It was 6:00 a.m. June 9, 1998 my mother’s seventy-third birthday, when she drove to my house laying on the horn of her car. As I came to the door, she called out in a shaken, tearful voice for me to call the coroner in Gulf Port, Mississippi. My younger brother Mark had just been killed. The first thing that came to mind was the fear that it had to be alcohol related. Mark had been struggling with his alcoholism for more than twenty years. In the last thirteen years he had bounced in and out of AA many times. We had lived in fear of this phone call for a long time.
I phoned the coroner and my fear was confirmed. Mark had gotten drunk and passed out on a train track on his way home. His blood alcohol level was so high he never knew what hit him. The coroner said he did not personally believe in cremation but under the circumstances he suggested we consider it. I then thought of what I had heard over and over in AA meetings. One of three things will happen to you if you are an alcoholic and continue to drink: you will go to jail, be institutionalized or die. Mark’s drinking caused two of them to come true.
I phoned the people with whom Mark had stayed. I was trying to make sense of this senseless death of my forty-two-year-old brother. I learned that he had just been released from jail and put on probation for pawning his employer’s tools. He had used the money to drink. The judge had ordered him to attend four AA meetings a week. On June 7 he went to his first AA meeting and was to go to his second on June 8. When he got home from work on the 8th at 4:00 p.m., he had received a money order in the mail for $43.00. Instead of making that second AA meeting, he chose to take the money order to his favorite bar to cash. He drank until closing and was on his way home by way of the train tracks. He traveled this path to avoid the police and a possible public intoxication or violation of probation charge. This was a frequent way home for him. Around 1:00 a.m. he passed out falling on the train tracks. A CSX freight train was his last contact with life.
His death was difficult for me to accept the next day. I talked about it with my sponsors and went to a lot of meetings sharing this AA truism of what happens to an alcoholic that fails to get our program. I thought of gratitude in this period of sorrow. I was grateful that Mark had not been driving a vehicle and that no one else was dead. I was grateful that he did not suffer. Most of all I was grateful to this wonderful program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Without Mark’s personal struggle with alcoholism I would not have found the program eleven years ago. You see, my parents put Mark in an alcohol rehab program thirteen years ago. As a result of that experience my late father got sober and then I got sober. Fear of that phone call has been replaced by finality and peace.
Dan A. Lakeland, Florida