Silent passing of a long lonesome wail

This morning my friend Doug woke up dead.

Died in his sleep we suppose. Peaceably we hope.
The man deserved to pass painlessly away.
After such a long, painful existence.
I have no idea what killed the body of Doug Smith.
But I do know what killed this life.
That was alcoholism.
It was a beautiful life and he was a wonderful man.
He was a man who will be much missed.
And he was a man who missed much.
To say Doug without saying "The Movement" is to say nothing at all.
I met him when Nicaragua needed the solidarity of the American people.
And there was Doug.
Listening to him talk I learned of many other things.
Planting trees, free radio, old town unions, the rainbow coalition, tribal rights
Where was Doug not?
When he stood there, he stood firm. He knew his stuff.
And he knew where he stood and for whom he stood.
Always doing it with that commitment to truth and ethics.
He was not at home with himself.
The steering wheel of his life had no hand on it.
How many of those rehab centers did I visit him at?
One in Napa, one in Sonoma, another somewhere past Port Chicago.
There were residential programs,
And special homes.
And shelters.
I saw those places full of men who found the air around them heavy.
Sharing a house, but not their lives, not their homes, not their broken hearts.
They shared a building and a need to stay sober in order to save their own lives.
Good men sharing joyless housekeeping.
All I could do was take him out to lunch somewhere pleasant.

As time passed I found that he never could come fully out of the sickness.
There were long sober times.
For them to exist, he had to focus more on himself.
Politics went out the window taking friends, family, lovers and work with it.
As the years added up, his presence in the lives of others became another broken
promise.
Doug was a man whose star shone brightly when it was shining.
When the demon did not grab him there was no better.
He was the man of the co housing, building, planning, organizing.
The politics was part of all he did, but was not all he did.
This man once had the courage to ask me how my girl had gotten a black eye.
Ready to call me out and come to her aide, despite our years of friendship.
He had a longer relationship with truth and ethics that held sway over him.
He was a man who knew how to engage a child.
And trick them too when needed.
Kids loved him, he loved them back.
My kids shared deep laughter when he was around.
My younger kid still uses Doug's drill and Leatherman,
After doing so much for Nicaragua and El Salvador he only asked for one thing for
himself.
It was to visit Nicaragua, together with me.
So we went.
Him in detox.
My day old divorce seemed painless when watching him suffer through detox.
And we had a young child of 8 to keep us both company.
That son now mourns him with me.
In those couple weeks I learned how he was much more admirable of a person than I
had already discovered and that his fight with alcohol had cost him more than I
suspected.
Neither fact was new to me, but the depth of the problem needed to be seen up close
to be felt. And he never drank a drop on that trip.
His hands knew the running of a printing press better than most who claim that skill.

When sober he was a craftsman, a journeyman and always a working man.

It is amazing how our culture wears down working men. Especially when they are
single, childless, and ever more so when they have a problem.
That last thing an alcoholic needs is more loneliness.
Yet it is exactly the actions of a drunk that gets one shunned into ever more solitude.
When he decided to move to my area
I was overjoyed to have such a friend live close.
And then I go to see why, and why not.
Living close to a man who was living far away from everyone,
The drinking cost him the job he moved here for, because he ethically told his worked
owned, coop printing company that he had relapsed. When he could, he found more
work for private firms. Ethics and Truth are not profitable gods to worship, all they
pay for their sacrifices is Integrity and Awareness, maybe some Consciousness when
they are feeling generous.
And it cost him the home he was trying to make with radical young people.
He went missing in the local worker owned coop movement he had moved here to
join.
There were women who loved him, but who could not live with his condition.
As a friend, he was absent in good times and bad. He never had it together enough
for long enough to be anyone in my son's lives. Yet he was there and they were
open to him.
And he was never the one I called upon when I had to leave with one of those
children in the middle of the night nor when we were walking door to door with voter
cards. He was the first one I would trust, but the last one I would trust to be healthy
enough to help.
We saw him off to the hospital twice. My younger son and I visiting him in the ICU
and again a year later in the detox ward getting ready to be shipped to some place
he called "the Farm"
I would not let anyone see what I had found cleaning out his room. The stacks of
junk, the empty bottles, the not quite empty junk food bags, the clear signs of a man

who had withdrawn to his room to drink and rage at the world. His room mates told
me about how they heard shouting and things getting thrown. He wanted the hard
drives from his computers. We hired someone to help us put the rest into storage
and then clean the room. I sent the keys to his brother who foot the bill.
He went to the farm. His things to storage. I went home stricken wishing I could do
something real and not just put him and his things into boxes.
Doug spent some of the last of his inheritance money to put himself into another
"farm" called Duffy's. I went to see him there twice, and joined the program for
friends and family.
The patients were a tribe of dynamic folk. It seemed to me that all those people
needed help, wanted help, and that most of us do not understand the lack of control.
Only because of Doug, did I get to see how a sane, rational man was overcome. He
realized what was happening to him. What he did not have was a method or
condition that worked to keep him sober and allowed him to be the wonderful man
that he was.
It also seemed to me that Duffy's made a lot of money for something that was not
that big a deal. It could be done without requiring so much cash from the patient.
The city of Oakland could do that.
Kaiser could do that.
The county of Alameda could do that.
But of course, the way the money is counted rigs the system.
Whatever might have worked, Doug never found it.
And I wonder if we are even looking in the right direction.
There are a lot of Doug's. That is why I write this.
For them, their loved ones, for all of us.
Many of us, each alone in a way, all together in other ways.
Will miss this man.
I have been blessed with many a good friend.
Doug was second to none of them.
He was a great man.
And yet he was never as great as he could have been,
if he could have stopped this illness.
And he was never quite as happy as he deserved to be,

even if he was always able to take the hard times and be optimistic about the world's
chances and his own.
I'm also infected with that dogged commitment to truth and ethics.
So I have to tell what I see as my truth in loosing Doug.
It hurts to have lost this friend.
It hurt for him to have been lost these many years as we stood there.
Powerless.