Watching Time

On the way to the 2023 Recovery Rally. My heart was full of hope.

Sobriety is gained minute by minute in the early days of recovery. Sometimes locking yourself away is what is needed. It really does feel like you are hanging on with your fingernails over an abyss filled with whatever strikes the most fear in your heart. (Indiana Jones and the snakes ;). When the minutes get easier then you are counting the hours. We are always counting the days. And if we don’t want to do the counting - there’s an app for that. With technology you can at a glance see how many days, months, years, minutes, seconds and soon nanoseconds in recovery. It helps. Each unit of measurement is a victory.

My dad did not have any apps to lean on when he gained his sobriety. He found community in AA. But his biggest strength was will. He willed his sobriety into place. He had started his third family and a new law practice in a new town. It was a last chance scenario when he woke up on the front lawn with the sprinklers running. I know my father’s story. And I know he did not get the full experience of recovery. The stigma was strong and as a Catholic my father was trained for guilt so he readily picked up the heavy cloak of shame. He did have a small group of sober friends but as a man who loved people he still went to parties, bars and bought all of us alcohol for family events. I wish he would have encouraged more of a recovery lifestyle rather than feeling like he had to supply alcohol for the ‘normies.’ He did not want to impose his disease on the rest of us.

Diseases can run in families. Addiction runs through all generations of mine. Well, so far the newest ones are too young to buy alcohol so fingers crossed we turn them before they can. I thought I had dodged a bullet until addiction found my breaking point. It is that sneaky. It will lie in wait for years. It has it’s own method of timekeeping, trauma by trauma, one stuffed emotion at a time. My father watched my siblings struggle and he felt such guilt for being a ‘bad dad.’ He was sure that his addiction had caused what he saw in his children. But he had married addicts so there was genetic culpability elsewhere, but he willingly took on all of the guilt. I was my father’s confidante for most of my adult life. Looking back I see that I was his person. I had witnessed all aspects of his disease. I had been subjected to his alcohol fueled rage, I’d had to find him in bars as a teenager, and I’d had him turn into my biggest supporter and one of my closest friends in his sobriety.

I think I have mentioned that my father liked fine things. He always wanted a gold Rolex. He liked his story from coal miner’s son to a career as a lawyer. Standing on national stages with Kennedys because of his early devotion to politics. It think it signified success to be able to not just afford but proudly wear a Rolex. Because of his Hoosier accent he was the butt of many of our family jokes. He loved that - it meant all eyes were on him. He could not pronounce Rolex without a twang but that did not stop him from talking about it, even when we had all dissolved into our ‘dad wants a gwold Rwolex’ comedy routine. To mark 25 years of continued sobriety his best friends chipped in and bought him that gold Rolex. Engraved with all their names. He wore that watch every day from that moment forward and when he was not wearing it in his last days it was still there by his bed,

My dad was very deliberate in the decisions he made when preparing to die. As the oldest I was offered first choice of his furniture from his man cave. I have his beautiful antique bed and other things I would have never been able to buy for myself. He always wanted to be fair and treat us equally in terms of gifts or financial assistance. I never cared about that accounting method of his but I know he had a tally in his head and he felt he had short-changed me as the oldest and the one that had suffered from his addiction the most. As the oldest son, my brother Brendan was given his gold Rolex. He knew Brendan was struggling with alcohol and he had great fear for all of his remaining children, having lost Allison to addiction. He wanted Brendan to feel his strength, love and pride on the days he needed it. That is what the watch represented to my father. Hope for his son’s future.

When Brendan was living with me and seeking his own recovery he gifted me two links from my father’s watch. They had been removed so the watch would fit his wrist. He knew that they would have meaning to me. To have something that touched my father’s skin every day. That still contained some of his human energy here on earth. Who cares that they are pure gold. Not me. They sit on my altar as a personal touchstone. I see them each morning when I sit and journal. I look at the pictures of my father and Brendan that I pray to each day. I carry my father’s hope into my new recovery life.

Those links also represent all the days ahead of me that I must live without my dad. So, I’ll take another 24 as they say. I am sober and I am grateful for every day that I get to live as my father’s daughter shining a light on the path of recovery.