On the inevitability of death
Photograph ©2022 David Bivins
When did I stop dwelling on the inevitability of death and start dwelling on the inevitability of death?
When I was still drinking heavily, I would often dwell on the inevitability of my death. It seemed like something that was out of my control. Through circumstances of my own doing, the heavy drinking, I would continue my spiral into a gross, messy complex pile of disease and pass away in a pathetic whimper. The paradox was that I knew it was of my own doing, but that it was still somehow out of my control.
A desire to stay alive for other people (my family) is what pushed me to keep making an effort to get sober. Then the paradox shifted to why I couldn’t stop drinking when I was focusing on the people I love. I resolved that paradox by learning to love myself again.
But how could I have spent so long mucking about in that fatalism? I would literally say to myself “this is killing me” when I started drinking every night, and I would say it again as I started into my second six-pack of the night. I had agency in many other ways, but I felt powerless–even as I made the decision to buy alcohol; even as I made the decision to open it and drink it..
Was I really powerless? Did I really lack the power to alter that chain of decisions? I think that alone, I didn’t have a lot of power. I gained power when I changed my circumstances: a vacation in a remote place with no access to alcohol? I could stop for that week. But I didn’t make the choice to put myself in those circumstances often. I’m racking my brain right now to think of more than several occasions that I isolated myself that way. And post-isolation, I would jump right back into my self-destructive habit as if nothing had changed. I didn’t “dry out.”
I gained power when I chained the little I had to the power of others. I gained power when I joined with like-minded people, others who perhaps didn’t have a lot of power on their own but somehow came to the same place I did and chained their scant power to mine and everyone else's. And together, many of us became more powerful. Accountability. Vulnerability. Shared experience. Community.
So why did it take me so long to figure that out? For one, my brain’s craving for alcohol overwhelmed any rational thought that there was a potential way out. For another, I spent my life knowing that I could overcome any challenge on my own.
Knowing. It’s a funny concept. If I were to take a sheet of paper and make two columns, one headed “challenges I overcame on my own” and the second “things I overcame with the help of others or outside circumstances” the first would be pretty short and the second would be endless, only finite because my ink or memory would run out before I was done.
After a small construction project in our community garden, our large compost system was out of place. It’s a heavy wooden frame, maybe 10 feet by 4 feet and, with residual compost and muck stuck to the bottom, several hundred pounds. Several of us pushed and pulled and rocked it and we collectively said “we can’t move this.” But there were about eight of us in the garden, and I called everyone around and spaced us evenly around the frame. We counted to three and lifted the frame easily and set it in place. (More nefariously, a man who lives one block over from me stood scowling on his stoop one morning. A large group of teenagers had lifted his car up and removed all four of his wheels, leaving the car on milk crates.)
The “outside circumstances” are often hidden to people like me: I’m white, male, heterosexual, and I grew up in relative privilege. We weren’t rich, but my parents provided for us. We ate, we had clothes, we had a home. Looking around me in the jobs I had post-college, I know that my whiteness, my maleness, my adherence to the orthodoxy of my community, all these things gave me advantages that were invisible to me at the time. I didn’t earn it all. That’s the dark side of community–in many situations it protects and elevates some while excluding others. This has implications for people seeking sobriety, too.
Here I am zeroing in on community again. Of course, community can be two people–me and a buddy, a therapist, a good sobriety counselor. Or it can be a ready-made sobriety community: AA, Smart Recovery, White Bison, Tempest, etc. No one community can do it all for anybody, and that’s true of any community effort in sobriety or any other undertaking. But I do think finding community is key when you want to get sober and stay sober.
Oh yes, I was talking about the inevitability of death. It’s perhaps understandable that when loved ones die or have been in difficult medical circumstances, I start thinking about my own mortality. But it’s a healthier thought process now that it’s not driven by my self-destructive behavior. I think of it in the context of living every moment being as fully present as I can, with no hope or fear for the future. I know I will die, so I can stop worrying about it. I think about my life instead–not to check off a bucket list, but to be here, right now, making choices that are positive for myself and my family and community. It’s a lot easier for me to do that sober.
I love you,
David
