Interview With an 80-Year-Old Sober Person: Sydney Lea

By The Small Bow

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“I really don’t think much about death unless I stop living my life, as my recovery community advises, a day at a time. Keeping my addictions at bay with help from others is a big part of my purging death-hauntedness, which is waiting for me again if I drop the ball.”

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TSB: Does the idea of drinking still cross your mind? Are you tempted to try it again?

I have been in AA for a quarter of a century. (Had I stayed clean after first arriving, it would now be 48 years, but that’s another story.) And yes, the thought of a drink does occur to me now and then. It always involves some fantasy scene, even a fairly pedestrian one like sitting on our porch after a workout with a frosty beer—just one, of course—in hand.

After a bender that ended with a shotgun in my mouth, I decided that this was as far down as I wanted to go. From that very moment, there was an evaporation of any physical craving for alcohol or a substitute. A mystery and, yes, a blessing. Some have to white-knuckle it for a long time.

One of the things I say to myself when the thought of a drink crops up is—Finish the movie. I have twice proved that it may start on a beach—palm trees swaying, women draped all over me, the steel band softly playing. The ending, however, is too familiar: an undersized blue robe, a pair of paper slippers, and a locked psych ward. (The second time, it could have ended not in that ward but in my blowing my brains out. Thank God even I grasped that that would be too great a blight on the lives of our 13 and 9-year-old daughters.)

But my main strategy for fending off the boozing impulse goes something like this. 1. I acknowledge that I am forevermore powerless over alcohol; 2. Because I’m an alcoholic, the idea of consuming alcohol will present itself occasionally; 3. I recognize the thought of drinking...then I let it pass from my thoughts without any impediment by me.

I’ve learned that as soon as the debate starts—weighing the pros and cons, wondering if I was “that bad” (I was)—I’ll tie myself in emotional knots, and who needs that? I breathe the impulse out.

TSB: What brings you peace? 

I can wake up well shy of the “emotional sobriety” the 12-step literature talks about, and the very worst thing I can do is sit and stew. I need to get some exercise, pronto, which, being retired, I can do on my own time. Even when I was working full time, I had a series of kick-ass exercises that I could complete in about ten minutes if I was stretched for time.

The more vigorous the exercise, the better, but any is better than none. I live in the woods, surrounded by very steep hills, and can get up a sweat any time of year by walking as briskly as I can to or toward the top of one or more; ideally, I hike for a good length of time.

Over the years, I have acquired a really good stationary bike, a ditto rowing machine, and–forgive me—an isometric thing called the Chuck Norris Total Gym. Of course, I can do pushups, planks, squats, and other stuff that doesn’t require equipment. I usually do about 30-40 minutes of something in the early morning and the same late afternoon.

Apparently, there is a physiological reason exercise can lift a mood: serotonin release or some such? But all this is more about countering depression, I suppose, than finding real, deep peace.

Time with any or all of my five children and seven grandchildren is a great avenue to peace for me. I find it hard to be anxious with all that gregarious flesh around me.

12-step meetings are crucial, too. Even a tepid one leaves me feeling better, grateful that I am not the miserable, violent, opinionated, and desperate man I was in my active days. I do three a week with absolute regularity and more if needed.

I also practice a self-invented mode of meditation, a slightly revisionist version of the self-hypnosis I was taught in the early 70s when I sought to quit smoking. Ten minutes, even fewer.

The Serenity Prayer also works, even, strangely enough, if I merely mouth it.

TSB: But does the idea of being closer to death creep in and mess with your sobriety?

No. Now, at 80, I am, by anyone’s standard, pretty damned close to death; I really don’t think much about death unless I stop living my life, as my recovery community advises, a day at a time. Keeping my addictions at bay with help from others is a big part of my purging death-hauntedness, which is waiting for me again if I drop the ball.

I had a heart attack seven years ago and underwent emergency surgery to save my life, and so, as I sometimes put it, I had a dress rehearsal for death. I was struck even under those circumstances by how little it frightened me. I elected to use 12-step parlance again to turn it over, in this case, to skilled cardiologists, to whom I am forever grateful. The Serenity Prayer was more than merely a boon that night.

When I do contemplate the fact that I am in my very late innings, my emotions have all but nothing to do with fear; instead, I get wistful: I hate the idea that I’ll very likely leave my considerably younger and wondrous wife behind, along with those children, grandchildren, and a handful of treasured friends, some in recovery and some civilians. But that’s one of many things I must accept, as I cannot change it.

Maybe the most important thing, but still one that’s more or less out of my hands. I strive, with fair success, to cherish all the blessings that have come my way since I stopped scrambling my brain with substances.

TSB: If you could list specific moments you’ve had that have been direct gifts of your sobriety, what would they be?

— I walked out of my first AA meeting and heard two barred owls yammering at one another, and I thought, “You may hear a racket; I hear beautiful music.”

— At my older son’s wedding, the minute the band started, our youngest daughter, then nine, ran directly up to me and said, “Daddy, can I dance with you first?”

— I was scheduled to do a “wired classroom,” presenting a talk about poetry to high school students all over my state; I’d never done such a thing, and I was nervous as a cat. The studio from which I’d hold forth was at the state technical college. There was an old millstone that served as a step into the building. I stood on it and said, “The only thing you can do is your best...and the world will keep turning however that turns out.” That was an actual moment of inflection in my recovery; I learned, as they say, that it wasn’t all about me.

— I went to an old woman’s funeral. She had babysat for my blended family for 39 years and was one of the world’s sweetest souls ever. We were all grieving, though we knew death was imminent. I started crying in the pew and thought, “This is good. This is sadness, and I am clear-headed enough that it’s real, not substance-induced and phony.”

— I am blessed in looking at my wife every day and thinking, “How in the hell did I ever end up with someone so out of my league, physically, spiritually, intellectually?” I’m like the klutz in the B-movie who gets the girl. Do we have spats? Who doesn’t? But fights? No. And she doesn’t have to worry about me going off the reservation in any way, hiding booze, endangering our kids, brawling in a bar, whatever. And we laugh out loud together at least once a day.

— Another improbably beautiful moment: it was a glorious June day in about the eighth month of my recovery; I was driving the regional interstate, and there was almost no traffic. I found myself preparing to pass a lonely Mobil truck, of all things, but I slowed down to follow it, just to contemplate the Pegasus logo on its tank. That red horse just looked incredibly beautiful to me, and I experienced a deep peace. The whole situation reminded me of moments I’d enjoyed on weed before all that went south on me, and I was overjoyed to know that such a feeling could be available without help from any substance.

— When she was in third grade, our oldest grandchild wrote that she loved me and needed me like a squirrel needs a nut.

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A former Pulitzer finalist, Sydney Lea served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. In 2021, he was presented with his home state’s Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. You can read more of his work at SydneyLea.net.

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