Introduction

When feeling grown-up was everything, my older sister Ann made me feel grown-up.  I was seven when she introduced me to high stakes gambling by letting me win a quarter in a very grown-up game of checkers.  My first sip of beer, banging pots and pans on New Years Eve,  breaking the rules... some of the most important events that shaped my existence as a child were provided by my sister.

As a kid, I always looked forward to visiting Ann because there was a party at her house almost every weekend.  I remember the distinct contrast between the laughter and music at night and the morning after with overflowing ashtrays, the smell of empty beer cans, and the moaning whispers of adults grappling with aspirin bottles.

Almost thirty years later when Ann called me to say she wanted to kill herself, I wasn’t surprised even though she had been sober in Alcoholics Anonymous for twelve years.  To me, she almost seemed happier as a hopeless drug addicted alcoholic than she did as a member of AA.  I felt awkward trying to help her because she had been in the Program twice as long as I had.  Night after night she would call giving me the same reasons over and over again as to why she wanted to die.  Night after night I would suggest to her what worked for me... the Twelve Steps.

“Do you realize that I started the first 5:30 meeting in Anaheim?” she said jumping from desperation to pride and back again.  She reminded me of her years as a coffee maker and how everyone at the clubhouse loved “Annie.”  A couple of weeks after her last call, my sister forfeited twelve years of sobriety with a drug and alcohol overdose that left her in a coma.  She survived with a mild stroke but was never quite the same.  After recuperating she went back to AA for two more years until she finally succeeded in ending her life.

It would be easy for me to say that her friends at the clubhouse—who loved her so dearly—should have provided her with a solution to her problem.  But the truth is that many members of AA today are in the same boat as she was—oblivious to a solution... and how do you tell someone with twelve years of sobriety that they are doing something wrong?

I accept the fact that Ann is no longer with us, but what brings tears to my eyes in this moment is knowing that the solution to her alcoholism was sitting right in front of her for over twelve years.  No, not with the chairperson who told her that AA was a selfish program, but rather in that blue book titled Alcoholics  Anonymous (AA World Services)—affectionately known as the “Big Book.”  It is the origin of such chapters as, “There is a Solution,” and “How It Works.”  Unfortunately, the words on those pages—much like the book itself—go unnoticed by many, if not most, AA members today.  I liken my sister’s death to someone dying of thirst... not looking in their backpack to discover a canteen full of water.

When Ann died they had a memorial service for her at the clubhouse, followed no doubt by a meeting to discuss “keeping it green.”  Would it not have been a more fitting tribute to my sister if they had opened up the book Alcoholics  Anonymous and discussed the solution to alcoholism and drug addiction so that newcomers wouldn’t follow in her footsteps?  How many thousands of AA members will be eulogized by a fellowship of men and women who believe that being selfish and fearful is the path to sobriety?  My sister locked herself up in a prison of  fears, resentments, and morbid fantasies, never hearing the solution to her problem.  Today she is finally carrying a message from the book Alcoholics  Anonymous—“Half measures availed us nothing” (59).

The first sentence of chapter five in the Big Book states: “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path” (58).  I can honestly say in the eleven years that I have been a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous (1997), I have never seen a person fail who has “thoroughly followed our path.”  And yet if you are a new member of AA, there is about a ninety percent chance that you will fail... that you will drink or get high again.  How can this be?  If you are sometimes bored at AA meetings, you have relapsed, or wonder why so many people are relapsing around you, "Staying Sober in AA..." will provide the answers you’re looking for.