Carver: Gravy
“No other word will do. For that’s what it was.
Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. ‘Don’t weep for me,’
he said to his friends. ‘I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure Gravy. And don’t forget it.’”
—Raymond Carver in The New Yorker (9/29/1988), p. 28.
It is not unusual for people seeking spiritual direction to come seeking relief from an addiction. They are under the influence of another “spirit” and have “seen through a glass darkly” that the answer may be a spiritual one—a relationship with what those in recovery call “a higher power.” They may simply come for a brief time. As spiritual friends, we care for their soul, which has been anesthetized and put to sleep by drugs, alcohol, work, shopping, etc. We keep looking to see where God has worked in the person’s life, caring for that soul. We keep praying they will become aware of God’s leading them to a new life of spirituality through those moments.
A recovery theme or principle is that a person caught in addiction must reach some sort of “bottom” before having a moment of clarity leading to a desire to change. So, we look for that bottom and hope to bring awareness to the person who can learn from that devastating event.
Raymond Carver was a brilliant poet, short story writer—and alcoholic. When he reached his bottom in June 1977, he went into recovery for ten years. This is his famous poem about his last ten years in recovery, written at age fifty before he died of lung cancer. It is also inscribed on his tombstone in Port Angeles, Washington. Sometimes, I share this poem when that moment of clarity comes to someone I am talking with.
Olivia Laing has written an insightful book, The Trip to Echo Spring (Picador, 2013), about the association between creativity and alcohol in the lives of six writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. Carver is the only one of these six who found significant recovery.
