Re: Two AA Suicides

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In a message dated 1/6/99 11:14:56 AM Pacific Standard Time,

babystrange@... writes:

<< Subj: Two AA Suicides

Date: 1/6/99 11:14:56 AM Pacific Standard Time

From: babystrange@... ( Mabee)

Reply-to: 12-step-freeegroups

To: 12-step-freeegroups

another friend's demise

I had been sober almost four years when my boyfriend's " sponsee " committed

suicide. was

24 years old, and had been in the Program for about two years. He mainly hung

out with a group

of extremely hard-line AA's that were half-jokingly referred to as " the

Trudgers " (as in " trudging the road to happy destiny " ); he asked my boyfriend

to be his sponsor because his previous Trudger-sponsor had called him a " wimp "

and an " asshole " whenever tried to discuss personal problems.

Apparently, this guy's line of thought was that if you were working the

Program rigorously and correctly you wouldn't have problems such as not being

able to talk to girls, and if you did it shouldn't matter becausethe Program

was supposed to be your entire life. It was an attitude shared by the Trudger

crowd, along with a certain arrogance; after all, they were the ones who were

working it correctly--AA fundies, really.

emptied the medicine cabinet into himself and hopped the first streetcar

out of his neighborhood. He was found on the waterfront, unconscious, having

drunk a bottle of vodka on top of the pills. Since no pill bottles were found

on him, an assumption was made at San Francisco General that he was just

drunk, so they didn't pump his stomach. He died a few hours later.

I went to his funeral, and the trudger crowd was there, including that

glutinous rat-bastard ex-sponsor. Everyone was standing around in the lobby

of the funeral home, and here were these AA's hanging out as if it were just

another meeting. None of them looked so much as sad. His family was sitting

off to one side of the room, and on the other were AA's analyzing amongst

themselves just why had done himself in.

I heard a lot of talk over the next few weeks that maybe he held something

back in his Fourth Step, or maybe had something else he just couldn't face,

and I felt the rage building up. A lot of things that had merely irritated me

about the Program and the way people interacted within it began to seriously

piss me off. I went to meetings for another four months, then had to stop.

had been ill-served by the Program when alive, and found wanting by its

members after he was dead.

He was a sweet, bright kid, rather immature, but certainly he didn't deserve

to die. He did have wide mood swings, and I think he could have been helped

by medication, but the self-designated recovery experts in AA would have stood

smugly by and told him he wasn't sober had he taken them.

Then there was Tess, who had been in AA for a number of years before a cab

driver beat the living shit out of her one night for refusing his advances.

He beat her so badly she had to have vertebrae in her neck and back fused, and

she was in constant pain the entire time I knew her. Some days she'd be

hysterical with it.

She wouldn't take the painkillers she'd been prescribed, because she didn't

want to " lose her sobriety " . The attitude toward her in the meetings was that

Tess was a " drama queen " who wanted a lot of attention, when what she really

was was half out of her mind with pain. Finally the contradiction got her;

she took her prescribed medication--all at once. A small group of her close

friends were genuinely affected by her loss, but the general attitude of the

same people who thought of her as a hysterical attention-seeker was that she

just didn't work the Program hard enough.

Fuck, yes, I still " have a resentment " ...

---- Mabee

>>

I am really interested in what you have to say, however the background you are

using makes it impossible for me to read.

Judie

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