By Hank Center
2021 will end soon. I am grateful for that. The abusive relationship we had with life in terms of the life of the last four years, predictable and timely, ended in disaster. Those old fears of isolation, financial insecurity, and fears of “not living after death,” and now that we look at it again, fear it exists, among others.
Survivors of domestic violence will see the parallels, but not before the knots in our stomachs tear us apart, the intestinal action that tells us that something is not quite right, but cannot be seen or recognized immediately. We just know it’s around the corner and it’s wrong. We live in a state of anxiety just waiting for “we don’t know exactly what,” but we have a lot of experience telling ourselves to be careful. Then, the enlightenment that makes us think we are crazy, the ones who shout and curse, the suspicions, the violence, and then more that make us think we have caused all this.
Each new year begins with joy and hope, a resolution that this year we will ascend to our best self and achieve tasks and goals that we had alluded to in the past. So did this one.
“In the early days of AIDS, we had little information and found no help”
By now, most people have a history of a pandemic that can include illness, death, grief, loss, financial obstacles, career and education disruptions, and shattered dreams. Now what?
For many of us in recovery, 2021 was a Tuesday year. We take care of it because we have always done it. We have to. It was walking or dying. Many of us died.
Every day of my late stage addiction was a horror story: lying, manipulating, using and using, passing and coming and having to start over and hate my life and myself and not knowing how or if I could change that. The life of an addict at the end of his life can become ugly, deadly or, worse, fast. But that Tuesday year? This is what this pandemic feels like. It just won’t end.
In the early 1990s he lived in New York City and belonged to a group of writers. We met once a month and alternately varied locations between the apartments of some of the members. I loved that group and made new friends who also loved books and writing. I also loved going to a different host apartment each month. This was intimate, informal, and conducive to our group goals. It was a look at someone’s life and the opportunity to observe our host in their surroundings, a somewhat rare event in the city.
One month we had to change meeting place because one of the members was ill. And then he died. Then another member left his job due to illness and then another. We would feel that one had died and another member was moving home, always a coded message. Finally, the only members left were me and a lesbian named Clair who we wrote about nuts and bolts and hand tools. We lost contact after a couple of missed meetings. It was too hard because finally all we could talk about was how amazing the group was and how sad we were about to lose our friends.
In the early days of AIDS, we had little information and found no help. Our friends got sick and died, and finding a cause or a cure didn’t seem to be a priority among the people who decide these things.
I was also struggling to stay sober, but I had managed to get together 90 days a couple of times.
I got a call from my best friend from college who was visiting from Atlanta. He knew he had been HIV-positive for several years and had been hospitalized several times. I also knew he was naming his T cells, there were six, and it would be the last time I would see him.
There is no place more special than Manhattan for Christmas and Chris loved Christmas.
Our visit was a whirlwind tour and Chris ’desire to see and do everything in the city only faded with his illness. We went out in the morning and after a couple of hours he was exhausted and had trouble breathing. Every afternoon I connected an IV to a surgically placed port. It looks like this will revive him a bit, but we would spend the rest of the day in front of the TV watching movies with a fire in the fireplace that we kept roaring because it was constantly cold.
“Domestic violence, the AIDS crisis, substance abuse, homelessness and mental illness did not kill me”
I organized a party in his honor and together we decorated the only Christmas tree I have had since my childhood. It was important for him to have a tree and that was important to me. I was sober, barely precarious, but Chris was so proud of it and told me so often.
He left a few days after Christmas, got sick on the plane, and, after landing in Atlanta, was taken by ambulance to the hospital.
On New Year’s Eve 1995, my best friend Chris died of AIDS-related complications at an Atlanta hospital after spending two weeks with me in New York. It was too much for my fragile sobriety and I got drunk two more years and three rehabs.
When I moved from New York in 1999, I no longer had friends my age. They had died of AIDS, suicide, murder and overdose. I felt completely alone and sometimes when I think about the end of that era and think of my friends from Fire Island and the city that I will never see again, it makes me sad.
“My recovery does not depend on people or circumstances, but on God”
Domestic violence, the AIDS crisis, substance abuse, homelessness and mental illness did not kill me. It prepared me for life and Rona. So what?
I am grateful to have a solid recovery and a relationship with a higher power to guide me through difficulties and reveal myself through prayer and meditation to recognize the next opportunity and what my next action will be. I have come a long way during this crisis and have been able to make good decisions. My recovery does not depend on people or circumstances, but on God.
Nobel Prize-winning philosopher (1957), Albert Camus wrote:
“In the midst of hatred, I found that there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of the tears, I found that there was, inside me, an invincible smile. In the midst of the chaos, I found that there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that in the middle of winter, I found that there was, inside me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. Because he says that no matter how much the world pushes against me, there is something stronger inside me, something better, that pushes back ”.
So I survived 2021.