No Friends of Bill W.
Cheever came to the pages covering Christmas 1970. On the eve of the holiday, Bill Wilson passed a fitful night. A lifelong smoker, he had been fighting emphysema for years, and now he was losing the battle. Nurse James Dannenberg was on duty in the last hour before dawn. At 6:10 a.m. on Christmas morning, according to Dannenberg's notes, the man who sobered up millions"asked for three shots of whiskey."So did your blood run cold? Were you shocked that Bill Wilson would ask for alcohol on his deathbed, but relieved to learn he didn't get it? I'd guess that a healthy majority of the people who read the article felt the same way.He was quite upset when he didn't get them, Cheever writes.
Wilson asked for booze again about a week later, on Jan. 2, 1971.
And on Jan. 8.
And on Jan. 14.
"My blood ran cold," Cheever said recently of the discovery."I was shocked and horrified." With time to ponder, though, she found herself thinking,"Of course he wanted a drink. He was the one who talked about sobriety being 'a daily remission.' I realized that this was a story about the power of alcohol: that even Bill Wilson, the man who invented sobriety, who had 30-plus years sober, still wanted a drink."
That's because they've been brainwashed. I found it rather abhorrent that Bill Wilson couldn't get a taste of the one thing that may have made him feel a bit better on his deathbed. That allegiance to some stupid code of an earthly recovery group made one man's descent into death much more difficult than it needed to be.
I'm not horrified that Billl Wilson asked for alcohol as he was dying. I'm horrified that he didn't get it.
There are a couple of different ways of looking at alcoholism. One way says that it's the condition of needing alcohol, and that it becomes a problem only when the need for alcohol and the effects of consuming alcohol take a toll on the alcoholic's personal and professional life, or that he becomes a threat, a danger, or a burden on those around him. We need lots of things to help us get through life. If, for some of us, a few drinks a day are among those things, and we can remain functional and cordial and unassuming while taking those drinks, is the fact that we crave them really all that bad?
The other way is to look at alcoholism as this looming demon that needs to be defeated not because of the ill-effects it can cast on some people and those around them, but because alcoholism itself is an evil to be erradicated at all costs, and that every instance of its defeat somehow effects a greater good in the world. For these people, defeating alcoholism is an ends unto itself. They'd support overcoming a craving for drink even if overcoming the craving caused more damage to the alcoholic and his family than the drinking itself.
You can probably guess which view I take.
People who enter programs like Alcoholics Anonymous put themselves through a good amount of suffering. They do so because they conclude that the amount of suffering they'll need to endure to overcome alcoholism is less than the suffering they'll inflict on themselves and those they care about should they continue to drink. That's it. That's the only reason to enter AA. You don't enter AA if you crave a couple of drinks every night before bed (some people probably do, but there's no reason for them too). Even if you really, really crave them. Why not? Because those drinks and that craving aren't disrupting your life.
So what ill effects were those deathbed shots of whiskey going to have on Bill Wilson's life? They certainly weren't going to wreck his liver. They weren't going to make him beat his wife or his kids. Seems to me the only thing those shots would have done would have been to make Bill Wilson feel a little better. Does anyone think that the millions of people Bill Wilson's program helped off of alcohol would go back to drinking upon hearing that he"gave in" once he was within inches of dying? Would it somehow have invalidated AA's track record?
Was the symbolic value of keeping Bill Wilson alcohol-free until the moment of his death really worth denying Bill Wilson some relief from the pain of terminal illness? If Bill Wilson himself asked for some whiskey, he had obviously calculated that the pleasure it would give him was worth more to him at the time than any"damage" to his reputation as the guy who started AA might suffer if he consumed it. Or perhaps he didn't care. But it doesn't matter. What right did the people around him have to not respect his request?
And what kind of puritanical sadists have the rest of us become in that we relish the thought of a sick man being made to unnecessarily suffer against his will so as to preserve some sort of saintly example for today's alcholics to follow, or to make the rest of us feel more"pure" about Bill Wilson's legacy?
You can probably see where this is going. People who revel in the fact that Bill Wilson was made to suffer out of allegiance to keeping his anti-alcohol egacy pure suffer from the same delusions as the people who think we ought to make cancer, AIDS, and other sick people suffer out of allegiance to the war on drugs. Kids who choose to smoke pot today don't do so because California lets its AIDS patients light up at medical clinics. And kids who choose not to smoke pot don't base that decision on the fact that federal agents now raid convalescent centers and handcuff senior citizens to their beds.
Likewise, nobody stops or starts drinking, enters or gives up on AA because Bill Wilson wanted whiskey on his deathbed.
Hat tip: David Boaz.