The following book passage touched me so much and struck a deep chord within me that I decided to take the liberty to include it in my blog.
"Why an angel? Because I believe that, in time, that is what we become in sobriety, if we last long enough, to the end. Not the winged type, no. Not some haloed cupid or sword swinger but a kind of flawed angel, without wings, that belongs to no religion but rather to a species of human heartbreak unlike any other known.
Alcoholics and addicts are unlike any other people I've ever met. I am unlike most people. A blazing mutant of some kind. A wondrous freak. In my mind lurks an urge that will be with me to the end, to put a bottle to my lips and drink myself to death. A judge and jury that I wake up to each morning has pronounced a verdict of guilt on me for no crime that I have committed, just for being alive, and has sentenced me to death, not by guillotine or rope but by a single drink.
It is the strangest thing, this sentence of death, this disease I have which tests me to the max and each day holds my existence accountable to the very universe, a god no religion can know as we drunks know it.
A god of drunks who goes with us into our prisons and gutters, bedrooms and businesses, flophouses and alleys, hospitals and mansions, and patiently waits with hand on our shivering shoulders as we groan through yet one more night of near death, waits to see if maybe this time we've had pain enough, loss enough, enough hangover, illness, fear, to ask for help....
Because when death sits on your shoulder each day, whispering, urging you to your end, there is no time to lose, so much light to grasp for, struggle to embrace. We are struggling with light. And yet we are only human after all, so terribly flawed and foolish, selfish and ridiculous. Sobriety can be messy. At times, I have seemed to myself the most awful of persons. But even then I am ascending, even then I am going up the ladder of light with eyes wide open and hands outstretched, to clasp the next rung up. And I climb."
Taken from "Drunken Angel" by Alan Kaufman.
