Fiddler’s Green
In Between Here and There
The veil between this life and the next sometimes grows a bit thinner while I am grieving the loss of a friend who’s gone over. I learned of my dear friend Paul’s departure for parts unknown a little over a week ago. I’ve been a little “off” ever since.
Since I learned this sad and unexpected news, I have found myself wandering around in the in-between land, somewhere between here and there, where I get caught up in questions about life, and death, and after-life, wondering if my friend is still around in some form, if there is any help I can be to him wherever he is, and even requesting assistance from others who have gone before — alerting them to a “newcomer” amongst them, and asking them to be there with him, so he is not alone. Help him to navigate these new unchartered waters, to find his way over there.
This is all a part of how I grieve. Paul was a special friend, one who played a significant role in my own journey here on this side of the veil. I’ll try to put his role into context.
Many, many years ago, when I was 24, I’d lost another friend, my first real loss in this life, someone I always thought would be around, a friend I used to turn to in some of my most troubled times, and I had quite a few of those back then. Reed was a friend who “got” me. He had a strong intuitive sense. We had a connection that ran just a little deeper than any I’d had with another human being up to that point in life. His death hit me especially hard.
For the first time in my life, after he left, I began to seriously question what it was I was here for, what purpose my life had, and why I was still here while he was no longer around? It was a period in my life where I depended on certain substances to aid me when I wanted to think deep thoughts. I smoked a lot of dope, and inhaled a lot of opium smoke, in my efforts to find clarity of thought. I really thought these things helped with that.
In a way, they did. I would get high AF, and achieve some level of understanding about things; but when I came back down, I would feel just as lost and confused, a little more devestated, and pretty burnt-out. More than anything else, I was feeling very much all alone in the world.
I hadn’t realized just how much getting high was serving to isolate me in my own little world, and slowly cutting me off from the things I loved in life. You don’t see this happening when it is, as it kind of creeps up on you. The drugs used to serve to help me feel more connected — they would remove my inhibitions with others, allowing me to open up more and feel connected. But, by this time, they were having the opposite effect on me, but I didn’t see that.
I was also a workaholic then, working 60–70 hours a week as a warehouse manager for a printing firm. My typical day would involve working 12 hours or so at the warehouse, then coming home alone to my apartment, blowing off a couple joints, affixing a small ball of opium to the end of a needle perched under an empty water glass, firing up the opium, letting the smoke accumulate under the water glass, then deeply inhaling it to let it take me away from all of this to parts unknown. It was a lovely, “pure” high feeling.
I would try to write about the deep thoughts that I was thinking, usually with very little to show for the effort. I would then play a baseball board game that I still enjoy playing, to this day. That winter, that game kind of became my whole life. I immersed myself totally into it, got completely lost in it, creating a whole baseball league and season, managing all the teams, serving as umpire and commissioner, rolling the dice for each pitch, each play, recording it on scorecards which would later be used to assemble all of the players’ statistics, updating the league standings, posting the leader-boards, making trades, the whole bit. This was my own little world that I had created, shared with no one else, but filling my evenings and weekends with something that deeply interested me.
One night, it all hit me, with a clarity that bespoke of my next 43 years, a vision of the future for myself that I immediately set about becoming part of my reality, in that moment.
It was a typical night after a long day of work. I dragged myself into my apartment, turned on the stereo, smoked a couple of joints, inhaled the opium, got good and high, tried unsuccessfully to do some writing, then pulled out my baseball game. But this night would not play out like so many other nights over that long, cold, lonely winter had.
I had been taking a medication for my diagnosis of “manic-depression” by the doctors at the Veterans Administration, who granted me a disability under the category of “Nervous Condition”. The medication had helped to stable my nerves, and to overcome the suicidal thoughts I’d been plagued with when I first got out of the navy. These had become prevalent when I’d decided to stop drinking and partaking in all forms of drugs. I didn’t want to do any of that anymore, but without them, I didn’t even want to be alive. So many terrible thoughts and feelings had plagued my mind and my psyche each day - I just wanted it all to stop, to go away. I wanted to go away. The medication had helped with all of that.
While I was in the V.A.’s Depression Clinic, a 2-month in-patient stay, I’d also discovered this lovely combination of weed with the lithium they gave me, that allowed me to go to that place of deep thoughts, but kept me in a stable enough condition that I didn’t reach the point of insanity that drugs had previously begun to take me to. It was a happy combination that worked for about a year and a half.
I had stayed off the booze, and joined AA to help with that. Well, joined might not be the correct term — I went to meetings and didn’t drink. I was so-called “sober”, calling myself an alcoholic in the meetings, never fully understanding what that even meant, and never telling any of my friends outside the meetings that I was an alcoholic. I just knew I couldn’t drink, so I didn’t. The meetings did help with that.
Then, about a year and a half into that period, where I began to have friends again, and got gainfully employed, achieving the promotion to warehouse manager from forklift operator, I’d gone up to Connecticut for a party, celebrating the return of my friend Reed and his fiance, Peg, from a 5 months-long cross-country journey in a camper.
Reed had been diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma, a deadly diagnosis back then, where doctors had told him he had about 5 to 10 years left to live, unless they found a breakthrough in the treatment for the disease. So, Reed and Peg had set out to see the country. He wanted to squeeze as much living into the years he had left, and see the things he hadn’t seen, while he still had enough good health to travel.
At the welcome-home party, held in their large, 2-story farmhouse in Windsor, Connecticut, there was some cocaine going around. It was the middle of the summer, very hot and humid. The coke had gotten difficult to snort. Somebody said to try just eating it. I tried that, but didn’t feel anything. So I tried eating some more. Still nothing. I kept eating it, wanting to feel something, anything. I really needed to get good and high.
I’d never really done coke before, so I didn’t know what to expect. I have no idea how much of it I ate, I only knew that it was making my mouth feel all numb and weird, and I started getting very nauseous. I felt like I was going to get sick, so I stumbled upstairs to the bathroom on the second floor. It was occupied.
The last thing I remembered was standing in the hallway outside the bathroom door, trying not to throw up before I could get into the bathroom. Things had begun to spin — and then, I was up on the hallway ceiling, just floating there, in a state of being I can only describe as feeling completely unfettered, unmoored, unanchored to anything, feeling no tension, whatsoever. I also felt enveloped by a sense of comfort, of peace, of love. It was only then that I realized just how much tension was normally in my life. For the first time, I wasn’t feeling it, and its absence was my first understanding of its existence.
I wanted to stay there. It felt so wonderful up on that ceiling. Looking down below, I saw a small crowd of people, my friends, standing over a body on the hallway floor, and I heard my name. Only then did I realize that was me down there on the floor — but I wasn’t there, I was up here, on the ceiling! I tried telling my friends this, but they couldn’t hear me.
That’s when it dawned on me that I might be dying. So, this is what that feels like? I liked it. I didn’t want to go back. Let’s go!
I watched as they picked the body up and carried it to a room down at the other end of that hallway. I talk about it like it was just some object or some other body, because I was no longer even connected to it. I was up here, and calmly making the decision to stay right where I was. I wanted this feeling to last. It felt like I was there for an eternity, and maybe I was. Maybe a part of me is still there. I think that may be true.
But, in that moment, I felt something drawing me down to that room, and I just floated with that energy, finding myself in that room, where that body that used to be mine was laid out on a bed. My friends were very excited, several on each side of the bed, calling my name repeatedly, shaking that body - I could feel their fear, and kept wanting to let them know that I was okay, to just let me go.
One of those friends was not fearful or excited, he just was sitting at the foot of the bed, very calm, when I realized it was he who had drawn me back to that room. There was a connection there, and I felt his calmness and his thoughts, gently saying, “it’s not time for you yet. You are needed here. Come back.” My friend Reed had come out there to get me and bring me back. We’d always had this kind of psychic connection, but this was something new for me.
Next thing I knew, I was back in my body, it was me again, although I still felt the sense of calm that I’d felt “out there”, even though I realized my body was shaking uncontrollably, and I still could not make my mouth and voice to work, wanting to tell my friends I was fine, to not worry about me. Instead, they picked me up again, carried me to a car, a station wagon I think, laid me out in the back, and drove me to a hospital in Hartford.
All the way there, I kept trying to tell them it was okay. I didn’t want to go to a hospital. That would make it official. I had managed to keep my drug use off all records associated with me. I didn’t want it to be part of my record. I can’t tell you why, other than, in the navy I’d been in the nuclear power program, and drug use could have gotten me thrown out of that program. Fortunately, they didn’t have drug-testing back then.
I finally managed to regain control of my voice again, just as we pulled up to the emergency room entrance. “I’m okay, guys. I’m shaking it off. Don’t take me in there.” I refused to go in.
The next day, Reed drove me down to the Greyhound Bus station in Hartford, where I was catching a bus back to Bucks County, Pa, where I lived. We were both very quiet during the ride. While he and I had always had this strange pyshic connection, we had never talked about it. We just knew it was there. I knew he knew what had happened, and he knew that I knew. Somehow, talking about it would mess it up or something. He waited with me at the station until the bus came, then we hugged and said goodbye. That was a little odd, since we never really hugged before that. It felt really good to hug my friend. He looked kind of sad as I watched him waving as the bus pulled out.
That was the last time I would see him on this side. Five days later I learned that he’d contracted pneumonia, and in the weakened state of his immune system from fighting the Hodgkins disease, the pneumonia had killed him.
The night of my revelation in my apartment after getting very high came six months after his passing. A month before, I had nicked my finger with a utility knife at work and had nearly lost the finger when an infection set in. A doctor took me off the lithium to help the antibiotic fight the infection. Without the lithium to help keep my emotions stable, I was feeling them much deeper, and the overwhelming emotion I felt that night was loneliness. So much so that I called out, “Oh, God, I’m alone!”
Just then, I spotted the AA Big Book sitting on my kitchen counter. I’d never read it in those two years I’d been attending AA meetings. Something compelled me to pick it up and start reading, that night, instead of playing my baseball game. What I read astounded me. I had no idea that alcoholism involved all of that. It gave me a tremendous sense of hope, and I’d gone back to the meetings, looking for what I might have missed in those two years.
I didn’t find it there, but I did run into an addict at a clubhouse who told me about N.A. There, I heard a message of total abstinence from all mind and mood-altering substances, and I got clean. I stayed off the lithium and embraced the spiritual program of Narcotics Anonymous. I immediately became a member, getting involved, doing more than just going to meetings. I just happened into the meeting that decided to begin writing N.A.’s own version of the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions. I became that group’s scribe, recording, transcribing, and editing the words of the addicts in the meeting into a format we could use in our step meetings. I then got to help write their basic text on recovery from addiction. This work kept me clean while I struggled to gain a spiritual understanding, through those steps, to help me to get back fully into living.
Many things happened on my long journey through recovery. My group got kicked out of N.A. and formed what we called “Addicts Anonymous”. I eventually drew disillusioned with that group, and went my own way. I stayed clean, and continued to apply the principles I’d found there to my life, and life happened. I prospered, grew a family, worked my way up to an executive level position with the government, and pretty much realized every dream I’d ever had, and then some. Life had great meaning for one who used to struggle to find any meaning. However, after many years away from the 12 step rooms, I found myself yearning to be a part of a fellowship, again.
I was in the process of trying to figure that out when my friend who just recently passed, Paul, reached out to me and asked me to come down to the Addicts Anonymous group in DC, where I’d previously met and gotten to know him. My first thought was, “If Paul is still alive, something has happened for him!” The last I’d seen Paul was 12 years before, when he couldn’t stop shooting dope.
Indeed, something had happened. He’d had an awakening of some sort. Whatever it was, had allowed him to start building a good life for himself. I would learn that he still had periodic “relapses”, maybe once or twice a year, that would only last a few days, then he’d be back to the group. He eventually asked me to sponsor him, and we went through the steps together. After that, he seemed like he was okay. I don’t know if he had any relapses or not after that, I just know that things seemed to settle down in his life.
The news of his passing was a bit of a shock. Back when he was still relapsing, we’d always almost expected that call one day. But not now. He’d apparently had a sudden heart attack or stroke in the shower, and went quickly.
My return to 12 step fellowship, ushered in by Paul’s reaching out to me, has been the story of my past 11 years. I went from the Addicts Anonymous group to AA, and finally back to N.A. 4 years ago, where I have found a home. I’m currently helping about 18 other addicts in their journey through the 12 Steps (and 12 Traditions), meeting each weekly in one-on-one sessions on zoom, walking with them in their journeys. The technology that got pressed into service at the beginning of the Covid pandemic allows me to sponsor addicts in 6 different countries, almost like they are all right here, in my office as we meet each week. This fills my days with much joy and peace, being able to be a part of something that impacts so many in a transformative and positive way. I have Paul to thank for helping me to find my place, here. He’s been a good friend and a fellow who understood the struggle, and who’d found a significant level of peace and joy in his life, before it ended so abruptly.
A lady I sponsor in England sent me the pictures shown at the top of this story, along with the story of them. She is a boat-painter, and a recent client asked her to paint that picture on the side of his boat. He had a tattoo of the same on his arm. Fiddler’s Green is apparently a mythical place on the other side, where old sailors go to enjoy much mirth and merriment, where the only requirement for membership is a healthy sense of humor.
I had a dream during a brief nap the other day. In the dream, out of which I awoke still laughing, a friend and I were listening to some music that struck both of us in the funny-bone, and we began that uncontrollable laughter that happens between friends sometimes, and I came out of that dream still laughing, not remembering what was so funny. I can’t tell you who the friend in the dream was, but I suspect it was Paul. Perhaps, he had found Fiddler’s Green and was sharing the laughter.
Farewell, old friend. Thanks for the laughs, and for the life I live today. You had a lot to do with me finding my way to where I am. I hope you find yours over there.
