i woke up this morning with old thoughts in my new [alanon] head.
memories of stories i had been told,
memories of stories i had lived.

it began a long time ago.
a young woman known as N, married at age 18 a man twenty years her senior.
this union,
was to be the beginnig of a short life for her and a long life for many who followed after her.

not long after young N married  A, her life of isolation began.
separated by what today is a few short miles,
was back then a few long miles.
she rarely saw her identical twin and family again.

the babies came right away away.
after ten years of marriage ,
ten children were born.
two set of twins were to be the offspring of this marriage,
one of them being my father.
two weeks after the birth of baby ten,
my birth grandmother N died of blood poisening while A [my birth grandfather]was a many six miles away on a drinking binge.

eight of the ten children left behind as a result of this sad untimely death were to be adopted out.
the two eldest girls age 9 and 10 were to stay and live with their drunken father.
how sad their lives turned out to be.

my father was adopted by a local christian family.
he was five,
he remembers being separated from his twin sister,
watching her from the back window as the car was being driven away in.
she was running, screaming, crying out his name.
that was the last he was to see of her until he miraculously met her in Germany as a young adult, when her husband was stationed at the same base as my father, while enlisted in the canadian army.

i am told that my grandparents would have adopted my fathers twin sister too,
they wanted to,
but she was already spoken for.
being as cute as a button the story goes...
a couple who could not have childeren of their own paid my birth grandfather sixty dollars for her [i guess this was not uncommon in those days] and took her far away,
in a pretty new coat and bright shiny shoes.

the identical twin of my birth grandmother adopted two of the her now deceased sisters boys,
one  being the last child born unto this tragic union.
he too was to die at a young age,
and,
the other still living has  lost his family,
due,
to the unstoppable drinking that he never knew,
but,
somehow inherited from the father who before him who could not stop either.

the remaining children were adopted into this community that i have called home for many years.
our name and the tragedy is fast becoming an old story in the new developments of this town.
with time people forget.
but,
for many the pain lives on.

this disease called alcholism has been like a thread in a well woven tapestry framed in a passage called time.
it has been a part of my life since before i was even born.
it has hurt loved ones then and continures to hurt loved ones now.
it is a part of who i am.

for years i hated the man who [in my mind] started it all.
the man who drank not himself to death [for he was to live a long life]
but his young wife.
she died as a result of his neglect,
children suffered,
family members were hurt,
and he lived on
and
on 
and
on.........
to hurt many more through out his life time.

i knew this man .
my first memory of him is when i was nine years old.
we would go visit him in his old ram schackled log cabin,
he would drink the night away,
we kids would sit by the pot belly stove and drink hot cocoa he made with canned mild.
it was nice.
it was before i knew.............
we were always told after we visited with him,
" Don't tell your grandparents where we have been".
it was a small town [still is 998 people],
and,
of course everybody knew the story of the O. family.
when my father was adopted he would see his siblings in school and be told
"don't talk to them, they are not your family anymore. we are"
''don't talk, don't tell'' was to become the trade mark statement through out my father's life  and mine.
when we visited old grampa O., we were not tell gramma and grandfather N. .
many other things happened later in life ,
and,
we
were always told,
" Don't talk, don't tell".

old grampa O. lived on,
and
on
and
on.

after years of destruction, pain and death, he died.

many years later ,
after a tragic loss of my own,
i was visiting the old cemetary yard.
i found gramps O's  grave,
and on the slab of concrete that marked  his burial spot were engraved two words.....,
" JESUS FORGIVES ".
i looked at those words and i thought,
"after all he had done,
after all he has hurt,
after all the devastation and pain that was to follow generations later,
his loved ones were able to say those two words.

today,
as i think back on this story,
on the life of this one man and the lives of many others effected by this disease called alcoholism,
i want to say to my higher power.......
please help me whisper these words......,
" Jewely Forgives ".