The Rewards of Giving

Today’s passage comes from page 109 of the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions, in Bill W.’s essay on Step Twelve, the paragraph after December 10’s. (December 3 maps the whole essay, and December 9, on love with no price tag, follows its first paragraph back to Ebby T.) Bill had known that kind of giving from the other end first, before he had anything to give back. In memories that Pass It On, AA’s biography of him, quotes, he credited his mother-in-law, Matilda Burnham, with an astonishing capacity for “the kind of love that demands no reward.”

The memory belongs to the end of 1930, where Pass It On quotes it. After the crash, and a job in Montreal lost to his drinking, he and Lois W. came back with no money, Lois wrote, and her parents took them in at 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn. By then, Pass It On supposes, Bill had lost some standing with them, though they seem to have treated him kindly all the same. Matilda had cancer of the bone and was going twice a week for radium treatments, and her husband and son had fitted out a floor of the house as an apartment where she could be cared for. She died on Christmas Day, 1930. Bill, as Lois and Pass It On both tell it, was drunk that day, and for days before and after.

Her husband, Dr. Clark Burnham, “loved Bill and tried to help him,” Lois wrote. In 1933, when Bill was drinking constantly, it was her father, as she remembered it, who recommended sending him to Towns Hospital. Pass It On says Bill’s brother-in-law, Dr. Leonard Strong, married to Bill’s sister Dorothy, arranged the stay and paid the fee. In “Bill’s Story,” written for the Big Book in 1938, Bill said he got there “through his kindness and that of my mother.” In 1957 he wrote that Dr. Strong and his mother “saw us through the worst of my drinking.”

Lois traced a habit of her own to her upbringing. As children, she and her brothers and sisters were never paid for work they did for their parents or for anyone else; they were taught to help for love, and “for the reward of feeling useful to others.” In 1936, decorating a new apartment for a friend, she couldn’t bring herself to charge for her work. She offered to take speech lessons instead, and never went to them. She remembered too, from her girlhood, that her father sent no bill at all to many of the families he treated.

By 1936 the giving in the house ran the other way. Bill had been sober since December 1934, and from 1935 he and Lois took in drunks to live there. They kept for themselves the second-floor apartment Dr. Burnham had made over for his wife in her illness, and gave the rest of the house to the men (December 15 tells how that went). Dr. Burnham died at 81 in September 1936, not quite two years into Bill’s sobriety. Matilda had died almost four years too soon to see any of it.

More on the house, and the doctor who often sent no bill: A doctor’s daughter, in Captain of My Soul. On Lois’s years of standing by Bill, and her father’s advice: Everlastingly trying, in Captain of My Soul. On the drunks who lived in the house: Damn your old meetings, in Captain of My Soul.