Thirty-five years ago this month I was a mess. I had an addiction that was killing me. I’d experienced a few months of sobriety after a stay in a local thirty-day program, but I had slid back into the morass and was speeding toward the brink. As luck would have it and a change of location with a trip to Arkansas I attained a few months of drug and alcohol-free time. I began to get my sense of worth back, I found music again, lost to me for many years, and I found a peace that allowed me to hold still my legs and brain for a longer and longer stretch of time as my sober time added up.

I moved back to Sacramento to re-assume my life responsibilities. They say when you first get sober to stay away from triggers. Everything in Sacramento seemed to be a trigger. Places, people, smells, and sounds were everywhere. I wasn’t likely to keep my level. I didn’t drink or use, but I was close and desperate to find relief for the voices in my head.

I remembered some people I had met from when I got sober the very first time who seemed to care whether I lived or not, and I went looking to find them. I went back to one of those meetings you might have heard of. They speak of life and despair, and love and sobriety in those places. The first meeting I went to someone remembered me from before and said hi to me. I didn’t remember her name, just her face, but she remembered mine. She was interested. She surrounded me with some other warm people at that meeting, and the people all gave me phone numbers to use. They all said call them, anytime, even 2AM. From the bar or from my bed or even from the edge of the cliff, they said call. It wasn’t like the BS, “call me” that regularly gets uttered with no intention of it ever happening. These people were genuinely concerned for me.

I immersed myself in those meetings and particularly those people and I kept staying sober, growing, falling in love with my life and my kids. And finally, I met up with a friend of mine who had been my first sponsor. He took over. Jimmy was a big bad-ass biker who had been sober for years. He had long hair and tattoos, rode a Harley, and was a guy you would never expect to cry, but he cried with me as I progressed. He smiled too. We laughed and we laughed a lot.

Twenty-five years later, long distanced from any program for sobriety but still sane and mainly sober, I met up with Jimmy again. We were both old men, he ten years my senior, but he was the same guy. We had a few meetups. He was still heavily involved in meetings, sponsoring newcomers, being of service, and living a solid sober life. And in the time we hadn’t seen each other he had married, but he was going through the end of that.

His wife was also a friend of mine from way back. she had been sober as long as Jimmy. But she had fallen out of love with him and needed to go her own way. I got that, Jimmy got that, it happens. She left and filed for divorce.

She called me one night and said she feared for Jimmy. She had served him with the divorce paperwork and they had been scheduled to meet up to discuss what little terms would be. She said it was all amicable, but Jimmy missed the meeting and was not returning messages. It had been over a week. She asked if I would come help her find him, so I went.

We found him. He was in a seedy motel where junkies go. He was in a room there, door open, laid out on the bed and dead with a needle in his arm. Jimmy, my rock and a rock for dozens of others for forty plus years was gone. The road is long, but the traveler controls the speed we drive that road and sometimes the accelerator sticks on full speed ahead.

I hope there is a place where we get to see the people from our lives. I want to give Jimmy a hug.