HERE’S TO YOUR HEALTH

This week’s HTYH is a continuation of Larcine’s story: I thought that I was a saint because I wasn’t the person who was abusing alcohol and drugs. I was the one who was holding it all together, but I was as sick as my alcoholic husband. Alanon literature says, “We become unreasonable without knowing it.” We become unreasonable by trying to force our solution on our husband’s problem. I was trying to force my round husband into a square hole. My children loved Butch but they feared me because I was the one who did all of the screaming; I could not comprehend this phenomenon. I’d come home from work and find him passed out and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if he had passed out from the alcohol or if he had overdosed on drugs. I didn’t know if I should call the police, paramedics, or walk around him. Our sons went with the flow and one time they pretended that he was Gulliver and tied him up.

Butch got arrested again and it didn’t seem any different from the other times but this time he got sober. Why he got sober this time and not the others remains a mystery. The only explanation that made sense was that God’s Grace had suddenly started working in his life. That last arrest is when his recovery began to happen. That was in 1979 and back then when the police arrested drunks they released them after they sobered up. I drove to the police station and picked him up after his release. This time he really screwed up and I was loaded for bear, but God must have been working in my life too because I didn’t say a word and at a time like that it takes a power greater than me to keep my mouth shut.

When we got home he went upstairs and stayed there for two days, but he finally came downstairs and said, “I think I have a problem!”

The day before Butch was released I heard about a new program at a local hospital the specialized in the treatment of alcohol and drug abuse. I gave Butch their phone number and he made the call on his own free will. I believe that God pushed me out of the way so he could be helped. God must have answered Butch’s prayers for help because the hospital put him in a detoxification program in their psychiatric ward. The boys were in pre-school and kindergarten and I tried to cheer Butch up by visiting him and saying, “Look what the boys made for you.” But he wanted to show me what he had made in occupational therapy that day so I took his stuff home, hung it on the refrigerator and the boys said, “Yahoo! Daddy’s sober now.”

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The hospital introduced Butch to Alcoholics Anonymous and from that day to this he’s been actively involved in A.A. and he’s been sober every single day. I am forever grateful to that hospital and Alcoholics Anonymous for taking a hopeless but really good guy and giving him a new life. I’m not just grateful that he lived because I secretly hoped he would die after his last arrest. My heart is more grateful today than words can say and I get teary-eyed thinking about it but what I think about is how angry I was back then. There’s no doubt in my mind that my husband was very close to death and I know if had he died then our sons would have been raised by an angry mother full of rage and self pity. When Butch was released from the hospital they gave me a list of things I should do and how to act, it was all about the poor suffering alcoholic. They gave me a book entitled “The family afterwards,” and I about gagged. To be continued.