A middle-aged woman whom I will call Mary is trying to get her life together. (Besides the name, I have changed other significant details in this true story to preserve confidentiality.)

Many things have gone wrong for her over the years; now she hopes that this long era of misfortune has come to an end. Mary has determined to keep to the straight path that she has finally found.

As she talked with me last week, my heart went out to this woman who has known so much trouble and loss. It is not had to imagine myself in her situation, confronted with the mistakes and afflictions that makes of human life a constant struggle.

A drinking habit has led to much of Mary’s grief. It was a large factor in the break-up of her first marriage. This addiction caused much harm to Mary herself and to the people closest to her.

The worst part of it came when, after her divorce, a judge ruled that Mary’s children could not be entrusted to her custody, because of her drinking. Since her husband was also found to be too unreliable for taking care of the children, they were given over to foster parents.

Another factor in Mary’s troubles had nothing to do with her conduct. In a tragic accident last year, her twenty-year-old son was killed. The loss that Mary and her family suffered then and continues to suffer is too painful for words.

As a mother, she thinks of her son constantly. Not a day goes by without Mary thinking of him, his beauty and the love that they shared. Since his gravesite is far from where she lives, Mary has set up in her own house a memorial to him where she can stop and offer prayers in his memory.

But the most important memorial to her son is the resolution Mary has made not to take another drink. Thus far, she has kept this promise made to herself and her son. She knows that there is no better way in which she can honor her son and the love she feels for him than to preserve her own sobriety.

She knows that the struggle will not be easy. Another addiction shows how vulnerable she is to the grip of destructive habits. Every time she takes a break from her work as a home health aide, she steps outside and lights up a cigarette. But this smoking addiction can only ruin her health and shorten her life; it cannot bring down everything else in her life the way drinking can.

The struggle with the awful urge to drink has become the spiritual center of Mary’s life, as it has with so many other people. If she can cope with this challenge, then she will have passed the supreme test in her life. You can say that, if this happens, her life will have become successful, no matter what her other failures have been.

Let’s hope that she is not carrying on the struggle by herself. Any- one who has known the fearful demon of alcohol addiction needs the help of other people to break its grip. Mary may already belong to an A.A. group made up of other women and men who have learned to cope with the pressures of addiction.

Mary probably does not think of herself as having a spiritual life. She has become so used to failure in her personal and family experience that language about the spirit may seem quite foreign to her. Quite likely, she does not belong to a church or other formal religious community.

But her struggle is basically spiritual and, if indeed she gets her life together again, her triumph will be spiritual. The writer Thomas Lynch describes what happened to change him: “What I’ve learned from my sobriety, from the men and women who keep me sober, is how to pray. Blind drunks who get sober get a kind of blind faith – – not so much a vision of who God is, but who God isn’t, namely me.”

Coming to believe more strongly in her own worth as a person and in the love that supports her life will give Mary the motive force for change. If she pulls it off after so much failure, what a triumph of the human spirit that will be!

Richard Griffin