By the time he died, Dad’s body was wasted. The cancer had eaten through his left humerus—fracturing the upper arm-bone. The nurses splinted his arm. The cancer had colonized his lungs and his entire GI tract. Coupled with his cirrhosis, his gut couldn’t function, and his belly blew up like a hot-air balloon. Between his arm and his abdomen, he was in severe pain. I’d stand next to his bed in the hospital feeling helpless and wishing I could insert some kind of valve just to let off the pressure inside his belly.

I wanted to scream, Couldn’t they invent a device like that to ease my father’s suffering? Instead I stood there, just watching him, and holding his hand.

He didn’t complain. He lay there, passively. He was a pretty passive guy when you got right down to it. He never took care of his body, he only rarely confronted my mother about her aggressive ways. He drank instead. It numbed him out. It “calmed” him.

I’d come to the hospital with little cans of tomato juice—the only thing he liked to drink in lieu of beer. I used to wish I could bring him a six-pack.

The nurses were giving him morphine, which exacerbated the blockage in his gut, plus a small 25 microgram fentanyl patch. I used to want to fight with the nurses (I was my mother’s daughter; I’m expert at arguing, at fighting, at digging in my heels, at thinking I have the answers—these are habits of mind I’ve tried to give up in sobriety) and get them to ditch the morphine and up the fentanyl because fentanyl is a cleaner drug, it has fewer GI side-effects than morphine by far, but I didn’t want to give away the fact that I myself had vast personal experience with opioids (“How do you know so much about this, Ms. M?”).

So in this way, I failed to advocate for my father’s care. Because I was in my addiction, I stood by and let him be in pain. It’s hard to forgive myself for that, even after five years. I see him now, in my mind’s eye, in the dark room, lying there on that last day, breathing shallowly, his body draped in a white sheet, wasted except for his swollen belly, unable to move, unable really to speak. I picked up his bible and read the first chapter of the Gospel of John to him. It begins:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

As I read, the tears fell from the corners of his eyes. John I was his favorite chapter: Dad believed in the Word. Not quite in the same way I believe in words, but we had that in common—love for the power of language, the power of communication, and belief in spirit.

Dad taught me never to stop talking with people I care about.

Dad died quickly. He was diagnosed with cancer the first week of January and he died February 1. I told a friend recently that I thought he just wanted to get back to my mother. “That’s romantic,” my friend said.

“It’s not romantic, it’s religious,” I snapped. “He believed in heaven and he believed my mother was waiting for him.”

“It’s still romantic,” my friend said. “You might believe in heaven, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you want to be with the person when you get there.”

Huh. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Dad was a romantic. He used to buy my mother jewelry—sometimes big jewelry, extravagant stuff that she was too afraid to wear. A six-carat garnet cocktail ring with diamonds on either side (“Joseph, where the hell do you think I’m going to wear this?—we don’t GO to cocktail parties”). Ruby-and-diamond earrings. He used to take me to Bailey Banks & Biddle to pick stuff out for her. I loved standing next to him at the bright jewelry cases, looking at the rivers of gems, knowing that Mom was due for a surprise and that Dad had let me in on it.

My mother was a beautiful woman but she never learned to accept her own beauty. I learned that from her, too, and that’s another thing I’m trying to change.

I bought myself a diamond ring when I sold my first book. Over Christmas I took my friend Lucy to our favorite jewelry store to help me pick out a moonstone-and-diamond ring, a big one that Dad would have liked.

My mother's rose-window necklace.

Daddy gave me my mother’s most prized piece of jewelry after she died: a gold replica of the rose window in Notre Dame cathedral. He brought it back from Paris in 1984 and she wore it every day. My son used to chew on it when he was a baby sitting on her lap. Now I wear it pretty often, along with the pearl earrings Dad bought me when I turned 40.

//

I was out walking yesterday in the 60-degree day with my spiritual mentor, my 72-year-old surrogate mom, and we were talking about how hard it is to get old and the decisions she’s made to take care of herself so she can enjoy as much of her life as she can. I told her that it had been five years since my dad died, and that he had only stopped drinking in the last month of his life—after he was diagnosed with cancer. “That’s counter-intuitive,” she said. She’s right.

I’m taking the month of February to rest from this blog. Since I started Guinevere Gets Sober two years ago, I haven’t had significant time away, and I need to look after some other stuff.

My life has expanded so much in the two years since I started writing for you. I’m planning even better things in the time to come, including a redesigned site.

Fear of abandonment is one of my strongest shortcomings, so I hope you don’t leave me. But if you do, you do.

If you don’t, see you in March.

P & P's sweet yellow lab, who I love and who loves me.

Last night went to a 50^th birthday party for my friend P. This morning her husband (also called P) phoned to thank me for helping him in the kitchen. I didn’t do much: gave him instructions for browning his baked brie (under the broiler), taught him how to use his own convection oven, and oversaw the complex, gourmet task of heating the Costco frozen mini hotdogs wrapped in puff pastry.

Over the phone this morning, P said her husband was suffering from an infection in one of his molars. His jaw was killing him.

“Hasn’t the doctor given him anything for the pain?” I asked. “Codeine?” They’ve known I’m an addict since the summer day in 2010 that I told them at the Tate Modern in London, looking at Niki de Saint Phalle’s “shooting” paintings.

“Yes: I picked up a Z-Pac for him this morning for the infection,” she said. I sat there waiting for her to announce Which Drug he’d been given.

“And he also has Vicodin.”

Aha!

“But they didn’t want him to take it during the party last night.”

Of course. Because he’d have been drinking. Also, it might make him sleepy. Vicodin makes normal people sleepy, and sometimes nauseated. It makes addicts like me wake up and want to clean the entire fucking house from attic to basement, all the while sorting out three or four book chapters in our minds. “My house was never so clean as when I was using,” my friend L murmured to me the other day during a meeting when someone mentioned Vicodin.

Once upon a time, if a friend mentioned she had Vicodin in the house, I might have felt an immediate, overwhelming drive to invent a pretext for coming over right away, eagle eyes scouting around for the brown plastic bottle with the child-proof cap. They say you’re either moving toward a drink/drug or away from one, and today I didn’t have that compulsion—I had the memory of it, but not the actual feeling—so today I think I’m sober.

The reality is, drugs are everywhere, anyway. In order not to descend into insanity, I have to keep steering into some kind of solution.

“Has he taken any?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “but it’s not helping.”

“When did he take it?” I asked.

She handed the phone to her husband. He said he’d taken one 7.5mg pill two-and-a-half hours before.

“G, why isn’t it helping?” he asked.

Because the fucking drugs never take away all the pain, I thought. They just take away part of it and make you not-care about the rest.

“Because when you have severe acute pain, sometimes you need a bit extra to get on top of it,” I said. That’s what they taught me at the pain clinic: when a flare comes along, try to anticipate it and take a bit extra. I suggested he take one more, and then dose every 4-6 hours as it said on the bottle.

“Is that going to be OK?” he said.

“You don’t have a problem taking drugs,” I said, “so you’re not going to have any trouble. And that much Tylenol isn’t going to hurt you. Just don’t take more than that. And why don’t you try putting some ice on your face?”

I call him a couple hours later and the one extra has helped him get on top of the pain. “It’s just like you said,” he tells me. “It’s not all gone, but it’s not killing me anymore.”

Would P ever think of chewing the Vicodin? Hell no.

//

A couple days ago I get an email from a reader, a guy about my age. Dave from California. He’s sitting out in San Diego or somewhere waiting for spinal surgery, he’s got 16 years clean and sober, the pain is frigging driving him nuts. He NEEDS to make it go away. He thanks me for my post about Chewing Vicodin.

This post gets tons of hits. There are many, many of you out there, pills in your hot little hands, wanting to know “how to maximize the effects of Vicodin.”

“I have found myself wanting to chew the medicine,” Dave writes.

Would P ever think of chewing the Vicodin?—I ask myself again. Hell no: because P isn’t an addict. P can have one or two glasses of wine. He can choose which it’s going to be: one—or two.

“Sixteen years clean,” Dave writes, “and as soon as the pain gets too big I start to think I know a better way to take pills. Thank you. Keep doing what you do. It is a service for which I am grateful.”

//

If I had a dollar for every time someone has told me to keep doing what I do with this blog, I’d have a nice packet of dough. It’s very, very kind of people to say this. I’m grateful for you guys who read me. For the many people like Dave who check in and find help and who are generous enough to let me know about it.

Dave is having his surgery today. He’s going to be in a lot of pain. I’m holding him in the light. That’s how Quakers talk about praying for someone: “holding you in the light.” (I’ve been walking around these days, holding a bunch of people in the light. It’s quite a comforting thing to do, praying for someone else’s ass life besides my own.)

“Pain sucks, man, I know,” I write to Dave, “but one addict praying for another is a powerful thing.”

If you have a moment, maybe you’d be willing to drop a note in the God-box for Dave.

Why not also pray for P?—Actually, I pray for P, too, he and his wife are quite often on my gratitude lists, but I know P will be all right. It’s Dave I’m worried about. He’s dealing with two monsters.

"Regret," self-portrait sketch of G

I was told recently by a non-alcoholic, non-addict that it’s selfish of people in recovery to put our sobriety before everything else in life—that when we say we need to put our sobriety before our marriages, our kids, everything else, what we’re really saying is that our addictions give us license to do whatever we want for ourselves and in our lives.

I tried to talk about how recovery asks us to serve, to look for God’s will and challenge our selfish and self-seeking behavior, but I seemed to dig myself deeper into a hole because in fact “God” seems to be expanding my life in unexpected ways that look selfish to some people in it—even to myself.

Have you ever had trouble talking about this idea with friends or loved ones—or even thinking about it in relation to them? Has it ever been difficult for you to put your recovery over the people in your life, or your work, your achievements?

Has putting recovery first ever resulted in your making changes in your life that others didn’t expect or like? Has your pursuing sobriety ever hurt anyone else? (one of my biggest fears: hurting someone else unintentionally.)

I really need to hear your experience with this today, so I hope you’ll let it rip.

I started thinking about whether exercise could help or hinder recovery when a guy who sometimes reads this blog emailed me at 4 a.m. one morning saying he couldn’t stop thinking about how one of the members of his recovery community had killed himself. A “meeting-a-day guy,” he said, and a finisher of “many Ironman triathlons”—a guy who worked it, and who expected it to work for him, because, as we say, “It works if you work it.”

I never say that at the end of meetings. I don’t believe “it works if you work it.” Recovery is not about self improvement (I tried it). It’s about self acceptance. (The hardest lesson for me.)

My experience is, the bad shit doesn’t stop happening just because I get sober. (God, how I wish it did.) Bad shit keeps happening, keeps happening, and because I’m sober I feel it even more deeply. Which can so totally suck. Or it can be beautiful:

I Feel Life.

Feelings Pass.

Exercise can become a compulsive behavior just like any other behavior. Exercise can be another way to get out of feeling the feelings. The push to exceed limits raises adrenaline and dopamine just like cocaine and speed do, producing a chemical rush. Just watching your body improve in the mirror gives you a rush.

G's body after two rounds of P90X, late fall 2011.

Last year I started an intensive exercise regimen. My only goal was to test my strength. I completed two 90-day rounds, and in the other six months I scaled back to three to five days per week. My body changed. In the downtime, I decided I had to exercise not for vanity reasons.

I used to take drugs to be thin, to fit into jeans that were too small for my body, to feel my bones stick out, to feel wraithlike and spidery

G's skinny-ass little body two weeks before going into detox, August 2008.

(this is unhealthy sick but this is the way girls are taught they ought to feel)

I decided I had to exercise for my health. To accept myself. To surrender to what my body would become. Not to sculpt it into what I thought it ought to be.

Exercise is like medicine.

No: exercise IS medicine.

Good food is medicine.

Rest is medicine.

Work in moderation is medicine.

Play is medicine.

Prayer and meditation are medicine.

And an attitude of self-acceptance is medicine.

These exercise gurus I interviewed—they’re all over 40, and they’ve all got at least 15 years sober. Catra Corbett, she’s 47, my age, she’s amazing! She works in a San Francisco Whole Foods selling vitamins and supplements, she’s the one in the store who knows about nutrition and the difference between vegetarianism and veganism and who can tell you what food to buy if you want a healthy body. And when business slows down in the summer (because in the Bay Area everybody’s outside from April through September), Catra takes a month off and just goes solo fast-pack trail-running all over the place. Check out her Facebook page. Check out this photo.

Ultra-marathoner Catra Corbett, looking about 27 at 47

She runs, she says, not to look hot or to look 20 years younger than she is, but to stay clean and sober and sane. She has 19 years off booze and drugs.

The other guys are amazing too—Todd Crandell, Shane Niemeyer, Dan Cronin. And the guy who emailed me is equally amazing, if not in some ways more amazing, but I promised I’d keep him anonymous. (No idea why my editor named him “Brian.” Editors do funny things sometimes.) Each of them demonstrates self-acceptance, as well as a desire to maintain their fitness in order to help others.

What do you do to stay fit and sane and sober?

Bikram?

Biking?

Ultramarathoning?

Dog-walking? (I’m thinking about getting a dog.)

Tell me.

“I can’t stop thinking about it—I don’t know why,” the person said. “Except I think to myself, That could have been me. What she was doing wasn’t very far from where I was when I finally got sober.”

I was sitting on the floor (we had so many people today, there wasn’t room enough for chairs for everyone) thinking about Virginia. A woman who used to live in this house.

When we moved in here in 1993, I was out back double-digging the garden one day when I introduced myself to the old lady who lived next door. “My husband and I have just bought this house. We’re happy to be your neighbors,” I said. She fixed me with a steely stare.

“My daughter died in that house,” she said, her head shaking in an almost palsied way.

“Oh my God,” I said. What else to say? “I’m so sorry . . .”

“You should find out things like this before you buy a place.”

So I checked it out. I went to the office of the recorder of deeds (this was in the days before electronic recordkeeping) and found out that our house had been bought in 1969 by our next-door-neighbors, who in 1972 sold it to their elder daughter, Virginia, and her husband Raymond, I guess so they could have her living nearby. Virginia moved in with Ray and their three-year-old daughter. Then in 1974 Raymond sold the house, which, the deed said, he owned in full after his wife’s death in 1973.

Her death?

So I called the coroner. (These are the things that, as a reporter, you learn are possible to do: you can go to the deeds office, you can call the coroner, you can say you’re investigating a death and get the public information.)

I told the assistant I was investigating a death that had occurred in June 1973. He whistled at the early date and said he’d do some checking. An hour later he called back and said he’d found her name.

“Right,” he said, “cause of death was pentobarbital poisoning, location”—and he named the address of our house—“30-year-old white female, date of death six-three-seventy-three, manner—”

“Wait a minute!” I said, scribbling furiously.

“—manner of death undetermined,” he finished. “But there was an autopsy done, and the cause of death was determined to be pentobarbital and Tylenol poisoning.”

Suicide, I thought. Or an accident. Or, less likely, murder.

“So there’s no way we can know how she died?” I asked.

“What you mean? She died of a drug overdose,” he said.

//

Nembutal caps, otherwise known as Yellowjackets.

The Physician’s Desk Reference says pentobarbital is more commonly called Nembutal. It has a very high bioavailability, meaning not much of the drug passes through the system unmetabolized—your body gets most of the dose. It’s processed by the liver and discharged by the kidneys. Wikipedia says it has been used in Oregon for physician-assisted suicide and “in various U.S. states” for use in executions. It is said to be the drug that killed, for example, Marilyn Monroe. It was one of the drugs used by the waste-case Hollywood characters in Valley of the Dolls. In the U.S. it’s classified as Schedule II, the same as all the drugs I was on in the last four years or so of my addiction. It’s majorly habit-forming; it’s one of those drugs that’s very effective if you want to not-feel.

//

Even before I admitted I was an addict, I thought it was pretty ironic that I was living in a house where a previous owner had OD’d. Virginia’s story was one of the many stories that helped me get sober. I didn’t want to die in my bedroom, as she did.

Did she in fact die in our bedroom? Did she die in the bathroom? Did she die in the adjoining room I use as my study? Did she die in the night, in the day, as she was falling asleep, before she could wake up? Was her little girl in my study or across the hall, in my son’s room?

I can’t know any of this, but I do know that it could have been me, and it wasn’t.

The first thing I noticed on the tape: he sounded drunk. Lazy enunciation, slightly slurred, things you don’t notice unless you haven’t seen the person in, say, five years.

The second thing I noticed: he sounded sick. The recording was made in June 2006, eight months before he died. But we didn’t know then that he had cirrhosis and massive GI cancer.

I listened to him talk, then after about five minutes I had to shut the tape recorder off because I could feel a ripping sensation coming up from my gut through the center of my chest, and as I pressed the “off” button I bent over into a soft moan.

Grief is a strange thing. It comes in waves. For me it’s activated by some physical experience—a bodily sensation. The act of hearing my father’s voice. I shut the machine off just as he was laughing. For such a big man, Dad’s laughs weren’t loud. But they shook his entire body. He usually sat with his legs crossed at the knee, and one arm folded over his huge beer-gut. His broad shoulders were always hunched over, permanently rounding out his wide back, and his laugh would make his shoulders bounce up and down.

And his blue-gray eyes would hold a pleasant squint as he regarded you happily.

It’s always the memory of his laugh that makes my son cry. He was crying about it again just the other night. Both his grandfathers died around this time of year—his paternal grandfather died the second week of January last year; and Dad died the first of February 2007. “I miss Grandpa,” my son said, and I said, “Yes, it’s been just about a year, hasn’t it?”

“But what about Grandpa Greenie?” he said. We always called my dad Greenie. (A long story.)

“Yeah,” I said, “Greenie’s been gone for almost five years.” Five. Years.

“He was so nice,” my son said.

“He loved you very much,” I said. I always say.

//

A lot of people think the drinker in the family is the mean one, but in my family the drinker was kind and gentle, and the “sober” parent was the schoolmistress, the general, the warden. The critic.

I was talking yesterday to another child of a wildly alcoholic family, the writer Kaylie Jones, author of the memoir Lies My Mother Never Told Me. I asked her what it is about growing up in an alcoholic family that makes us so pathologically afraid of life. “I think,” she said,

I don’t know—but I think in my case, I was derided and laughed at always, so any feeling I had was worthy of a joke. When your feelings are belittled like that, you have a natural aversion to the possibility of failing or being laughed at.

“So you learned to hide,” I said.

“Yes. And I learned to quit,” she said.

This blog has helped me by forcing me to come out of hiding. By forcing me not to quit. You help me by reading it.

In order to run a blog, I have to write the blog. This week I joined a site called 750words.com, which has given me another way of forcing myself not to quit. I have a lot of big ideas that want to come out onto the page, I can feel them, I’ve felt this way before, they’re dammed up inside there and the reservoir is sloshing close to the edge. But my mother’s voice

(you think you’re so goddam special, what makes you think you’re so goddam special? what makes you think you can do what you want? what makes you think you can just book a flight to chicago and ask those people to pull paintings out of storage for you to study? who the hell do you think you are? who the hell)

is telling me to scale it back, to go into hiding, not to trust people, never to ask for help. To quit.

G's son critiquing awesome and quite famous paintings by Sargent and Homer at a private curated study session of 60-some watercolors, Metropolitan Museum, 2006. Photo by G's friend Nan.

So this morning I booked a slot at the Art Institute of Chicago to look at some of my favorite paintings. In reading about these works on the Art Institute’s site, I found out that one of these artists learned how to improve his style by (duh) studying other artists’ works at another museum. Did he waste a lot of time wondering whether he was good enough or “special enough” to study these works?—I doubt it. He just did it.

So this is how it happens, how I get sober and counteract my alcoholic childhood: I follow the intuitive thought

(maybe i could use my free ticket to go to chicago; maybe the chicago museum does the same thing as the met did six or seven years ago, and pulls paintings for people to study, maybe i could do this more often than once every six or seven years)

and life becomes alive.

(WHAT THE HELL MAKES YOU SO SPECIAL?)

Mum: shut up for a while, OK? I love you, but just sit down.

When I figure out what I need and go after it, life becomes exciting. The excitement, as long as I can tolerate the anxiety of it, makes me want to stay sober. When I’m in that attitude of finding things out, making life interesting, meeting new people, and enjoying myself, I’m moving further away from a drink or a drug.

The star at the top of our tree.

The phone rang this afternoon when I was between two pieces of work. It was a sponsee calling me to congratulate me on two years sober today.

Part of me feels like it’s weird for me to take credit for being sober. (Ego alert: I can’t take credit!! omg, I am so fucked up that how can I possibly take credit for anything?? and I can’t give up being fucked-up; being super-fucked-up is proof of how special I am.) If it’s not a matter of my doing it on my own, if it’s “another” power doing it, then how can I take credit?

But that’s bullshit, too. I made a decision (many decisions) to be sober, and as I told my sponsee today, there have been times I’ve just gritted my teeth and not-used and not-drunk so I could stay sober. For example, after finding top-shelf drugs in my space this summer.

I do a lot of “footwork” so I can live free. I “bust my ass,” as my mother would say. So I guess I can accept some credit.

This sponsee is an artist who just moved back to town after graduating from an art program in NYC. She left high school in 2006. She got sober a year ago, at 21. I’m way old enough to be her mom, and it’s cool that we can have this relationship. Sometimes she’ll call and I’ll ask “What are you doing today?” and she’ll say “I’m drawing,” and for me it’s motivating to hear someone say they’re spending part of the day making art. I like her drawings a lot. And they say your sponsees put you on your game; I’ve been listening to this one talk for a couple of months about how she’s making drawings, she’s working on a book of art, and today I finally got back into the studio.

I talked with this sponsee about creativity and recovery, about how “rigorous honesty” is helpful in creative life, about how anxiety during the creative process can be productive, and about how our dishonesty isn’t about lies, per se—we don’t tell bald-faced whoppers—it’s more about believing delusions about ourselves:

• I’m fucked up
• I’m ugly
• I’m worthless
• I’m a loser
• I’m going nowhere
• I never work hard enough
• I suck
• I’ve fucked up too much in life to change things now

Well, what the hell—I suppose after all these might be considered bald-faced whoppers. But we don’t tell these lies with a purpose to deceive or hurt other people. We tell them because they feel like God’s own truth. These are the kinds of messages I’ve heard a lot of recovering women say they tell themselves. Their very authentic feel makes it difficult to work against them.

I relapsed because of delusions like these. At the time (Jan. 2, 2010), I was comparing myself to a handful of women, mothers of friends of my son’s, who I thought were richer, hotter, better moms, more fortunate, more “successful,” and as a result happier than I was. I mean if they’re richer, hotter and more “successful,” they must be happier than I am, right? So, like, while dwelling on the lives of these Amazing Babes (none of my business), and psychically speaking falling into a pit of spikes with blood at the bottom (favorite image of my imaginative kid), I took drugs.

Great solution.

One rule of thumb I’ve been using the last two years when it comes to delusion is a guideline I heard pretty soon after I first got sober in 2008. They said:

You’re either moving toward a drink or a drug

Or you’re moving away from a drink or a drug

So any thought that makes me want to drink or use—I look for the delusion in that thought. The lie.

One of my new year’s resolutions is to understand thoughts as choices, and to choose what I want to think. For example, instead of choosing to tell myself I’m fucked up, I choose to tell myself I’m doing just fine. Based on the data, the facts, I am.

As I was finishing this post, another sponsee called to congratulate me on two years sober. This person has eight years. I sponsor her in Al-Anon. “If I don’t keep myself sober,” I said, “how am I supposed to take credit?”

“You can be grateful,” she said.

I am that, too.

And then there’s the other party, the office party, which is an annual affair given by (and for) colleagues of my husband’s. There will be lots of people talking office politics, which is always, in my opinion, a super-fun blast. There will be many slightly nervous people standing around with their arms folded across their ribs, one hand holding a drink. There will be a few almost secretly sober people but most of the people there will be drinking—to “break the ice,” to ease their nerves, TGIF and Merry Christmas and ho-ho-ho. Eggnog for “holiday cheer.” Drinking to “be sociable.”

So which party would you rather go to?

Unfair question. Actually I want to go to both of them. There will be people I want to see at both parties. And I like going to gigs with my husband. He never has any trouble talking to anybody. (Or he never seems to.)

I hardly ever write about my husband because he’s a very private person. But the fact is, he drinks, and I don’t. I asked him this morning why he will have a couple beers at the office party.

“One beer,” he said. “I never have more than one.”

“One beer then,” I said.

He came up with a bunch of answers: “To be sociable,” he said.

“So not-drinking is being unsociable?” I said.

“It’s not sharing in what is offered,” he said.

“So why don’t you share in the Pepsi that’s offered?” I said.

“I hate Pepsi,” he said.

After hashing out the reasons people drink (“as a social lubricant” was my favorite: as though partying were the equivalent of possibly painful sex, and you need a few dollops of good lube to get through it) he said that he thinks a lot of people drink because “they like to get half-crocked.”

“You mean drunk,” I said.

He looked at me dubiously.

“Well, if they get half-crocked, then what’s fully-crocked?” I said.

“Falling-down,” he said.

“So if being fully-crocked is falling-down toilet-hugging drunk, then half-crocked is impaired—it means you can’t drive, it means you’re drunk,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “Drunk, then. A lot of people like to get a little loosey-goosey.”

There are all kinds of names for it (see Christopher Hitchens’s list for some examples). My husband talked about how, ever since I got sober, he has become bothered by the “normative drinking” in our culture, which is to say the way everyone expects everyone to drink when socializing. In the student newspaper, he said, there are stories talking about the best bars around campus.

“I mean, they’re not even old enough to drink, right?” he asked. “And the campus newspaper is telling them the best places to go drink.”

A couple months ago I went to a women’s blogging conference in New York City. The opening reception was held in the hotel bar. I arrived half an hour into it and there were a couple hundred women crowded around the bar, eating fancy little canapés and “being sociable” with their drinks. I hadn’t gone to a bar to drink in maybe 15 years. I’d forgotten what it was like: people “breaking the ice,” screaming laughter, hollering drink-orders at the bartenders; people being nervous to meet strangers and drinking so they could talk more; some people feeling so nervous that they were sitting by themselves in a corner, or standing against the bar, holding a drink, their faces like shutters against a storm.

I threaded my way down to the empty end of the oval bar and asked for a ginger ale. The barman gave it to me in a tall pint-glass.

“Could I have it in a wine glass, please?” I said.

So he put it into a wine glass, and I looked, in the dark room, as though I might be drinking champagne. And I Didn’t Drink all night, and I had a good time meeting a bunch of interesting new people.

(“Is that OK—to pretend you’re drinking when you’re not?” I recently asked some sober women. “Hell yeah!” they said.)

So here’s what I’m doing to get ready to party tomorrow without drinking or using.

1. Talking about it with you. Just being open about what’s real always helps me do life honestly. What’s real for me is: I no longer want to drink to have fun. And I no longer have to.
2. Going with someone I like. I like my husband. He’s fun to hang with. We can read each other’s minds across the room. I have his back, and he has mine.
3. Looking fabulous. My wardrobe will be: small black sweater studded with tiny glittery black beads (Eileen Fisher), skinny black velvet jeans (Citizens), and black kitten-heel boots. (Believe it or not, got all this second-hand.) Midnight-blue Hard Candy eye-liner stuff and iridescent pink Sephora lip gloss. Looking Awesome is part of my internal higher-power thing. The better I take care of myself, the more I respect myself. … What do you do to look fabulous?
4. Letting people know I don’t drink. Showing up looking fabulous and then telling people I don’t drink is an interesting experience. Some of them look at me and, I suspect, it crosses their minds that it might actually be possible to Look Fabulous and Have Fun and Not Drink, all at the same time. … Some want to know why I don’t drink. I’m more forthcoming about my reasons with some than with others. At this office party last year I told one person (an old colleague of mine) that I’m an addict, and it turned out that they come from a family almost as rife with addiction as my own. It was only after I was honest with this person that I realized I’d never seen them drink at parties, either. Whenever I see this person now, I can tell we understand each other in a very comforting way. … With other people I just say that drinking gives me migraines (it does), or that I lost a lot of people in my family to alcoholism (I did).
5. Chill. When it gets too much, instead of having a drink (or better yet, popping some pills), I just go off by myself. I’ll make a call, check my email, fire off some texts, look at Facebook, read the frigging Wall Street Journal on my phone—whatever it takes to chill out. If I go to the bathroom and I’m tempted (just out of curiosity) to open the medicine cabinet, I look in the mirror and tell myself, “I don’t do that anymore,” because I don’t.
6. Leave. I leave parties when I want to. I actually know what I want now, because I’m sober. I plan ahead to leave by a certain time, without regrets. When it’s time, it’s time.

For another perspective, here is how my mate Sacha Scoblic, author of Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety, is planning to party sober.

When in doubt, go to Thoreau.

Have you ever gone to a Gifts of the Program holiday meeting?

I went to one the other night, at a Tuesday-night Al-Anon meeting I’ve gone to off and on since 1999.

Some of the same people who came 13 years ago still come to this meeting. I used to drop in every week, Tuesdays at 8, in the first part of 1999, on my way back from my parents’ house in the suburbs.
After three months of going to these meetings I found out that my mother was dying of her lung cancer, and from March to June 1999 I drove out every day to take care of her and my father. Then on my way back, on Tuesdays, I’d stop in at the meeting.

Back then, the meeting was in a damp church basement pocketed with mildew, and the ancient sofas scattered around the perimeter of the small basement room where we met were funky and gross. I’d flop down in a corner of the musty green couch and cry. I didn’t knit back then. If I’d been able to knit, I might not have cried. But the people in that room just let me cry, and they patted my shoulder and told me to keep coming back.

My mother died in June. In December, I went to their Gifts of the Program holiday meeting. The lights were turned off and there were red candles burning down the length of a long table, with pine branches and sparkling ornaments. The table was gorgeous, in my memory I can still see how warm and lovely the room was, but I could not take its beauty in. I was numb. Not just from drugs (I was taking some drugs then, small amounts, two or three Tylenol #3 I think, or maybe one Lorcet each day, not much at all, and I was not drinking) but I was numb also from the pain and grief of seeing and remembering (over and over, remembering) how my mother had died. I couldn’t stand to feel my feelings. There’s a part of me that still can’t—that’s the part that’s the addict, the daughter of an alcoholic family.

At that Gifts of the Program meeting in 1999 they passed a basket and people were instructed to take a “gift” as the basket came to them. The gifts that year were bookmarks, and on each was printed a “gift” the program is supposed to give us. My gift that year was “Joy.”

I carried the bookmark in my daily planner all through the year 2000. That was supposed to be a good year. On paper, it was: I had a book contract, I had a lot of other work, my beautiful healthy son was in a high-quality Montessori preschool for half-days. We were splitting our time between two cities. There was opportunity. But I couldn’t see the opportunities, and I couldn’t feel joy.

That summer my father came back from a European trip and almost died from pneumonia. My brother and I looked at each other over his body, trembling on a hospital ice-bed, and wondered if we were also losing Dad.

Shit happens, and that year shit kept happening. I kept having feelings about it that I was afraid to have.

Week after week I’d look at the bookmark in my calendar and I’d try to summon up the joy but I was just pissed that God Had Killed My Mother. (Suffocating myself, blinding myself, with self-pity.)

That’s the part of me, the addict and daughter of the alcoholic family, that keeps feeling her feelings over and over. Choosing to feel them over and over. Which is called “resentment.”

resent v. Origin late 16^th century, from the obsolete French resentir, from “re” (expressing intensive force) + “sentir,” to feel

Joy may have been given back then—for example each time my son came home happy from school, or during the three-foot lake-effect snowstorm when he ran around the house hollering, “Mama—it’s thundering and lightning-ing and snowing!”—but I didn’t accept it.

//

There’s the addict part of me, the child-of-an-alcoholic-family part that is too afraid to watch the wave of feelings coming to knock her down. Then there’s another growing part of me that’s OK standing onshore and watching the wave come, then allowing herself to be knocked down, then getting back up again and spitting out the sand. Someday I might be able to plan for it, to keep standing as the wave crashes.

They say quite often that God does for us what we can’t do for ourselves. They less often say that God doesn’t do for us what we can do for ourselves.

//

I’ve gone to 13 Gifts of the Program meetings over the years at that meeting. I went while I was falling down into addiction and I drew gifts like “Self-worth,” “Happiness,” “Wisdom,” “Honesty.” Some of them were little flat gingerbready ornaments that I’d hang on the tree or stick on the fridge. Some were party favors that I put in my bedside table drawer, and they’re still there. Some I lost.

Then I got sober. Getting sober is largely about accepting reality, and the reality is, I can have self-worth, happiness, wisdom, honesty. I can have joy even when shit is hitting the fan. The reality is, I have choices.

Last week’s meeting was in that group’s “new” home of the past two or three years, a clean basement room in a church at a major intersection about a mile or two from my house. They had icicle lights hanging from the ceiling and tables jammed with foil pans of lasagna, crock pots full of steaming kielbasa and sauerkraut, big bowls of lettuce and pasta salads, plates and boxes of cookies and brownies. I brought my husband’s roasted winter vegetables, with horseradish sauce: the parsnips are my favorite. I hadn’t seen some of those people for months but when they saw me they called my name and put their arms around me.

I got a plain, no-nonsense gift: “Keep It Simple.”

Last night I had trouble sleeping. I’d gotten a disturbing email that had made me (you guessed it) pissed off and self-pitying. I twisted in bed and wrinkled up the sheets for a while, then I made a choice. I put my socks on and lit a lamp in my dark study. I made some lists: deadlines to meet; presents to buy; rooms to clean; calls to make. I put a date next to each one.

One of my new year’s resolutions is to get a handle on time.

Once I’d simplified the next five or six days, I could sleep.

“What—is he finally in rehab?”

Not exactly the response I expected, but after all a logical one.

“No,” I said. “He has esophageal cancer.”

“Isn’t that the kind of cancer you get when you’re an alkie and you smoke like a chimney?” my friend asked. My friend, a poet, is an “alkie” himself and, at 47, has been sober for more than 25 years.

“Yeah,” I said. “It often has a very poor prognosis—they usually don’t find it until it’s advanced.”

Poor Hitch, we agreed, then we were tempted to take it back, because if there were anyone in the world who wouldn’t stand for anyone’s pity, it might be Christopher Hitchens.

Christopher Hitchens, just before he was diagnosed with cancer.

And now poor Hitch has gone. The world of language and letters and of debate will be the more impoverished for it. He was a brilliant speaker and writer.

Hitch has remained on my mind since I read about his diagnosis the summer he got sick. Just before that, I’d come across this interview with him in the Guardian, in which the writer opens with a portrait of Hitch in hangover and then, after taking him for a pub lunch:

It seems to me so evidently the case that Hitchens is an alcoholic that to say much more feels unnecessary. But for the record, he trots out all the usual self-serving, defensive evasions: “For me, an alcoholic is someone who can’t hold his drink” or, “I’m not dependent, but I’d prefer not to be without it.” The longest he has ever been was a dry weekend “in fucking Libya”, and he claims he drinks only to make other people less boring. So, presumably, he doesn’t drink when he’s with [Martin] Amis? “Er, yuh, I do.”

He was a relatively young man—only 62, not yet out of middle age—but his body had been leveled. Not only by the disease of cancer, but also by the disease of addiction—the underlying or, as physicians might say, “primary” cause of the cancer. Just before he got sick, he’d been taking care of book sales and promotion for his memoir Hitch-22, flying around the world, but he’d not been taking care of himself.

Hitchens was a formidable intellect—he could worst his opponents in debate, gain the upper hand or secure the last word on panels, or engross any assembly for hours on end.  Talk-show hosts worked hard to insert toeholds into Hitch’s monologues. He reveled in performance as much as he enjoyed working out the arguments.

I remember sitting in a bar with Hitchens, listening to him regale me and our partners (Hitch and my husband had been at Oxford, at the same college at the same time) with his opinions and tales of his exploits. This was a while ago, he had just started working for Vanity Fair, and I don’t remember the details of the stories or the arguments; what I remember is his bearing, and his appearance. He knocked back glass after glass of scotch and chain-smoked, holding the cigarette in the same hand as the booze. His shirt was unbuttoned (as always) to show the mat of hair on his chest, and his sandy locks fell across his damp forehead.

I kept looking at him, wondering, Why does this guy think he’s so hot?

He had been much more handsome before the booze and ciggies went to work on him.

Christopher Hitchens as a student at Balliol College, Oxford, around 1970.

Hitch always carried himself as though he were a real dude when in truth, by the early 1990s, he looked blowsy. He wouldn’t have been much to notice had it not been for his voice. Hitch had a gorgeous voice—insistent, seductive; mellow and smooth at the front but with a deep burn at the back, like the Scotch he loved. For a man who had lived and worked in the States for 30 years, his voice was still curiously Oxonian all the way through. How Hitchens preserved his accent is an interesting question. I think Hitch’s voice was where his psyche lived (he may have said and even believed it lived between his legs, but a great part of it lived in his larynx) and I suspect he protected it.

After his diagnosis interesting discussions sprouted up on the Internet about the ethics of praying for Hitch (start here to follow this question). Should someone who disdains faith and God be prayed for? Would they want prayers? And many people wondered: Could Hitchens possibly remain an atheist, now that his life was in jeopardy?

Of course he remained an atheist, for fook’s sake. What I always wondered was, would he ever get sober?

I suppose it’s because I lost both parents to addiction—my father to alcoholism, my mother to nicotine addiction—that I find this question so interesting. Neither of my parents was able to quit their drugs before they died.  … A prescient exchange occurred between Hitchens and Jon Stewart when Hitch appeared on The Daily Show in his 2007 promotion of God is Not Great, his book about atheism.

Stewart: Does [faith] serve a purpose to give comfort to people, because we are a species that knows we’re going to die and leave—isn’t it nice to have something that brings comfort? Is it necessarily a bad thing to have that comfort, if it doesn’t then cause us to attack other species whose comfort we don’t believe in? Let’s say it’s just for our comfort.

Hitch: That’s a very beautiful and sincere question. <audience laughter> I, myself, I’ve always thought—in the death matter—that an exception would be made in my case.

S: Really?

H: Yes. But I must look like an asshole to you when I say that.

S: Not just when you say that.

Uproarious laughter at Stewart’s last jibe. Anyone who was able to get Hitchens’s goat always earned some giggles. Hitchens himself was gracious about it—he was usually (but not always) generous with talk-show hosts who tried to spar with him. And of course Hitchens was joking about living forever, but only half-joking—his response betrayed a kind of blindness. Let’s face it: his life had been in jeopardy long before he was diagnosed with cancer. You can’t drink and smoke that hard for that long that without putting your life on the line. Hitchens said ages ago for the record that many great writers “did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind.” Well, OK, Hitch, and how long and how well did they live?

Another thing that I noticed during this Daily Show clip: Stewart looks and sounds so spiffy next to Hitchens. Because Stewart is so healthy.

I’m thinking about Hitch’s wife and kids. …

By the way, if you think it’s impossible to get sober and still be an atheist, think again. A friend of mine turned me on to this interview with Augusten Burroughs, author of the memoir Running with Scissors: he claims to have no religious belief and to have cleaned up with a higher power that was a “cartoon version of Jesus, plucked from the manger with a pet cow.”