August 19, 2007

A Guest Essay By J. Theodore Everingham

I was born in May, a little more than 68 years ago, in a sleepy hamlet in southwest Michigan. The town itself had little to distinguish it then and perhaps less to distinguish it now.

Still, I have a mental scrapbook of Norman Rockwell-style pictures of those early years: In one of them, I am watching the Decoration Day Parade passing the spacious front lawn of Mr. Swem's funeral home. The high school marching band, the local Boy Scouts and proud young men in their country's uniform and aging veterans in faded VFW caps, all marching solemnly from the post office downtown, out West Front Street, to Oakridge Cemetery at the edge of town to pay respects to the sons and fathers, husbands and brothers who had not come back from Europe, the Pacific or some other far away battleground.

We moved 135 miles east to Jackson just after World War II. The years flew by. I have a mental Norman Rockwell-style picture of my proud Mom - my equally proud Dad at her side - pinning an Eagle Scout badge on my chest. And another of me, delivering the commencement address at my own high school graduation on a perfect early June evening.

And so it went - one enduring, pleasant memory after another: Four years at Albion College, followed by a simple but special wedding to a young woman named Marcia, and then off to the law school at the University of Michigan. More Norman Rockwell: Happy times, more graduations and birthdays, a growing family, good friends, rewarding work, in fact, little to suggest that much was wrong at my house.

By 1977, I was 38 years old, a graduate of an outstanding liberal arts college and one of the nation's finest law schools, thought by most to be a talented lawyer. I was a partner in a pre-eminent law firm. I had a lovely and loving wife and three bright, attractive children. - And I was a drunk.

I was living a nightmare, totally out of control in a grotesque, downward spiral toward disaster and ultimately death.

On a rainy Monday morning that May, the executive partner of my firm called me into his office to tell me that I had to accept help for my "problem" or leave the firm. I was devastated. He was my mentor and a special friend. I felt betrayed by his intrusion into my personal life.

Norman Rockwell took that day off!

Later that same afternoon, I found myself in a stuffy, smoke-filled, overheated, windowless room in the basement of an office building in downtown Detroit in my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. And somehow, that rainy afternoon I first said out loud what I knew but outwardly had denied for so very long: My name is Ted, I said in a quavering voice, I'm an alcoholic.

I was admitted to Brighton Hospital later that week. Though frightened like never before, I quickly found that Brighton cared about me. The admissions clerk cared. The groundskeepers and the dietician cared. The doctors and nurses cared. And, of course, the other patients cared about me, as I would come to care deeply about them.

The days that followed were filled with lectures and group discussions for my slowly re-awakening mind, hearty meals for my long-deprived body and soul-searching, late night talks with other patients. As the days passed, I was struck by the universality of this disease: I was living and learning with people who drove trucks, cleaned offices and tried lawsuits, students and teachers, people who made things and people who sold things. And many, not surprisingly, had no job at all. But we had a common condition and a common purpose. And we cared and we shared and we began our recovery together.

One afternoon, a week or so after I arrived at Brighton - and I remember this as though it happened this morning - I was sitting on a stump beside a path that led down the hill to a small pond that we call "Lake Serenity." I was watching two chipmunks playing on the other side of the path. And at that moment, for reasons that I do not understand to this day, I realized with blinding clarity that recovery was within my grasp.

The 30 years since that epiphanous moment have been years of learning and personal growth and professional productivity. Those two chipmunks, of course, are long gone, but Marcia and the three children who saw me off to Brighton so long ago are with me still. So now are the children's spouses and our five grandchildren. Today, I not only enjoy our family holidays, children's birthdays and special times with friends, but I remember them. Norman Rockwell is back.

Yes, I was born in May of 1939, and yet again 30 years ago.

The second birth took place somewhere between my executive partner's office and that stump beside the path to Lake Serenity. Had it not been for my journey down that path, I would long since been resting, instead, next to my parents out West Front Street, past Mr. Swem's funeral home in Oakridge Cemetery.

If you need or know someone who needs the kind of help Ted Everingham was fortunate enough to get before it was too late, you can contact him at tedeveringham[at]comcast.net

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.