Resurrection Rite of Sobriety : Alcoholism: A woman discovers new meaning to Easter in the annual Spring Roundup of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Easter has never been one of my favorite holidays. The Easter Bunny turned into a hollow chocolate rabbit before I was 6. And the best efforts of Sunday school teachers failed to convince me that the death and resurrection of Christ were of greater spiritual moment than his birth.

I would occasionally pay homage by attending an Easter service, but it was mostly through a rote sense of obligation. Certainly not in the spirit of the day.

But, in San Diego, I’ve found a new way to celebrate Easter. And, while it is not a religious celebration, it has touched me in a way that no Easter sermon ever did and has taught me vividly about death and resurrection.

In recent years, I have spent my Easter Sunday mornings sharing breakfast with a ballroom full of drunks at the annual San Diego Spring Roundup of Alcoholics Anonymous.

This weekend, the 13th roundup, about 5,000 sober alcoholics and their families are gathered at the Sheraton Harbor Island to celebrate sobriety, continued recovery and fellowship. Some have less than a day of sobriety and others 40 years or more--as we learn at the “countdown” at the close of the convention.

The room is polled, those with more than 10 years of sobriety, more than 20 years, more than 30 years and so on. Last year, the last man standing had nearly 40 years of sobriety. The applause thunders.

Forty years seems an impossible goal. Until five years ago, sobriety in our house was counted in hours, not years.

I can identify more easily with the next tally: those with fewer than 30 days, fewer than 20 days, fewer than 10 days and so on. Usually, at least one person is still standing when the countdown reaches, “ . . . and those with less than one day of sobriety.” The applause exceeds even that for the man with almost 40 years, as if, by its vigor, the clapping will protect the newcomer.

The annual convention is a weekend full of play--golf tournaments, dances and 10K races--and the spirituality of the 12-step programs. There are lunch and dinner speakers on Saturday and marathon meetings of AA and its companion family program, Al-Anon, around the clock. The highlight for me, however, is the Sunday morning “spiritual” speaker.

I was introduced to this somewhat unusual ritual by my newly sober friend, who brought home to me a cassette tape of a roundup speaker. I must have listened to that tape dozens of times. And each time Tom P. told his story of six unsuccessful attempts at sobriety and the ups and downs of finally learning to live without heroin and alcohol, I came to believe that there might be life after alcoholism.

It was too late for most of the alcoholics in my life. Both grandfathers, two uncles and my father died from the disease. But these speakers were writing a new end to the story--an end I wished my father could have heard. An end I hoped that the man I love would find.

When people like Polly said, “I knew I was a drunk and a lush, and I knew I was dying,” I knew what she meant. I had lived with drunks and lushes, and I, too, was dying.

She said she had reached a point where she ceased to go to sleep and wake up, and instead would pass out and come to. “I wasn’t even present for life. . . . To drink was to die and not to drink was to die.” One night, she said, she crawled around on the garage floor checking bottles for any leftover drops of booze that her husband might have overlooked when he poured out their contents in a desperate, but futile, attempt to bring her to her senses.

I had done my share of picking up drunks, pushing their staggering bodies upstairs to bed. And I had poured out my share of booze.

But Polly survived, despite being pronounced dead on arrival at a Texas hospital after a drunken automobile accident 13 years ago. That too was an Easter weekend, and Polly quit drinking a few days later. It was her “resurrection.” But, as she said, “there can’t be a resurrection unless there’s a crucifixion.”

The roundup is a long, long way from childhood Easter egg hunts. I still occasionally feel a surge of guilt as I write out the $30 check for our roundup breakfasts, weeks in advance--a feeling that I should celebrate the greatest Christian holy day in a church. And, in fact, on many Sundays, I do find both solace and inspiration in church services.

On Easter mornings, though, I would rather be with several hundred recovering drunks, sharing their “deaths” and celebrating their ongoing “resurrections.”