Today we may or may not go to a Memorial Day Barbecue put on by Max’s AA group that will be held prior to their meeting. It depends on the weather and how I’m feeling. I guess if I go to the BBQ I’ll probably end up staying for the AA meeting too. I’ve been to a few AA and Al-Anon meetings and while they were okay, they didn’t touch anything deep inside my soul as far as trauma or compulsion or other issues were concerned.
Max has of course been in AA for decades now, since he was a teenager, and he leads a local AA meeting over Zoom too. He has a lot of AA friends and sometimes I feel a little jealous. Where is my band of supportive alcoholics and addicts and so forth helping me get in touch with my higher power? When Sarah died, and I was driving home from NYC, several people from AA were waiting with Max for me to arrive and I’m glad they were there for him.
In AA you have to believe that there’s a power greater than yourself to whom you can turn over your addiction and be helped. It’s really the power of the group, although many people of course pray and see the power as coming from God as well or choose another higher power too. Max chose music as his higher power. He has always been kind of obsessed with music and has an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz, R & B, and really the whole history and story of music.
What would my higher power be? I’m not sure I have any idea. I’ve never been particularly spiritual or religious, though I definitely know I’m Jewish and what that means. Could Sarah be my higher power? That seems to be putting an awful lot of responsibility on a very young girl. This question seems to be caught up in the whole issue of my search for meaning right now, my trying to find a center for my life. Which leads me right back into feeling depressed again.
I did Google the grief group Compassionate Friends this morning, and saw that they have a meeting at the beginning of next month in a suburb pretty close to here. Perhaps I will tell Max and we will make an effort to go. We kind of poo-poo’d them initially because they mailed us so much of their material and phoned us too, and I think we felt a little too recruited. But perhaps they are worth a try. It’s funny, while I am typing this, a dream comes back to me in which Dr. Z told me he telephoned the leader of our old Grief Group (the one that came to such a bad end) and had a “discussion” with her. I felt vindicated!
The First Year Without Sarah 