so.

life has to continue.  it will, too.  it will for someone.  it will for me.  it has for those who are now gone, when some who went before them left this plane of reality.  life goes on, and there's nothing one can do about it.  checking out doesn't change the going on anymore than staying around changes the fact that a person is going to die.  it's just how it goes. 

i'm going to try to write this here, as i need to post something on FB, to honor the man who did so much for me, for my existence and continued growth and survival.  and then maybe i can cry as i want to, and maybe i can begin to let go.  i don't know for sure.  but i can try.

"There's a tendency to personalize loss of life, as if the person who has passed away was somehow obliged to us who remain and have broken their obligation.  I guess a part of me feels this way, but the person in question taught me so much better than that.  I know he left because he was sick a long time, and now he's not anymore, and that is a joy to know and a sadness as deep as the hole that existed in me when I came to recovery in 1988.

That's where I met Johnnie L Copeland, in a 12 Step meeting in Salem, Ohio.  Oh, I don't give fellowship names.  if you're astute, you'll probably figure that out for yourself.  But the 11th Tradition gives explicit instruction on that, and I"m not going to be the one to break it.  They get broken enough these days, part of what the hell is wrong in our fellowships.  But I get off track...

I met Johnnie in a little meeting that was one of the originals of this fellowship, back in 1988.  When I walked into that meeting, I was a recently nourished 20 year old junkie with an inferiority complex on steroids and a razor-sharp ability to hide everything behind whatever wall I could construct the quickest.  Be it silence, a mohawk haircut, a large vocabulary of words I didn't even know (back then), or staring at the ceiling or the floor.  I was a terrified kid, fresh from Columbus and suicidal notions, wanting nothing more than to find a way to successfully smoke weed and drink without the onus of freebase cocaine (crack) hanging around my neck millstone fashion.

Johnnie was one of the first people I met in MY recovery.  I met people in my dad's recovery, and I met people on the perimeter as my dad learned to work the steps and did 12 step work the old-fashioned way.  But when I got sober, Johnnie was there.  He was one of three black people in that meeting, and one of only a handful in the city of Youngstown period, in that particular fellowship. 

I felt like I didn't belong there.  I was broke and raggedy, and these people looked well dressed and groomed and hip.  They seemed the manifestation of the tormentors of my high-school years, all grown up now.  Not Johnnie; he seemed somehow worse back then.  Three piece suit.  Jheri curl long enough to almost resemble the old Processes the singers wore.  Jewelry and sunglasses.  A young white girl next to him.  He looked like he stepped right out of an Iceberg Slim/Donald Goines novel.  He became my sponsor, but that's not why. 

He became my sponsor...I ASKED him to be my sponsor, for one reason:  when he spoke, people shut the fuck up and listened to hear what he had to say.  I'd never seen anything like it.  When he spoke, at that meeting, you could hear the fluorescents hum.  And everyone but one person turned to look at him as he spoke.  I remember feeling...'He's not afraid.  He has the room under control when he speaks.'  And I wanted that.  I wanted to know how to do that.  And no one else I saw that day commanded attention without trying like that. 

That's most of my inclusion in this, thank Heavens. 

Johnnie L Copeland was about this recovery thing.  He did his work and retired, but as he worked he helped build the fellowship of Cocaine Anonymous in Youngstown Ohio, and much of the state of Ohio.  He used time that he could have spent doing just about anything else laying down the formation for recovery in this city for people who were being shunned by AA and couldn't get all the way into NA.  He made us responsible.  HE gave us positions in the beginning; Secretary, Treasurer, GSR.  He made up the briefcases and filled them with the things the meeting would need and passed them on to us, to take with us to the meetings we went to.  He would tell us to go to AA, to learn recovery there, and to bring it back to share in CA.  He sponsored a lot of guys.  He helped a lot of people, a whole lot of us.  And he paid for it, too. 

He had a lot of stories of the things he' experienced and done.  I never had a problem believing him, because there is a certain way a person carries themselves when  they've seen hells beyond hell.  I learned this as I became a man.  He grew up in a segregated, racist America, and he learned how to be a man when the white world wanted him to be a 'boy'.  And he tried to teach many of us how to be men too.  He spoke of his sins, his mistakes, his crimes.  He spoke of his regrets and his vices.  He didn't 'sugarcoat' anything, and he was fond of letting you know he didn't.  He didn't try to make himself someone fabulous and amazing in our eyes; quite the opposite.  He would show how imperfect he was, how brutal his actions had been.  He would speak of how the program changed him, and that was his message. 

He was smart.  He was confident in what he said.  He spoke with assurance; when he was sure of his facts, he spoke them and would not brook the nonsense of 'hypotheticals' and rhetoric.  He would say often through the years at many meetings, "The truth don't need me to defend it."  He spoke eloquently, and he could speak gutter profanity just as well.  'Hardcore recovery', they used to call it, and they tried to imitate it, as they did with so much of his persona here. For him, it was a way to confront the brutal truth of who a person was, to get him to open up about the worst of himself so he could see there was only one way to go; UP.  For the imitators, it was just a way to make themselves feel better at someone else's expense. 

How far should I go?  He always drove a Cadillac and a Corvette?  He always had a beautiful woman (at least since I knew him), including his last wife?  He was a gambler, possibly compulsive when it came to the lottery?  Should I say how he took very little nonsense, or what he considered nonsense, from anyone?  How he spoke of money, how important it was to him?  I'm not sure it was, but he spoke of it often. 

I can't really elaborate on that, anymore than I would attempt to explain how many times he sat after a meeting for hours, speaking to someone who was having a problem, long after the practice of 'fellowshipping' died out.  Or how he would deliberately read in a broken, misspeaking fashion to make someone who could barely read at all feel better about themselves.  Or how he was always trying to figure out how to make CA better, trying to see how we could help more people, how we could do more for the community of recovery. 

I can tell you what he told me.  Like, how 'Recovery is life; they're not separate for us.'  Or, 'Just like life has more than one side, your recovery has to be multi-dimensional as well.'  Or, 'Try everything you can to work on your relationship, give it every effort possible...so when it finally ends, you won't think there's something else you can do, and you'll break clean'.  Or a thousand, thousand other things he told me, showed me and taught me over almost 30 years of life. 

Again, not without cost.  'No good deed goes unpunished', they say.  He had to watch as the vultures picked apart the Fellowship.  He had to watch as the newcomers began to be treated like they didn't matter.  He watched egos run rampant and spirituality take a header into a pool with no water.  He watched meetings close and people relapsing over and over again.  He never stopped trying to do the right thing, to get people to do the right thing.  He was ostracized by his imitators, he was slandered and they talked about him behind his back often.  I relate only the facts here.  It hurt him greatly, but he didn't tell to many people that.  He told me.  I'm telling you.  It doesn't matter now, does it?

Now, you can go to one of the few CA meetings in this city of Youngstown, Ohio, and you may see a gathering of Cadillacs.  You might see the jewelry draped fakers and listen to their 'emotional rantings' with no substance in the Big Book or any real recovery facts at all.  You might see the dog and pony show (he loved to use that term) that our meetings have become.  And you might be inclined to think, that's Johnnie C's legacy.  But that's not it. And I sure as hell am not it.  I'm ego-centric, but not to that extent. 

No, I can't say for sure what his legacy is...but I know that when you see someone who is taking time to help someone who is struggling with their sobriety, taking time to listen, to share from their heart rather than from their head or their groin, you're experiencing some of his spirit.  When you see someone digging deeper into the Program, trying hard to find not only where they're at in the process, but where they could go if they truly apply themselves, you are digging some of his flavor.  And when you hear a real burst of laughter from someone who has learned to laugh at themselves, telling themselves the truth about who they are for the first time, or when you watch someone weeping from some truth they've stumbled upon and others offer them genuine love and support...that's a part of his legacy, far as I'm concerned. 

He was scared when he was sick, but he never showed it outside his own home.  Not to me.  I saw it though.  I'm almost certain his wife saw it.  But he continued on.  He was still advising me, still suggesting things.  He never stopped being...Johnnie. 

They'll pretend they care, and many will be glad he's gone.  I'm speaking truth, regardless of who accepts it.  Many will come with crocodile tears and secret heart-smiles.  Many will curse his name openly.  But I'd be willing to bet more will feel what I feel; loss of a friend, a father, an uncle, a mentor, a teacher, a guide, a leader, a support, a sponsor.  Many will feel happy that he's not scared anymore, that he's not sick anymore, that he's done dying.  I believe that will be the majority.  But, under any circumstances, he was one of the best people I've met on this journey so far, and for the past 30 years, he's always had my best interest at heart.  And for that, I honor my sponsor, John Lee Copeland, and I do so with all the love and respect I have in me. My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today..