Lamenting loss of a recovering brother

Over the weekend, I again found myself at the funeral for someone I met in recovery.

Mark died last week of heart complications; his health had not been good for a few years now, and his body finally wore out. I hadn't seen him in over a year, but there was a time when he and I carried a recovery meeting twice a month into Center Pointe, the treatment center in Knoxville that caters to the indigent and the financially strapped.

When I first met Mark, he'd just gotten out of prison. He wasn't the intimidating, surly, burly prison-type that most people think of when they imagine ex-cons; Mark was a tall, soft-spoken man who possessed more power between his ears than most men will ever have with their physical bodies.

At the funeral home on Saturday, I read with amazement his long list of accomplishments -- in chemistry, in bio-technology, in engineering, in fields of science of which I don't even have rudimentary grasps. He was truly a genius, and his knowledge of recovery -- of the history of various 12-Step programs and the fellowship we both attended -- was vast and awe-inspiring.

I remember sitting in those Center Pointe meetings, listening to Mark expound upon the disease concept of addiction and the treatment that recovery provides for that disease. At first, I worried that what he said would go over the heads of the patients, many of them fresh out of detox, a lot of them there unwillingly.

But the more I listened, the more I learned from him myself -- and the more I saw how much he helped the lonely and the desperate and the hopeless that sat with us in those meetings.

Mark told them that they weren't bad people, they were sick people -- that they had a progressive, incurable and potentially fatal illness known as addiction. He told them that they weren't responsible for that addiction, but they were responsible for their recovery. He told them that within the 12-Step fellowship, they would find people who try to love unconditionally, who try to help others, who try to reach out and offer a helping hand to addicts still suffering.

He taught people that having the disease of addiction didn't absolve them from their actions, but that recovery would give them an opportunity to make amends to others and to themselves. He told them that recovery offered them a choice -- that if they didn't want to, they never had to get high again. He told them that the program gave an addict, any addict, the ability to stop getting high, lose the desire to use and the opportunity to find a new way of life.

Mark gave them hope. He didn't brow-beat them or tell them they were miserable excuses for human beings. He didn't use religion to scare them. In fact, he was adamant that they understand that while the 12 Steps talk about God, they don't refer to the Judeo-Christian concept of God in the sense that recovery meetings are worship services. Mark knew that many addicts come to recovery angry with or feeling abandoned by God; he knew that any sort of religious overtones might push people away from embracing recovery. Instead, he told them, find a Higher Power -- any Higher Power, as long as it's a loving, caring and benevolent force greater than yourself -- and cling to that force like a life preserver.

I don't know how many people in recovery were touched by Mark's message over the years. I know that I was, and at his funeral on Saturday night, I suspected many others whom I recognized, those with decades clean and those with only a few months, were touched by him as well.

I know that the local recovery community feels his loss deeply, as we do that of any of our number who die before their time -- especially one who did so much to help others with no expectation of anything in return except for a sense of gratitude for the opportunity to serve.

Farewell, Mark. You'll be missed.

Steve Wildsmith is a recovering addict and the Weekend editor for The Daily Times. Contact him at steve.wildsmith@thedailytimes.com or at 981-1144.