Here’s anther Del story.

Here’s anther Del story.

He told me about how he met his wife and how seductive the ego is, especially when someone else strokes it, and you even encourage it. In his words:

I was almost five years sober, and I gave a talk over in Venice, and Barbara came up afterward to thank me. I gotta admit I don’t know if it was her good looks or her star-struck eyes when she kept praising me. Obviously, I had made a positive effect on her. I did not now she was a newcomer, with just a couple of months in the rooms—this time. But the next day, at my home group, in Burbank, I bump into her again, and one thing led to another. I guess about the time she hd almost a year sober we got married. I don’t regret it for a minute, but marrying her has been a blessing and a curse for these thirty years. I even stayed with her when she got wacked out on Valium and ended up in the psych ward. I never stopped loving her.

My curse is that she never really grew very spiritually and I always judged her for it. That judgment has been more my curse for her than my undying love. But you see my love mighta been her curse, for my co-dependence kept me as the hero manager of her program. It wasn’t until she was laid-up in bed dying day after day that I saw that it was only my prideful perspective of her that made me look down my nose at her program.

Every time she talked at the meeting and when on and on about how thankful she was for the old timers, when she finally tried to stay sober. It finally struck me that she was professing her love to me. At home she always called me her old-timer. I remember how I thought she was trying to blow her own horn about old timers, since she theoretically was one. I remember apologetically trying to make expressions of disgust. Do you remember that?

Finally, while she had only weeks to live, and a few people came over the house so we could have a meeting and she went into her usual spiel, except she was gonna keep an eye on her old-timer afta she passed on. I began to cry, but I didn’t want her to fret, so I tried to hide my emotion. Later, I needed to tell her how sorry I was for all these years of looking my nose down on the gal I 13th stepped. I always carried that guilt neurotically, but she told me that she hitched her star to my wagon that first nite, in Venice, when I told my story. Furthermore, she knows how I felt and was just deferring to my masculine ego.

While I could quote the book and went around the circuit speaking, I made myself into a guru, but she was always there patiently for me, helping me discover the jewels under my face whenever I fell. I owe so much of my growth to her ind tolerance of me. She knew what I needed when she heard me share and felt compelled to rescue me. Eventually she went to Al-anon, and I went to ACA, and I’d like to think that we got better. We did, except I was a little slower to catch on. But she told me that I helped a lot of people, and although I helped them I used it to inflate my pride. We had both read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha many years before, but she asked me to read it aloud to her, as she lay there, a 80 pounds of her. I took my time, knowing she wasn’t going to hold on much longer. She kept reassuring me that it was fine, that it was her time. She promised me that I still had a few more lessons to learn

She died about half way through the book, but I’d read a page or two to her, each day, at her graveside, and we discussed it. Just like we always did. I’d go on and on explaining it and what it really meant and she’d ask me, the professor, a few simple questions that gently guided me around to another perspective. She let me see that Buddha, as the Buddha, paid a price for all his notoriety even if he brought comfort to many. I guess he was an old-timer like me. Now, I have plenty of time, away from the limelight to see how competitive I was, to see how unyielding I really was, to see my folly.

I needed the applause of the group, and I needed the most applause, and anyone that got too much became my enemy. I attacked them seemingly benignly and covertly, but even if they never suffered because of my caustic tongue, I sure did. My only consolation is that God needed my defects, and I thank God that He’s taken that one from me, but I do wonder who has it now. Is it you?