Editorial Comment 2/25/2020: Transitions (specific), and Transitions (general)

Transitions (specific):  Dr. Chuck Stevens (D.O.), addiction specialist and Methodist Minister, was a familiar figure and voice to many of us.  His 27 years of recovery contributed to the survival of, and the fulfillment of ambitions for countless others.  His passing in January came at age 67, a number he had not expected to attain; his grace in enduring more than one chronic, progressive illness both instructed and encouraged many who will see this.

Transitions (general): Much of my past week was spent in the company of Western Doctors in Recovery, in San Diego, a more compact and regional organization than International Doctors in Alcoholics Anonymous (IDAA), but which shares many of the same aims.  My presentation was on The Place of Death in Recovery.  Chuck’s passing stimulates this extract:

• A problem with death is that it is so very final. It has the last word, it is the prosecution’s final summation and the defense stands mute before it. Space is not the final frontier; death is.  And resistance to it is interestingly the source of many of our appetites, just as it is also the stimulus for creativity. Our disinclination to die drives at least the hunting instinct and the gathering of food, as well as its consumption; and arguably it impels sex, as procreation seems to be one of the few ways to assure immortality…or at least to increase the odds. We even grace the exhausted, wistful, briefly sad moment after orgasm with an homage, “le petit mort,” or, “the little death.”
• Because of its finality, it holds us in awe; and as a consequence causes us to be very apologetic, very humble when we are in its presence.  In the classroom, there is always the overeager child who calls out, waving his hand, “Pick me! Pick me!”  When friends ask for help, volunteers abound.
• When death looms, on a battlefield, at a funeral, or in a hospital, one does not hear, “pick me!”

- Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM