling to discover that you apparently took your own life last week. How could that have been??? Of everyone I've met at AA, you would have been near the bottom of the list of people I would have believed would succumb to terrible disease of depression! But that's apparently what happened, and the rest of us are left to try to sort that out.
I'm thinking that Chris Prentiss is right: alcoholism isn't the disease, but rather the symptom. It's the way that people self-medicate to kill the pain of deeper suffering, and the real disease is usually depression brought on by pain that is deep and usually old. So Richard, you did a wonderful and inspiring job battling the alcohol (and winning), but the deeper pain remained, and that's what finally took you away.
For anyone who is reading this and suffering from alcohol, by all means get help for your over-consumption… but remember that if you're like most of us, the alcohol isn't the reason you drink. We all need to find those real root causes of the pain we're trying to kill if we really want to recover fully from our suffering.
