Almost six months ago now, one of my greatest fears came true.  My beloved mother, who had been battling stage four ovarian cancer for a remarkable 5 1/2 years, passed away. She was the hub of the wheel we call family, and not a day goes by that we don’t feel the pain of her absence from our lives.  But in the midst of this tragedy, I want to tell you about the miracle hidden within…

Leading up to this event, in my mind, I had assumed that I would not be able to bare the horror of the loss of someone so close to me.  I imagined all kinds of scenarios in which I would fall apart, either at the hospital or the funeral home, or somewhere in between, but the story always ended with me being taken away in a straitjacket, thereby creating a whole new set of worries for my family at the time when they needed me most.

Had I been going through this a mere six years earlier, these mind movies would have been on an endless loop and I have no doubt that they would have eventually laid the foundation for a world class binge-to-end-all-binges.  And after that?  I don’t even want to know.

But I WAS in program.  And counseling.  And I talked about these fears.  Wrote about them. Cried over them. Most importantly, I cried about them to God and to my OA friends. And each time that I faced my worst fears and let the tears flow, it was like a release valve for my emotions, so that by the time my mother actually did pass away, I was not completely overwhelmed by it.  Yes, I was devastated.  Yes, I felt lost and alone in a way that I had never felt those things before.  But I did not feel hopeless.  I did not feel panic-stricken.  And I did not start spiraling into that black abyss that I had assumed would come to swallow me up.  I realized, through sharing with others, that people deal with death all the time and live to tell the tale.  I was just another bozo on the bus, and this time I just happened to be going through a great loss.

I hear at meetings all the time that “no one said life was going to be easy.”  And similar things about how life still happens even after we get sober/abstinent.  They ain’t kidding. But the difference is, now that sanity has returned, I at least have a fighting chance to face life’s challenges in healthy ways rather than the way I used to  – – by turning in on myself and self-destructing.

Thanks to my Higher Power, there is no need for that kind of behavior anymore, even when life gets difficult.