I took a major step toward overcoming my misgivings when I took the suggestion to read, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” by Harold Kushner. It’s a slender volume whose basic suggestion is that God doesn’t cause tragedies, but that it IS God who helps those of us stricken by tragedies to withstand the grief and eventually to move on. I don’t even know, now, how well I’m paraphrasing Kushner, but it’s what I took away from the reading, and it helped. 

I also carried my inquiries to a couple men of the cloth: Somewhere in the newspaper, I’d seen that a minister from the church a block from our house in Marblehead was now in Connecticut, and though our only personal contact had been when he’d picked me up hitchhiking once or twice, I called him up and asked to come see him. I also sought out Jon Luopa, my brother and sister-in-law’s Unitarian minister, a gently inviting guy whose tack — and my reaction — really surprised me. He had no dog in the hunt, and wondered, if God was a stumbling block, if I shouldn’t try out something called Rational Recovery, which I understood to be an analogue of the 12 Steps without the God part. My reaction was to defend “my” process, revealing more investment than I realized I had.

In conversations within the fellowship, however, I continued to challenge believers. My sponsor Michael was pretty patient, but soon made clear that I could think and talk all I wanted, but if, eventually, I didn’t take Step 3, I wouldn’t have recovery. And I wasn’t going to be able to skirt this one; even if logic and discussion had shortened the distance, I was still going to have to leap if I was to reach the opposing shore.

Not long after, I got another suggestion that helped as much as the one to read Kushner: Michael said that if I didn’t have a concept of God that worked for me, I should make up my own. I know now that the suggestion came directly from the Big Book, or, at least, that it also appears there, but I can’t tell you how surprised I was to see it there only a couple of years ago. I’d read the book more than once by that time, but that idea hadn’t registered. That sort of thing happens, though: I keep reading the book, and I keep discovering “new” things that were there all along.

Without too much effort, I conceived a Higher Power that combined my uncles Albert and Joe, one from each side of my family.
I chose them because neither had ever said a cross word to me, both had always had time for me, and I knew intuitively that both of them liked and loved me, whether they’d ever said it or not. They made me feel special. I was sure that in any circumstance, they would want what was best for me, would have helped me to get there if I had asked, and wouldn’t have scolded me if I’d fallen short.

God should be so good.

Though I didn’t see them at the time, there were a couple of other commonalities: Neither ever married, a path I thought I was on, and they both lived in the shadows of more accomplished brothers, as I had when growing up. (My dad’s father, Joseph, ran leather businesses on the North Shore, and he had employed Albert, just as Solly had employed Joe.)

I began to picture one or both of them on my shoulder when I craved help or comfort that I wasn’t finding in the quotidian world. If I conjured only one of them, it was usually Joe, who was more involved in my life at an earlier stage. He used to take me on jobs with him when he’d go to fix a broken window or install a shower enclosure, and he was there the day I learned to ride a bike.

This was just a construct, of course; I’d made it up. And yet, I was sticking with it, so it must have been doing something for me.

Then came the day I was sure of it.

I’d been smoking cigars, one of the more severe detours my compulsion had taken since I’d put down the food. Practically overnight, I’d gone from the sort of cigar smoker who bought a five-pack and let three go stale to one who went through 50 in a week. Do the math: that’s 7 a day!

I was smoking before hitting the floor in the morning, and I‘d often let one extinguish itself on the nightstand as I retired. I reordered my work day so that I could hang outside a couple of times a day. I allowed this obviously unhealthful behavior on the grounds that I wasn’t inhaling, which a) was never completely true, b) didn’t prevent nicotine dependence regardless, and c) skipped over the fact that it was addictive behavior, which, ideally, would have been reason enough not to engage in it.

Just as had happened with food, I’d come to see, eventually, that I was out of control and had to stop, but had been unwilling or unable to. (Today, I recognize that as a definition of powerlessness.)
Then, one day I pulled into the CVS parking lot to get my next box of 50, leaving my last stub smoldering in the ashtray. I went in, got my stash, and stood in line. But it was long, so I decided to look around a bit rather than just wait. As I was browsing, an alchemy within me combined the knowledge that smoking was bad for me with the certainty that Uncle Joe wouldn’t want it for me. Just like that, I put the box back and walked out a free man.
Though I didn’t make the connection then, it was just like that night on the turnpike: I’d walked in with one intention, and left with another, not because I’d willed it, but perhaps, because I hadn’t.
In my little world of rules, I would have been entitled to finish off the stogie in the ashtray, but I just let it go, and, miraculously, that was the end of them. It’s true that I’ve gone back to them for very brief periods over the years, so nothing’s permanent, but still, I remember quite clearly how Uncle Joe helped me quit.
It was an impressive feat for a dead man, particularly one who smoked cigars every day I knew him.