The Lois Wilson Story

by William G Borchert

  By late summer, Dick Johnson began a series of meetings with Bill in an attempt to save their relationship and his job with Greenshields and Company. He told his friend that while it was true he was making money for the firm, his partners were hearing too many stories about his drinking, his fights at the country club and even on the golf course, and upsetting incidents involving potential customers. But despite these warnings and more chances to reform, Bill just couldn’t stop his boozing.

  It was late September when Lois received an ominous phone call from her sister Barbara. Their mother was back in the hospital for more tests, only this time the results were far from encouraging. Mrs. Burnham’s condition had earlier been diagnosed as a low-grade infection in the abdomen. Now it was feared she might have cancer, and she had already begun radiation treatments.

  Even though Lois knew her husband’s job was in serious jeopardy, she felt she had to be with her mother, at least until she knew more about the seriousness of her condition. Bill said he understood and that she shouldn’t worry about him. Greenshields wasn’t the only firm in Canada that could use a good moneymaker like him. Lois could only shake her head. She left for Brooklyn Heights hoping and praying that he would somehow come to his senses before it was too late. The problem was, it already was too late.

  While Canada had initially been spared the collapse that hit the U.S. stock market, it was only a matter of time before the ripple effect was to take its toll. It seemed that time coincided with Bill’s downward plunge again into alcoholism. With Greenshields now cutting back on its staff and Bill unable to curb his lifestyle, Dick Johnson had no other choice but to let him go.

  With Lois back in Brooklyn, her husband began drinking around the clock. It was several weeks before he finally came off his binge. It was only then that he realized after working for ten months in Montreal, and after being connected with so many substantial investors and important firms there and in the United States, he had absolutely nothing to show for it. All he could do now was put their furniture into storage again, sublet their Glen Eagles apartment, and head back to New York.

  Bill Wilson was not only broke once again but, between his margin losses in both countries, his unpaid rents, and his drinking bills, he was $60,000 in debt. He had to humble himself at Greenshields to borrow $500 against his World War I life insurance policy to pay for his transportation home.

  Lois had been trying to reach Bill during his drinking binge. She was ready to head for Montreal when he finally returned her calls. At first he said he planned to stay there and find another position but she knew just by listening to him that it was hopeless. A few days before leaving Canada, he received the following note from his heartsick wife:

  Come home to me. My heart is breaking. How can we go on like this day after day! What’s to become of us? I love you so, and yet my love doesn’t seem to do you any good. Still I have faith that it must, someday. God grant that day be soon, for it doesn’t seem as if I could go on like this, night after night, waiting for you hour after hour. Oh, that I had the wisdom to know what would help you, for I’m sure you could be helped if only I knew how. I’d do anything, dear, that would help you. I put faith in love, love, love—and patience. Oh, I hope I’ll have the patience to go through with it, for it seems each night as though I couldn’t stand another—and yet another comes, and still another, until my heart is like a stone. A great dullness spreads over me until all things, good and bad, seem to taste alike.

  . . . God give me wisdom and strength and patience.19

  It was snowing the day he arrived back in Brooklyn.

  8

  When Love Is Not Enough

  THE LATE NOVEMBER SNOW WAS BEGINNING TO STICK TO THE bare branches of the tall elm in the backyard of Clinton Street. Dr. Clark Burnham stood at the kitchen window staring out, his deeply lined face reflecting the white glow emanating from the heavy downfall. He had much on his mind.

  Clark had just returned from the hospital, where his colleagues had given him the terrible news about his wife. The cancer was terminal. Matilda had but a few weeks to live. Now he must gather his family together and tell them in the most gentle and loving way possible in spite of all these mixed emotions stirring inside.

  But first he must talk to his daughter Lois, who was standing at the stove only a few feet away making them both a cup of tea. Dr. Burnham rubbed the back of his neck, stiff and aching from the growing stress and tension suddenly filling his life. After another moment, he turned and sat at the kitchen table. Lois handed him a cup of tea, then sat down across from him. She fidgeted nervously with the wrinkled collar on her housedress, appearing too ashamed and embarrassed to look her father in the eye. Dr. Burnham sipped the steaming tea. Then after a moment he spoke. His first question was simple and direct, for he had no time or patience for sugarcoating, even with his oldest and dearest daughter.

  “What do you plan to do now?” he asked.

  Lois cast a quick glance toward the outside hall, then back at her teacup. Her father knew she was thinking about her husband, who was asleep in an upstairs bedroom having just arrived back from Montreal. Her whispered reply was also simple and direct, “I don’t know, father. I just don’t know.”1

  It was the sad and hopeless look in his daughter’s eyes that finally took the sting out of his anger. After all, the damage had been done. There was nothing he could possibly do at this point about his drunken son-in-law. He wanted to throttle him, yes, but how would that help his Lois who, he knew for some inexplicable, insane reason, apparently still loved the lout?

  Despite his deep resentment, it was quite obvious that Clark Burnham, in spite of being a doctor himself, understood little if anything about the disease of alcoholism. Few did in those days. He was simply one of the many who considered drunkenness immoral and a weakness of the will. It was perhaps the biggest bone of contention between himself and his wife, who for some strange reason always knew her son-in-law had a “sickness of the soul.”

  But now, filled with empathy for his daughter, Dr. Burnham reached out, took her hand, and said with as much warmth and understanding as he could muster under the circumstances, “You and Bill are welcome to stay here until he gets back on his feet. I’m sure that’s what your mother would want, too.” Then after a brief pause, he added: “We’ll talk more later.”2 Lois squeezed her father’s hand. No other words were necessary. Dr. Burnham got up, came around the table, kissed her cheek, then quickly left the kitchen. She watched him for a moment as he disappeared down the hall. Then she rose, walked to the window, and stared out.

  Watching the snow continue to fall, Lois thought about her husband’s humiliating return from Canada, the despair in his bloodshot eyes, the futility of the pledge he made to her again as he stumbled in the door. She wanted to ask him as her father had just asked her: “What do you plan to do now?” But she knew it wasn’t the time and that the answer would simply involve another empty promise.

  Her mind was racing again. Many times in the past when she wanted to capture her thoughts, she would write them down so she could look at them, consider them, glance back at them as her life continued to change from one day to the next. She found a pencil and some paper in a cabinet drawer. Sitting back down at the kitchen table, in the soft, gentle quietness a snowfall brings, Lois began taking an honest and painful inventory of her situation. She wrote the following:

  What is one to think or do after so many failures? Is my theory of the importance of love and faith nothing but bunk? Is it best to recognize life as it seems—a series of failures—and that my husband is a weak, spineless creature who is never going to get over his drinking?

  If I should lose my love and faith, what then? As I see it now, there is nothing but emptiness, bickering, taunts and selfishness, each of us trying to get as much out of the other as possible in order to forget our lost ideals.

  I love my hus
band more than words can tell, and I know he loves me. He is a splendid, fine man—in fact an unusual man with qualities that could make him reach the top. His personality is endearing; everybody loves him; and he is a born leader . . .

  . . . The morning after he has been drunk, he is so penitent, self-derogatory and sweet that it takes the wind out of my sails, and I cannot upbraid him.

  He continually asks for my help, and we have been trying together almost daily for five years to find an answer to his drinking problem, but it is worse now than ever . . .

  . . . How can he ever accomplish anything with this frightful handicap? I worry more about the moral effect on him than I do the physical, although goodness knows the terrible stuff he drinks is enough to burn him up completely. Where can he ever go but down when he can’t control this habit? And his aims have always been so high! . . .

  I believe that people are good if you give them half a chance and that good is more powerful than evil . . . Francis Bacon said that the human mind is easily fooled; that we believe what we want to believe and recognize only those facts which conform to that belief. Am I doing that identical thing? Are people bad, is love futile, and Bill doomed to worse than mediocrity? Am I a fool not to recognize it and grasp what pleasure and comfort I can? 3

  Lois did not write an answer to that last question in so many words that snowy morning at Clinton Street, but she did answer it by her actions. Instead of leaving and seeking “pleasure and comfort” somewhere else, she stayed with her husband, not knowing how long it would take or if ever such qualities would come into their lives. She could only hope and pray they would.

  Perhaps without realizing it, what this deeply committed and benevolent lady decided to do at that moment in her life was to love her husband “unconditionally.” It wouldn’t be “I’ll love you if only . . . ” or “I’ll love you once you . . . ” No. With Lois Wilson, it was now: “I will love you no matter what.” This principle of unconditional love was to become the cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon—the unconditional love of one alcoholic for another, of one suffering spouse for another.4

  But is love, no matter how strong and how unswerving, enough to get an alcoholic sober and keep him or her sober? Lois was soon to find the answer to this vital question in her own painful way.

  After rereading her scribbled notes, she folded the paper and put it into her pocket. Then she went upstairs, got dressed, and left for the hospital to see her mother. Bill continued to sleep it off.

  Lois had been back in Brooklyn Heights since mid-October. She had returned to help care for her mother, who wanted to be home with her family, not “locked away in some lonely hospital all by myself.” Dr. Burnham had arranged to have his wife brought to the medical center weekly for radium treatments until her condition suddenly worsened and she required more frequent treatments and intensive pain medication. Matilda finally relented and just two days ago was readmitted to the hospital.

  While caring for her mother at Clinton Street, Lois rarely went out. At the same time, she was so consumed by her husband’s abject failure and the humiliation of their move back into her father’s house that she had given little thought to what was happening in the world around her. It wasn’t until she boarded the crowded bus to the hospital that day and glanced around at her fellow passengers that a strange awareness came over her. The looks on their faces seemed to mirror how she felt inside—sad, bewildered, and frightened. And each time she caught someone’s eye, they would look away—as did she.

  Lois exited the bus at Flatbush Avenue, one of Brooklyn’s main thoroughfares. The snow was still falling, but it didn’t blind her from suddenly noticing the effects of last year’s stock market crash on the ordinary hard-working men and women she began passing on the street . . . families in the long breadline in front of the First Presbyterian Church . . . clusters of men huddled in doorways, going nowhere . . . two elderly men across the way picking through trash barrels.

  Having been in Canada for almost a year, Lois was essentially unaware of the shocking collapse of the U.S. economy. Certainly she heard stories from family members and friends, but she was so engrossed in trying to keep her husband sober and employed that she didn’t entirely comprehend the catastrophic consequences of the crash.5 Apparently neither did Herbert Clark Hoover, who succeeded Calvin Coolidge as the thirty-first president of the United States. Hoover and his cabinet had failed to recognize early enough that European countries had borrowed far too excessively from American banks. Now, with the collapsing stock market having worldwide impact, these countries were in no position to repay their enormous debts. Almost overnight, U.S. banks began to fail. Even the building and loan organizations, which had been established to help homeowners like Dr. Clark Burnham meet their mortgage commitments and the nation’s farmers sustain their crop investments, were forced to close their doors.

  The country quickly spun into a deep depression. Before the end of 1930, businesses were going bankrupt, family farms were being auctioned off, factories were firing thousands of workers, and once-wealthy investors were wallpapering their bathroom walls with worthless stock certificates. It was an economic nightmare of gigantic proportions that would take years to repair.

  The wind was now blowing the snow into swirling gusts. As Lois turned into High Street and headed toward the hospital, she spotted a man standing in front of a boarded-up bakery shop selling apples from a cardboard box. He was in his thirties, about Bill’s age. His clothes were shabby and he appeared ashamed that life had dealt him such a cruel blow. He stared at the ground as Lois passed. She hesitated for a moment, touched by his hopelessness, but then walked on. She wanted to help but had only enough change in her purse for bus fare back home. So she quickly continued on her way.6

  Lois had always hated the smell of hospitals, and today for some reason the antiseptic odor seemed to fuel her anxieties even more. Her younger brother Lyman was at their mother’s bedside when she arrived. They hadn’t seen each other in over a year. He was now a doctor himself and had an active practice out of his home in New Jersey, where he lived with his lovely bride of less than two years.

  They hugged warmly. Then after Lois hugged and kissed her mother, Lyman whispered that he would wait for her in the corridor outside. He knew his sister and mother needed to be alone together at this crucial juncture.

  While Matilda had been back in the hospital only a few days, even she knew at this point the treatments were not working. She could no longer eat, and the pain medications were becoming less effective. No one had to tell this intelligent and compassionate woman that the end was drawing near. Still, she smiled through her suffering and fought to make her final days meaningful.

  Lois sat at her mother’s bedside holding her hand and chatting about the weather, the Christmas decorations already up in the stores, how quickly the holiday season was upon them. There were so many far more important things she wanted to say, so much she wanted to ask, so much she wanted to share—but for some inexplicable reason, only this stupid, meaningless small talk kept pouring out of her mouth. It had been the same way at home, too, never talking about dying. Then suddenly Matilda squeezed her daughter’s hand and pulled her close. Lois never forgot what her mother said that afternoon, perhaps because of how she struggled to speak or because her words forced her to make some important decisions about the direction of her own life.

  “Lyman told me Bill has finally come home,” her mother began, speaking in a hoarse whisper. “I know how things still are and I have been wondering lately . . . can this really be enough for you? Yes, I know how much you say you still love him and want to take care of him and I admire you for that. He is a very sick man . . . and may get even sicker . . . and certainly he needs you. But Lois . . . you also have a life of your own to live . . . and you must live it. You must find what can truly fulfill you, otherwise . . . one day you will wake up and be consumed by anger a
nd resentment for being cheated out of that life. Please don’t let that happen to you, my child. Don’t let that happen to you.”7

  Matilda touched a nerve. She verbalized frankly and honestly what her daughter had been refusing to face for several years now. For a long moment, they simply stared at each other, their eyes filled with tears. Finally Lois broke down and admitted her mother was right, that something must change and it had to be her. She promised then and there to heed her mother’s advice: she would care for her husband but also take care of herself. She was a strong, well-educated woman with many talents and abilities, and there was no reason why she couldn’t succeed in life and find some enjoyment for herself regardless of what happened to her husband. Yes, she would continue to try to help him but would also seek to help herself and improve her own life at the same time. As she shared these most intimate thoughts and feelings, she could tell by the wisp of a smile on her mother’s face that she could be at peace now, knowing her daughter was ready to pull her life together and not be dragged down by her son-in-law’s alcoholism. While she sensed her daughter’s determination, even Matilda Burnham, who believed to the depths of her soul that alcoholism was a spiritual malady, had no idea what a powerful influence it could have over someone . . . even someone as strong and determined as Lois Burnham Wilson. But for now at least, having shared her deepest concerns with her daughter, Matilda could rest more comfortably as she waited for her God to take her.8

  They continued to talk for a short while before Lois noticed her mother becoming totally fatigued. She urged her to rest, but the pain was returning. Just then the nurse entered with a timely dose of morphine. Lois waited as her mother dropped into a deep sleep. Then she kissed her on the forehead and walked quietly from the room. Lyman was still waiting in the corridor. He invited his sister to join him for some coffee in the hospital cafeteria. He said there were some things they needed to talk about.