Читать книгу Came to Believe - Anonymous - Страница 12

I tried to help this man. It was a humiliating experience. No one enjoys being a complete failure; it plays havoc with the ego. Nothing seemed to work. I brought him to meetings, and he sat there in a fog, and I knew that only the body was present. I went to his home, and either he was out drinking or he sailed out the back door as I entered the front one. His family was beginning to enter a period of real hardship; I could feel their hopelessness.

Then came the hospital episode, the last in his extraordinary record of hospitalizations. He went into D.T.’s and convulsions, so violent that he had to be shackled to the bed. He was in a coma and being fed intravenously. Each day that I visited him, he looked worse, impossible as that seemed. For six days, he lay unconscious, unmoving except for the periodic shakes.

On the seventh day, I again visited him. Passing by his room, I noticed that the restraints had been removed and the intravenous feeding tubes had been taken away. I felt elated. He was going to make it! The doctor and the floor nurse dashed my hopes. He was slipping fast.

After I had arranged to have his wife brought there, it occurred to me that he was a Catholic and certain rites should be observed. It was a Catholic hospital, so I wandered down the hall and located a nun (the mother superior, it later turned out). She notified a priest and, with another nun, accompanied me back to the room.

While the priest entered the room alone, the three of us decided to sit on the bench in the corridor. Without any prearrangement, all three of us bowed our heads and began to pray—the mother superior, the nun, and I, a Presbyterian ordained deacon.

I have no way of telling how much time we spent there. I know the priest had left and gone about his other duties. What brought us back to the immediate present was a movement we heard from the room. When we looked in, the patient was sitting on the side of the bed!

“All right, God,” he said. “I don’t want to be the quarterback any more. Tell me what You want me to do, and I will do it.”

The doctors later said that they had considered it physically impossible for him to move, much less sit up. And before this, he had not uttered a word since entering the hospital. The next statement he made was “I am hungry.”

But the real miracle was what happened to him in the next ten years. He began helping people. I mean helping! No call has been too hard, too inconvenient, too “hopeless.” He founded the A.A. group in his town, and he is embarrassed if you mention this to others or comment on the amount of A.A. work he is doing.

He is not the same man I was trying to twelfth-step. I failed in all my efforts to help the man I knew. And then Someone else provided a new man.

Bernardsville, New Jersey