Welcome to AA, you’re going to go to a lot of funerals.
Well, I have. And I only anticipate going to more and more the longer that I stay in the program. Mass church funerals, candlelight vigils in recovery houses, memorials at Lake Merritt or at the top of the Bart station at Civic Center plaza. I’ve been to more funerals and memorials in the last five years than I have my entire life before I got sober.
The quote at the top of the page is one that my first sponsor passed onto me when I experienced one of my first passings of a friend in recovery. It was something that someone had said to her when she was a newcomer in the program — most people outside of the program don’t realize that a lot of the wise or insightful lines in AA are just echoes of things that you once heard someone else say; and they got it from someone else the same way, and so on. I picture that image, of this young woman with two weeks sober shaking hands in introduction with some guy who’s been around awhile. Him welcoming her the matter-of-fact warning that a substantial amount of the friends she’ll make in these rooms of recovery will die premature deaths. I picture this and it’s saddening because it should be shocking, but it’s true. Anyone who’s been around in AA for a while will simply nod their head in a slow and strong approval of such a statement.
