To be or not to be...

I went to a memorial service today for a woman I met at the very first AA meeting I went to, almost 19 years ago. We call those we get sober with "littermates". Seeing her there week after week gave me courage to believe that I could do this sobriety thing, too. Then, I gravitated to other meetings, and only saw her once in a while. She got drunk. That was a huge wakeup call for me. You mean some people don't stay sober? But she came back, and set her foot back on the path. And she did that over and over again. Recently, while drinking, she had an esophogial bleed, and survived it, to get sober again. She knew that to drink meant she might die. And she did it, anyway. This time, she didn't survive the bleeding. What I saw today was how very much she was loved. And I got that these people felt they had expressed that to her, too. For some reason, it was not enough. And, she, like me, lived alone. She had dogs. The music she listened to is the music I love. She was an artist, like me. And I don't know why she had to struggle, drunk, while I preferred to stuggle, sober. It is a mystery to me, for sure. We joke that drinking is "suicide on the installment plan", and that is exactly what it is, a living death, followed by a real one. I always feel the rip in the fabric of our connectedness whenever one of us leaves the planet. For Sylvia, the pain is ended. Mine goes on.