Service – Paul O. – Memorial – 2000

My name is Jerry. I'm one of the pastors of Laguna Presbyterian Church, a grateful participant in the Al-Anon side of the program. I want to welcome you all here for this very important time of sharing and memory to remember our beloved Dr. Pauls. About 13 years ago that I began to listen to Dr. Hall and to Max as part of the Al Anon program, and they have helped teach me that I can laugh again and I'm grateful to God for their gifts, their inspiration and illumination in my life. We love you and this is dedicated to you and to Dr. Paul Max. Please join with me in our serenity prayer. God, grant me serenety to accept the things that I cannot change the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen. Father Richard. Thank you, Dr. Jerry and for your hospitality letting us gather here to give thanks to God for the life of Dr. Paul O. to praise God for that to mourn his passing and to have some laughs and memories that are so much in harmony with him I'm going to start with a greeting from scripture and then I'm not sober long enough praise be God the father of mercies the God of all consolation he comforts us in all our afflictions and thus enables us to comfort those who are in trouble with the same consolation we have received from him a greeting that Paul answered to the fullest. And as we begin, we want to invite Paula, Paula Max's daughter, to lead us in the reading of the acceptance. Oh, I'm so nervous. And I also have to wear these stupid glasses and I'm very upset that I have to wear these Stupid Glasses. I used to see people stand up and say that, and I'd think, oh, I'm never going to have to do that. Well, here we are. I wanted to thank you all for coming. It means so much to both me and my mother, and I'm going to cry, that you came and took the time out of your busy days to be here with my dad and me and my mom. I know how much he meant to a lot of you, all of you. And I want to thank you for all of your warm words and support that you've given over the last, I guess it's been five weeks now. And that has meant a lot as well. I think my mother has gotten over 500 cards, and she's read every one, and they've all meant a whole lot to her. People that she's never met, people that have never met my dad, that they would take the time to do that, which is really overwhelming. and very much appreciated. I want to thank Jim A. for all the coordination he's done with this service and we appreciate it so much and I've tried to tell you that, Jim, several times and I hope you realize that this is something that I appreciate tremendously and I know my mom does too. This is a beautiful service. I could say a bunch of stuff about my dad, of course and what he means to me and what his meant to all of you But I think the one thing that I'd like to say is that he always practiced what he preached. And everything that he ever said were words that he lived by. They weren't just idle platitudes. He really did practice those things. And, you know, he had a great ability to see people's problems and to see the solutions to those problems. And sometimes I didn't want to hear what he had to say, but he was always right, you Know? In fact, he used to say about my mother that she was always Right. and he didn't mind her being right, but he didn' t like her being so god damn right. Sorry, Father Terry. But a lot of times what he would say, the solution to things that were my problems were those words on page 449. And I know they've meant a lot to a lot of people. And I think that's because he was able, by his own experience, to discover a principle of truth with a capital T that means a lot to everybody because it is truth, you know? And many people have asked him to read these, be the person to read these words, and I thought a lot about it. And I felt that because these are so, they mean so much to everybody, and they mean so much to everybody in a particular intimate way that I felt it was fitting that we all read it together. So I would like you all to please join me in reading this passage from 449. Are y'all ready? And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation, some fact of my life unacceptable to me. And I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place or thing, situation as being exactly the way it's supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God's world, I'm sure. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober. Unless I accept life completely on life's terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed for the world as on what means to change you and me and my happiness. Thank you. Hi, everybody. My name is Muriel, and I feel very, very, very honored to be here today. You know, when you talk of Paul and Max, it's like it's one word. It just flows together. Max and Paul, Paul and max. It depends whether you go to Al-Anon or AA. And Paul and I shared so much together. You know, the reality of his leaving is just, I don't think, really come home for a lot of us. I don' t think so. And, you know, I have had so many people come to me and want me to tell some incident that they have had with Paul where Paul has said or done something that has been quite so unusual. And most of you know probably that both Paul and Max were very, very active also in Sober Vacations International and that they attended those and actually led meetings in those over a long period of time. And I heard the story of the last time, of the last vacation in which Paul told Max that he was going to get a tattoo. And he was absolutely horrendously surprised at that and I think a little bit disappointed that he was going do something like that. And what he did do, he got a tattoo on his hand, an L. And that tattoo meant two things. It meant listen and love. And then to really scare her, he had one put on his arm around here that said Maxine. But it was a fake one. That one really did rub off. You know, their story is such a wonderful story. I mean, they grew up next to each other from the time they were four years old and they'd been married over 60 years and, you know, Ball was also a double winner as a member of Al-Anon and AA. And during the time that they both were attending the Al-Enron meetings, Paul occasionally would usurp some of Max's things and take them as his own and then Max couldn't use them anymore because everyone and heard Paul talk about it. And, you know, one of the wonderful things about Max and Paul, when Paul would be talking, Max would be really intent listening and when he would make a funny as he often did, she would smile along with it if it was the first time she'd heard it. And that was such a wonderful thing to see. I've traveled with both of them at times I've traveled also with Max and my daughter and another gal when we went over to I've forgotten where we went now I mean, I feel so scattered that I'm not quite sure I have all kinds of notes and I look at them and I think why did I want to say that? I just don't know anyway Paul and I both wrote a book and in the writing of the books We both, we kind of talked with one another about and shared, you know, some of the things that we wanted to say. And in my particular book, in days 15, 16, 17, and 18, Paul's input is there called The Doctor's Story. And he was always so generous in sharing, you now, anything that he had. I mean, he was just, he's just unbelievable about that. And those of you who have known him well know that his humor was one of the things that we all loved so well. One of my friends was telling me the story that Paul had told him. This was another physician, and he said that when he had a candidate, he would bring them to Paul and Paul was another physician and Paul is always so gracious to them and so forth and so on and this one time he was bringing another physician over and as they were talking Paul got a telephone call and somebody said that he had read page 449 over and over and overthetically when I first came down here to Laguna when I moved down here from Malibu 28 years ago And, you know, I had read Paul's story in the Grapevine. And so I was aware of the story. But when people began talking about page 449, I got my book out, looked at page 4 49, and I thought, what in the heck are they talking about this for? This was a very bad drunk who was talking about all these problems. And I'm kind of a slow study. It took me a couple of years to figure out that I had an edition before the addition of the big book that Paul was in. And, you know, well, some of us are quicker than others. Yeah, also, this particular day, because I did go off on a tangent then, but this particular day he was talking to this man. The man said that he was going to commit suicide. And Paul told him, he said he'd read 449 and he'd read it a number of times, and it simply didn't help. And so that he had made up his mind, he was going to go ahead and he was committing suicide. And Paul said, well, if you do that, you know, you don't have any other options. And then he said a few more things to him, and then he said, you know, if you do commit suicide, don't tell anyone you spoke to me. You know, Paul followed his father as a pharmacist and he really wanted to become a doctor. And so So Max went to work and put Paul through medical school. And then she came to work in his office, where he was a great one for giving her orders. And at the time that Paul was to go into the, as he terms, the nut ward, Maxine was with him. He thought, aha, they finally figured out that this one is crazy and they're going to put her in this institution. and he was very shocked when the door closed and Pauline went home, I mean Maxine went home and Paul was locked behind the doors and that's a story that he's told very often and I've often thought of again the hyphenation of Paul and Max, Max and Paul because their stories are so intertwined that it just is you know unbelievable and you know I had a day before yesterday I had cancer taken out my nose. And so I was, you know, vanity, vanity. I thought, oh, my God, I really can't talk with, you now, this looking like a wuss. So I remembered the story again that another one of my friends told me about the point where Paul had a mole or something taken off and he thought it looked awful and he was a little concerned about going out in public. And all of a sudden he said, well, hell, I don't have to look at it. Everybody else does. So then I remembered another person who was very influential in my life, Dr. Peggy Bassett, and she used to say, if you can't hide it, paint it red. So, you know, when Paul's on her, I have a Mickey Mouse thing on my nose here. I don't know if it's going to stay or not. If it falls down, it's really going to be a big deal. going to really make me very embarrassed but anyway i think that uh that oh paul and i both at one time worked for the same corporation we were both uh professionals in the field of treatment and i remember one time when i was putting together to present to the corporation a two weekend retreat or a two-weekend let's say seminar and i had been able to get the most outstanding people to be in that seminar. And it was going to be two weeks because I really wanted to get the top people, all of whom would agree to come. And then Paul had said to me, have you built in the possibility that the corporation won't accept it? And I said, certainly not. And he was quite right, they didn't. So that taught me something that I've been able to use through the years is that I can put in the footwork, but I can never guarantee the results. And I don't know of anybody who has ever known Max or known Paul whose lives have not been affected in some way by them. And as a unit, they were absolutely wonderful. You know, I just, as I said, I've traveled with Paul, I've traveling with Max. paul and i had an opportunity for both of us to speak on a couple of occasions and uh i hated it when he spoke first because i you know i thought my god he's going to come up with something that is so meaningful or so funny and then i have to follow him and the last time we did that as i saw him get up to walk up there he picked up the 20 question things and i knew what What he was going to do, he was going to change the word drinking to thinking. And if some of you have never heard that, it is one of the funniest renditions that you can imagine, you know? It just, he took every single one of them and worked it through. He was a great influence on me, he Was a great Influence on my husband, and Max and I have shared many husband stories, and so I know a number of his little fallacies. Today, also, you're going to be hearing from his sponsor. And Paul would go on and on and On early on about some of the things that Max was doing and blah, blah, Blah, blah. And his sponsor would say, whatever. And one time Paul said to him, you know, let me tell you about any took this episode to tell him about. And the sponsor said to him, look, we'll talk about it next week. And Paul said, well, next week I probably forget all about it. And, you know, and that's true. So many of the things that so many of us have worried about never happened, and then the things have happened we never even worried about. And, uh, you now, and he, the humanness and the willingness to laugh at his own material or his own, let's say, small mistakes because I don't want to at this point even hint that he ever made any big ones. However, if you have an opportunity to talk with Max, maybe she can tell you something. So I feel extremely privileged to have been asked to talk today and I'm so glad to have heard Paula. We've talked on the telephone, met her when she was a little girl when they were living in Anaheim and it is so good to see so many of the people who are really so important to me and who have come here to remember both Paul and Max because she really was part and parcel of him so thank you applause applause applause applause Good morning. My name's Jack Neeson, and I'm an alcoholic. It's true, I used to tell him whatever. The reason was I wasn't really listening to him. Paul was the direct opposite of that. Not only with me, but I think with everyone else with whom he communicated. He listened to every word and the questions he would ask after you talked to him indicated that he had. He paid very, very close attention. I talked to Paul yesterday. he used to talk to God write letters to God so I thought I'd try it I wanted to know if there were might be anything that he would particularly want me to say and he said he said I've talked to you when you've had problems many times in your life and I've usually told you to take an inventory about that particular situation or matter and when you have it all written down we talk about it and you should keep it simple so keeping it simple means as our program dictates tell you what it used to be like, what happened what it's like now and I can do that I think pretty briefly what it use to be like before I knew Paul before he knew me. We were, as our stories indicated and as many of you have heard through the years, we were out-of-control drunks. He had an imaginary brain tumor that really tore him up. There was no cure for it and he medicated himself and he drank heavily. He did everything he could to thwart that brain tumor and its invasion of his body, and nothing worked. And my parallel was that I was a menace on the highway. For many, many years, I was behind the wheel of a car, which was, in everyone's eyes, a lethal weapon, and I handled it very callously. And only by the grace of God and Paul am I here today to tell you about it. That's what it used to be like. We were drunks, we had an uncontrollable habit, we were obsessed with drinking, and there was no way to straighten out our unmanageable lives. He found his way to AA, and I found my way to AAA. And somewhere in the summer of 1967, my then wife and I stumbled into a study group in the Canyon Club in a midweek afternoon. And Paul and Max were there, as Muriel indicated, they were together. and Max was paying attention to their discussion and Paul was half sitting and half lying across the table and he was wearing a GI or an olive drab jumpsuit and one could tell by looking at him and it truly was the first time I had seen him he absolutely did not want to be there And my wife said, we should talk to that couple. They seem to need some companionship. And I was under a great deal of marital pressure, let me tell you, at that time. So I agreed and we did go talk to the couple. to that couple. And in a short time, our lives intermingled. We did things socially. Paul got extremely active. He hit the ground running so fast it was unbelievable. And we were going to meetings in faraway places from Laguna. We were going to Malibu. We went to San Diego. were going to Ventura. We were going all over the California area to meetings every day, every night of the week. And it was, as I say, a hectic regiment for me. And Paul thrived on it and toward the end of that year, it was December 31st of 1967, there was a midnight New Year's Eve Mass in the, or Mass, Midnight Mass, okay. It was an AA meeting in the academy. And Johnny Ackerlin was leading the meeting and several people spoke and the last person he called upon to close the meeting was Paul who said, and it's just as if this happened last week, I've waited a long time for someone to ask me to speak. I thought it would never happen and I want to tell you how successfully I've worked this program and what it means to me and he went off he was off and running from that point he never stopped talking he never said a word and he, as all of you know thoroughly enjoyed and loved this AA program this fellowship of ours he found a sentence on page 132 of the big book that says we absolutely must enjoy life, or worse to that effect. And that was his byline. He thoroughly enjoyed life and he thoroughly enjoyed the AA program. And that's what happened. Now it's very sad. I find it... I haven't yet accepted the fact that Paul's not available to me. I said I talked to him yesterday, and I'll probably talk to him for many days. He was a wonderful friend. He was an protector. He saved my wife's life. He saved mine. My life. I was in agony with pains from a kidney stone, and he gave me morphine, and he said my nose is twitching as I give you this. I know all of you here love him. I love him, we love his memory, and he'll be with us forever. His favorite prayer was the third step prayer. He induced Betty and me to say it every morning of our life. He and Max said it every moment of their life. and I'd like to finish my set here by saying the third step prayer and ask you to join me. God, I offer myself to thee to build with me and do with me as thou wilt relieve me of my bondage itself that I may better do thy will take away my difficulties that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help so my power, my love, and my way of life may I do thy will always. Thank you. Goodbye, old friend. My name's Scott Redman. I'm an alcoholic. Paul Eliger was my sponsor and he used to love to run an attitude adjustment meeting and we're going to start just my talk out with the way he'd start his meeting. He would like everybody to have a chance to identify, so we're gonna ask everybody in the room to identify. And the way you'd like to do it is by having you identify all at the same time. So on the count of three, please say your name and the nature of your illness. One, two, three. Okay, we all know each other now. The other thing you'd to do, this is real annoying, annoyed the hell out of me. I'd like to pass it on to you. We'd have you all stand up and hug somebody you don't know. Go. He used to do that first thing in the morning, too. Man. Love in the Morning. Isn't that annoying? Anybody here in their first year? Raise your hand. Right there. And right there. Welcome, Al. Let's sick them after the meeting, folks. We're going to get gang-stepped after the meet. I'd like to read the preface to one of Paul's last books which is called There's More to Quitting Drinking Than Quitting Drinkin' and in the preifice he writes over and over in the early days of my sobriety I heard the admonition stick with the winners I decided to not only stick with the winners but to become one even though I wasn't sure what one was so I asked Chuck C Surely I thought an old-timer like Chuck would know. But he surprised me by hesitating. Then he said, I guess you have to die sober. Well, I wanted to be a winner, but dying wasn't part of my plan. Having to die to gain recognition never appealed to me, so I decided to live sober. I decided To Become a Winner by being a successful member of Alcoholics Anonymous. My definition of successful varied from time to time, and often my goal presented quite a challenge. But I figured if sobriety weren't a struggle there wouldn't be so many unrecovered alcoholics, and he did both. He got to live sober and he got to die sober. He was touched by the Masters hand as my friend Cliff likes to say and he touched as many other people as he possibly could. I was his sponsor and I want to talk in part for his sponsees today because it's exhausting turning to him and him not being there. My heart is broken but I'm not lost because he never told me that he was going to be my God or my higher power. hour. Paul Oliver didn't keep me sober for one second. I know I can stay sober without him, I'd just rather be doing it with him. And he was somebody who rejected the cult of personality so totally and out of hand, not before he accepted a little pat on the back, but he did reject it thoroughly, and any time I made a run at it, he discouraged it in me. And any time i tried to deify him, i did like to remember, as Muriel said, this This is a guy who went to check his wife into a nut house. They kept him and let her go home. The thing that's been left out of the story, which Max likes to remind me of, is she did rat him out to the doctor. She told the doctor he was doing a lot of junk, so they did throw a net over him. And that's in a special piece of Al-Anon literature that isn't distributed very much. When in doubt, rat him. Rat him out, I think is the... And his story, which has sort of been iconized in a way and is so powerful and so extraordinary. And I'm convinced that the big book is much like the Bible. You can take any sentence in it and use it to literally prove any point that you want. Of any political persuasion, social persuasion. It could be used as a spiritual tool, a spiritual weapon or a good resting place for a drink, as a lot of newcomers know. And there's a wonderful interview in The Grapevine, which I want to read a quote from, which sums up my sponsor's feelings about his story in a wonderful way. The Graepvine asked him, is there anything you regret having written in your story? And Paul replied, well, I must say, I'm really surprised at the number of people who come up and ask me confidentially if what they've heard on the very best authority usually from their sponsor is true, that there are things in my story I want to change or that I regret having written it or that i want to take it out because it says so much about drugs or that have completely changed my mind that AA is the answer or that even that acceptance is the answer. I've heard on the best authority that I've died or gotten drunk or taken pills. The latest one is that Max died and then I got so depressed I got drunk. So is there anything I'd like to change? No. I believe it more today than when I wrote it and he did and the the controversy between drug addict and alcoholic rages on it'll rage on for a while I've heard that the difference between the two is that a drunk will steal your money go downtown get loaded come back weeping and admit to you what you he's done a drug addict will steal your money, go downtown, get loaded, come back and help you look for the money. So actually my favorite junkie story, and it's absolutely true for drunks too, is this guy came to me and said, you got to lend me some money. My kids are starving. And I said, I'm not going to give you the dope. You're just going to take the money and spend it on dope. And the guy said, no, I've got dope money. So anyway, that's all. You can have anybody you want in Alcoholics Anonymous to sponsor you. You can have a designer sponsor. And the trick is whether or not you're allowing yourself to be sponsored, and I allowed myself to be sponsored. I invited Paul into my life when we talked, and I want to thank my children and my wife for being with me today and my friends, andI love you Maxine, and I love you Paula, and our oldest son elected to, after going to high school he put off going to college and went down to Chiapas, Mexico and worked with the Zapatista revolutionaries for a while and um i uh he he was uh just made this extraordinary uh choice i so admired him and was so completely terrified by the entire thing i uh the mexican military which sort of drive by his village quite often stare at him and drive away and the mexician military is depicted as such a loving kind group of people that i uh i would get overwhelmed by these waves of fear And Paul asked me to start taking the third step using the Mexican military. He said, obviously you're not able to run the Mexican ministry right now, so I want to strongly urge you to turn it over. And so I'd work the third steps and I'd take a walk in the morning and say, Pop, I can't bear this. Will you please take the Mexican military? And most days it worked, and one morning it just didn't. And I just got pounded over and over again by these waves of fear and this sort of bad Oliver Stone movie that kept going through my head. And I went home and I called Paul and I was crying and he said, basically you're making this about you and I said, you're breaking up on me. He said, you're not on a cell phone. He said you know, this could be the greatest thing he ever does. and i said yeah and i don't know if it's the greatest thing that mike ever did but i know that he came back from that experience fully cut cloth you know in the old days he'd go to the hardware store i think can he do this now you go to the hardware start to go he's gone to chiapas i think he can handle ash don't you i think he would always ask me if my wife was behaving uh because he knew if she wasn't behaving then there was some work he and I had to do to get her back in a line, which also annoyed the hell out of me. I couldn't show up for my father the night that he died. I showed up at the hospital loaded and the week that Paul took his light into another room, I got to go down to the hospital. He got to hang out. I walked in and the nurse took his blood pressure and he said his blood pressure was up, and he pointed to me. He said, he excites me. And it was just a great thing. The nurses, you know, people started finding out he was in the hospital. So the AA Army starts pouring in. You know, the phone calls, and the nurses are going, what? What? What? You know? Did this guy win a contest? What the hell is going on here? And it's just what happens in Alcoholics Anonymous. The only complaint that I heard him make through open heart surgery was that he said to me, I've spent all these years teaching people to hug me and now I have to ask them to back off for a couple of weeks until this heals. It's the only complaint that I've heard him say. What an extraordinary thing. For me, one of the most powerful ongoing examples that my sponsor gave me was his penchant and affinity and voracious desire to work with newcomers and how he continued to do so a couple of weeks before he took his light into another room he was at our house I was celebrating my 15th birthday guy got him to show everybody his tattoo and there was a new guy they were heavy Scottish broke this guy Tony and I said Tony this is my sponsor Paul and Paul said how many how much time do you have and Tony said, well, I've got three days. No, two days. No, I think I've gotta day. No, no, I got two days! No, I got three day! No, one! And Paul said to him, it's too little time to count. Paul Oligar was the first man who I ever heard say that Alcoholics Anonymous was the only treatment for a fatal disease that he knew of that left the sufferer in better condition than they were in before they contracted the disease. He was a guy, and I've taken the words out of his mouth and made them my own many, many times. He said that the big book of AA was the one book he knew about a text about recovery from a fatal illness that contained that sentence, we absolutely insist on enjoying life. He said there's no book about malaria that says malaria is a hoot. You'll love malaria. Oh, and you'll meet other people with malaria. It's fabulous. And then, by God, you'll need people who just caught malaria. It doesn't get any better than that. We're at the San Diego Roundup one year. There was a guy there, his wife gave a great Al-Anon talk. He came to AA. He had fallen into the closet drunk and her bare skin coat fell on him and he fought it for five hours. when he got out of the closet he said honey you better call those people and he was sitting at this and he was talking I think he was talking to my friend Pat and he said how he was depressed because he wasn't getting his attention his Al-Anon wife was getting all the juice and he just kind of wanted to go upstairs and feel sorry for himself and read page 449 and accept this thing and Pat said well if you want you can talk to the guy who wrote it. He's looming over you right now, and the guy had to stay down and be part of the deal, because Paul always wanted to be part of the Deal. He absolutely insisted on enjoying life, and I want to say it all today, and i won't be able to. I want to make it okay, and I'll never be able too. I am appropriately broken-hearted. I know that my response which was to turn to him is the response I have to turn to my higher power and then I know that that reflex will now have to be applied in a different way. My son's lost a very dear friend of theirs a couple of years ago, a 19 year old man who we all adored and he died suddenly unexpectedly and one of my sons said to me what am I going to do? And I said to him at that time there's three things that I have to do when somebody takes their light into another room. One, I have to find a way to continue having my relationship with them. I have to be true to that. Two, I have make sure there's no fears and no resentments blocking me from them. And three, and most importantly for me as an alcoholic who suffers from this horrible self-centeredness that will eclipse everything good and everything around me, that'll eat my brain and my heart and turn my life black and throw me out of my own life, I have not be an opportunist about it. I had to not use it as a tool, a weapon against other people. I'd have to get out of that narcotic of self-pity and be appropriately said and mourn and grieve and do that thing that I would always interrupt by using other people, using myself or beating myself up with drugs and alcohol. So welcome today. Welcome to this glorious celebration of an extraordinary member of AA who never, never became head drunk ever. Although there are some of us who would have had him run for head drunk, you know, um, but, but he never did. And one thing I want to close with, another really annoying thing he would do would be to encourage at times, say, when you're saying the prayer at the end, when you're finishing up, don't close your eyes. Keep your eyes open when you are holding hands and praying. And see if you can catch the eye of another alcoholic or another See if you can see your higher power to them, in them. And if you want to see my sponsor again, all you have to do is keep your eyes open at the end of the prayer or work with a new person because in their eyes you'll see my sponsor one day at a time for the rest of your life. Thanks so much. Please turn it over at this time to continue the program. Hello, my name is Terry and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Terry! Part of my ministry is leading retreats on weekends for members of Al-Anon programs, AA, and even some other programs. And the first time I led a retreat was at the invitation of Paul and Max. They wanted me to give a couple's retreat and I just never got the concept. I was really excited about recovery and the steps, and a couple of schmupple. I didn't care what the... A little trouble with that. Anyway, I was invited to their home, and Max made pork chops, and we had a dinner and a meeting about the retreat. The first thing I did was kind of secretly check up on him. I'd heard Paul share a few times and one of the incidents he described was making a deal with Max that he would lock the liquor in the cabinet and give her the key and that meant that that would moderate the drinking and that it would shut it off at a certain time well naturally Max went to bed with the key and he was there looking at the cabinet and it occurred to him whose goddamn cabinet is this anyway and he got a hammer and smashed off the lock and the hatch and everything while they were still living in the same house this was in Garden Grove, 1977 and I went talking with them but I kept edging around looking for this evidence of this having happened. There was a row of cabinets in the dining room or living room and I saw, this looks like where it should be and I'm so relieved when I saw this door with all kinds of wood putty covering up where these screws had been yanked out and I thought, well, I can trust him now. and we had a number of years of retreats and that retreat's still going on but they finally found a good couples deal someplace else Paul is a father to me my father died in withdrawal when I was a little kid and he's a father person to me some people I heard the expression to the master touches him, where there's a spirit that goes through him. And I think of Paul and there's something about his way and his personality that was always disconcerting and then deeply encouraging. I think there's two. Acceptance. This is Paul's other name. and then there's a phrase we use one of our sayings you put principles before personalities well those acceptance and principles before personalities they don't have much juice in them that's an unsexy expression they're abstract when you hear them out of context they sound severe and challenging and, well, okay. I guess we ought to accept now. And then principles before personalities. Okay, and personalities has a person in it, you know. That's kind of interesting, but no, not the person, principles first. And yet I, for my experience in my life, Paul embodied both of those things more than anyone I've ever met. He kind of taught me what principles before personalities meant, means. There's if you talk to Paul and he suggests something to you you have the feeling that he suggested it and that he was going to have a good day whether you did it or not. you know he wasn't going to check up on you or be disappointed or thrilled either way and there was a I've heard people those of us who are at times awkward in crowds and embarrassed we get very hostile towards people who are facile and a fellow well met and can just do parties real well. Then we go around talking. And I noticed that Paul really wasn't very good at small talk. He didn't, he wasn't. Small talk was small. But he wasn' t mad. He wasn' T angry about it. He just would get around to saying something funny or very helpful and if you want to go on your small talk all is fine with him it's just that that wasn't his thing and that legacy of everyone here and across the country and there's no way to track down everyone who's read the acceptance passage people are discovering that right now as we sit here in Saskatchewan but the reason I think Paul has drawn us together here today with the spirit that is uniting us in this room, a spirit of deep love is that mature love expresses itself in acceptance of things the way they are today mature love the love that just gives your heart hope and a confidence that oh yeah, life is worth living puts principles before personalities. And when you see someone do this when it's love welling out of the earth or the love welling up, the love that gets into us from our higher power when we drop our defenses and our resistance and our ego in between our ego attacks letting God in that's what brings us to life and I honor my brother and my father, Paul for being such an instrument in bringing us to live I'm going to quote something that Dr. Joe Persch shared with me I hadn't seen the doctor in a long time and he said that he considers Paul the missing link between alcoholism and the medical profession that you just don't find somebody in the medical profession who's thoroughly into the program where you can't even tell they're a doctor and then have the same person be so professional in their reflection on the medical issue that you forget they're in the program. And that touches me deeply. I love that. I love it. I love to think about our little man. I found myself, I'm somebody who can go through almost anything without crying. I don't cry when my relatives die I found myself unable to say all the words of the acceptance because just tears came out of me, I couldn't read it and that was the oh I think God really is touching us through Paul in an extraordinary way and I want to give witness to that and not say any more. I will close with a little prayer at the end, but Max indicated she'd like to say a few words to us and I'd like her to say some words and I would like to invite her to do that right now. Thank you. Hi, my name is Max and I'm a happy member of Al-Anon. Thank God I have it. I just feel very fortunate and I didn't come to Al-Alanon and think it was wonderful. I didn' t like it at all. This woman was pushing me too much and I really resented that and I finally told her off. She was telling me I had to go to four and five meetings a week and I didn't need that much. I really didn't. I have to tell you my joke. There was a woman sitting in the theater What was the name of that one? Phantom on the Alpha. Another woman came in and sat beside her and said, isn't this a shame that you're alone when tickets are so hard to get? And she said, well, that belonged to my husband. And she says, oh, well where is he? She said, well, he died. And she said, well, that's too bad, but couldn't you have asked a relative or a friend to come with you? And she says, they're all at the funeral. So that's the way I feel. I think this was kind of dumb of Paul to do this. I really do. and he didn't give me any notice at all anyway I guess I'll survive I hope so anyway because I'm getting a lot of attention now I always thought that they liked Paul better than me and maybe they did I don't know but I didn't have anything they wanted I don' t think thank you and I want to thank everyone for what they said now if Paula starts to cry I'm going to hit her because then she starts me and I don't want to cry in front of all of you anyway I wanted to thank Father Jerry too for having the thing here because I think it's very nice of him. And I understand they're going to have a wedding right afterwards so Paul and I were only married 60 years. So We were really old-timers. I can't believe it that we were married that long, and we knew each other from the time we were four years old. We used to make mud pies together back in Ohio. And then because I wanted to come to California, we came. and I'm glad we did because I don't think the meetings we've gone to back in Ohio were not that great so I wouldn't want to go to them all the time anyway I think that California Southern California has the best meaning anywhere and I'm grateful for that so when I came back I stayed but I stayed away for a while and I can't think of anything else to say other than And thank you for your attendance, and I appreciate that. And thanks to you. I want to thank Pat for driving me to the army, and I guess he knew how much I needed him. I did. I mean, they were very helpful. Thank you very much, Max. I'm going to close with reading a short ancient Christian hymn directed towards someone who moves ahead of us and then we'll rise and pray the Lord's Prayer together. And to Paul, may the angels lead you into paradise may the martyrs come to welcome you and take you to the holy city, the new and eternal Jerusalem. May the choir of angels welcome you. Where Lazarus is poor no longer, may you have eternal rest. Let's rise and pray the Lord's Prayer together. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and power and glory forever. Amen.