As Leonard Cohen writes in his song, Anthem:
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There’s a crack – a crack – in everything That’s how the light gets in.
I just read a fellow blogger’s heartfelt account of the bumps on her road to recovery from alcohol abuse. She spoke of her sister and asking amends for the breach in trust her drinking brought, and I couldn’t help but think of my dear brother George, who battled this disease and beat the hell out of it before he died of cancer at 54.
George was the world’s best drunk. I mean a serious, no-nonsense, let’s just get down and dirty drunk. He started drinking heavily in his mid-teens, and went literally from being a teen representative for the Episcopal Church as a missionary in the Phillapines to a high school drop-out in a record year and a half. There was nothing gradual about George’s shift from drinker to alcoholic. It was if the minute he tasted the magic of booze, he was hooked. Like I say, down and dirty and drunk with nothing much in between.
As his little sister, all I saw was the shift from being my smart, sweet, and handsome big brother to someone who no longer had time for me. He was gone emotional shortly after the heavy drinking began, and I found myself with a hole in my heart where my beloved brother had been. Gone. Even when he was around. Not present in the way that I could trust. Still, I loved him fiercely. Couldn’t not love him. And when he was sober, there he’d be. At least until he reached for that next beer.
Fast forward twenty years – he was then 37 years old and I was 34. He was about to lose his second wife and second child to alcohol and he hadn’t crawled out of the ditch from losing the first ones. Intervention time and a miracle. George went into treatment and began his road to recovery. The thought of repeating what had already broken his heart profoundly – losing his relationship with his first child due to his drinking – propelled him up through the murky waters and toward the light of a new life.
And he made it to the top. He never drank again. He worked those AA steps with honesty and effort, accepting that a higher power provided the only road he could find back to a life that he’d lost. And he came back to all who he had loved and asked amends, me being one of those people. And everyone – especially me – pulled him close and never let him go, though cancer had its ugly way with him a few short years back now and sent him to another place where he’s no doubt sitting at a sidewalk café enjoying a beer and not having one bit of trouble handling it.
Yes, Leonard Cohen got it right.
Our cracks – that truly is how the light gets in.
Opmerkingen