Happily Revisiting a Sobering Decision

You’ve heard it all before.

First day of the rest of your life? Right. Light at the end of the tunnel? Uh-huh. Moment of clarity? Sure.

For me, it all came true 19 years ago today.

July 21, 1981, was the day I knew that in the fight between me and alcohol, I was down for the count. And it was a count filled with anxiety attacks, blackouts, missed work, failed relationships and a bewildering sense of hopelessness.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise. My grandfather was an alcoholic. When he died at 93, he had been sober 39 years, helped back to dignity by Alcoholics Anonymous. Others in my family had also struggled with booze.

But me--I was too young, I kept thinking. I hadn’t even turned 30 yet. If I stopped drinking, what would I do on my next vacation? Or my next weekend? Or that night? After all, there was always the chance that things would get fun again, the way they were back at the beginning.

That Tuesday, though, 19 years ago, I couldn’t think of fun. As I was driving to work, I could focus only on my clammy hands, my suddenly shallow breathing, a dismal feeling of doom. I made a U-turn, went home, and--just as I had too often in the past--I called in sick.

This wasn’t my first anxiety attack and I knew it wouldn’t be my last.

But now my panic was aggravated even more; although I’d lost out at relationships, I had a job--a good job that I loved. But for how much longer, if things didn’t change? If I didn’t change.

Like most Americans, I’d grown up around alcohol. Although my grandfather had been sober my whole life--I’d even played the piano at his AA Christmas parties as a child--my parents always had their before- and after-dinner drinks.

I was 14 the first time I got drunk--on vodka pilfered from my parents’ cabinet. Still angry at my mother after one of the many fights we’d had, I drank half a glass, straight, then went off to summer school. There was euphoria at first, then wooziness. But that only told me to drink a little less next time.

Amazingly, I got good grades in high school, but what kept me going wasn’t the thought of getting into a decent college. It was the thought of my next drink.

Although I didn’t plan it that way, I ended up in college in Oklahoma, where women could buy 3.2 beer at the age of 18. Lucky me.

Four jobs in seven years followed--increasingly challenging jobs at better and better newspapers--but I just kept looking forward to my next drink.

Now, though, it wasn’t always with pleasure.

Because I’d discovered I couldn’t stop. I was afraid to stop. In fact, I couldn’t live without it.

Or so I thought until that Tuesday--a day when the door to sanity opened for a split-second and I stumbled in.

After calling in sick that day, I made two more calls--to a therapist, who agreed to see me later that week, and to the central office of Alcoholics Anonymous in San Jose.

That evening, I went to a meeting of people who, like me, had decided they needed a different way to live. It was there, in the parking lot of a church, as I talked to two women I would never meet again, that I saw that light at the end of that tunnel.

I don’t remember a word anyone said as we stood outside for an hour or so after the meeting, delaying my trip home to an empty apartment and a refrigerator full of wine and beer I had yet to dispose of. I just remember that they treated me--an embarrassed 29-year-old who’d walked into that meeting hoping no one would notice her--with total acceptance. And I felt I wasn’t alone.

A few months after I stopped drinking, I visited my grandfather in Akron, Ohio. He was turning 90; I was turning 30. He was nearly blind, nearly deaf and had recently lost my grandmother after 69 years of marriage.

But he was happy, I realized--much happier than I had been the last time I had seen him, when I’d still been drinking.

For years after I stopped, I was afraid to move away from my support system. I had gotten sober in San Jose, where there were dozens of meetings every day and life was comfortable.

But in 1990, I made the leap to Ventura County, and it was fine. The support was there when I needed it. And I did. It was almost as if the nine years in San Jose were a warmup for real life.

Since I’ve moved here, I’ve gotten married, adopted two children and lost both my mother--who had stopped drinking seven years before I did--and my father.

My relationship with my parents was one of the many miracles in my sobriety. My mother and I became the best of friends after we both stopped drinking. And because I was sober, I was able to help my father through her final illness and to support him afterward. Even to feel glad that he found a new love.

Through it all, bad and good, I’ve stayed sober.

I take little of the credit myself. Left to my own devices, I’d drink. That, after all, is what alcoholics do.

But with support--from family, friends, meetings and God--I’ve made it.

And I still know that I made the right decision back on July 21, 1981, a decision that--consciously or unconsciously--I make anew each day.

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Lynne Barnes is deputy city editor of the Ventura County Edition of The Times. She can be reached at lynne.barnes@latimes.com.