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Illustration · A pier on a December night: the black side of an ocean liner with lit portholes, a gangplank coming down from a lit doorway, empty, and one steamer trunk at its foot. Not drawn from a photograph.

Daily Reflections · January 5

Total Acceptance

Today’s passage describes the end of the road for a drinker. Marty M. had been there, and in her story in the Big Book she gave it one clause.

Today’s reading

The reading for January 5 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book, page 152, at the start of its last chapter, “A Vision for You”: a few sentences about where a drinker ends up.

This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.

Read it at aa.org

Themes and asks

  1. Every way closed

    The passage follows a drinker to the point where no way forward looks possible.

    • Do you remember the day when every choice looked impossible?
    • What would you say to someone standing there now?

  2. No small print

    The member who wrote the reflection says the bottom was what finally ended the arguing, and that what it brought left no room to bargain.

    • What reservation did you hold on to longest?
    • Is there one you’re still keeping, quietly?

  3. Who knew

    The member writes as one alcoholic to another. Read beside the history below: Marty’s family waited on the pier without knowing what had been happening to her.

    • Who in your life didn’t know, for a long time?
    • Who understood before you had to explain?

  4. Going home to get well

    This page’s own thought, from the history: Marty sailed home to get well and was carried off the ship. Getting nearer to help isn’t the same as taking it.

    • Where have you moved, or changed jobs, hoping the drinking would stay behind?
    • What came with you anyway?

Behind the words

The last passenger

Today’s passage opens “A Vision for You,” the Big Book’s last chapter, and it describes the end of the road for a drinker. Marty M. knew the place. In “Women Suffer Too,” her story in the Big Book since its second edition of 1955, she remembers one bad night in New York and, in a single clause, an earlier time: “that other window, three years before,” and “the six agonizing months in a London hospital ward.”

Her biographers, Sally and David R. Brown, say a little more. At a Fourth of July house party in the English countryside, drunk and in a blackout, she went out of an upstairs window onto a stone terrace. She “jumped or fell—she never knew which,” they write, and broke her jaw, a leg and a hip. She spent the next six months in a London orthopedic hospital.

She meant to go home to get well. Late in 1936, after more drinking in Scotland and in London, she borrowed her fare on the Queen Mary, planning to sober up on the way. She drank the whole crossing. Her mother, her sister Chris and Chris’s roommate met the ship in New York on December 15, 1936, and waited on the pier until everyone else was off. Then two stewards came down the gangplank carrying a stretcher, and on it “the last passenger off the ship.”

It was more than two years, through Bellevue and a sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut, before she read the book today’s passage comes from, in a manuscript her doctor handed her. November 18 tells what she did with it.

More on England and the pier: The last passenger, in People Like You. On the sanitarium and the book: The glass box, in People Like You.

The road to the book

Marty M.’s way home, in order, as her biographers tell it. Today’s passage was waiting at the end of it.

  1. A London hospitalSix months on a ward, mending, until the turn of the year.
  2. ScotlandA nurse from the ward takes her north to learn to walk again. She isn’t supposed to drink.
  3. Hyde ParkBack in London, broke, she sits in a rented deck chair with a bottle, day after day.
  4. The Queen MaryShe borrows her fare and sails in December 1936, meaning to sober up on board.
  5. The pierDecember 15, 1936. Her mother and sister wait until everyone else is off.
  6. BellevueThe neurological ward of New York’s city hospital, in 1938.
  7. Blythewood, early 1939While she is at a sanitarium in Connecticut, her doctor hands her a book in manuscript. Today’s passage is in its last chapter.

Threads

Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.

Sources
  • Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book). Works Publishing, 1939: “A Vision for You”; fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001, for “Women Suffer Too,” Marty M.’s story, in the book since its second edition of 1955. Page 152, which the reading cites.
  • Sally Brown and David R. Brown, A Biography of Mrs. Marty Mann. Hazelden, 2001. Chapter 10, “In the Fury of the Storm (1935–36),” and chapters 11 and 12.
  • Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. January 5 · aa.org

Something wrong here? A date, a name, a quotation? Let me know

Daily Reflections is AA’s book of readings for every day of the year, each written by a member about a favorite passage from AA’s literature. A Daily Reprieve gives each day questions to sit with and the story behind its words.

Printed from One Drunk to Another, an independent AA history · onedrunktoanother.org/today/january-5/