Healings FAQ No. 16, Ben Gaffaney

"My suspicion that we’re just killing time between the voids horrifies me. ... I try to calm myself with the logical nonsense of eternal existence."

Ben Gaffaney, author of Hopping Off the Bus to Abilene.

As you might imagine, quitting substances is a bit like running your car into a brick wall, at least in terms of how jarring it is to go from one state (drinking and using uncontrollably, at high speeds), to another (your body and mind coming to a dead stop). Biochemically speaking, the transition can be fatal, which is why a lot of folks have to detox under medical supervision. And it sure ain’t no picnic emotionally either. The phrase “dead air” comes to mind, like when there’s an unintended pause in a live TV show and it’s just brutally, uncomfortably quiet. Even a couple seconds of dead air is discomfiting. In new sobriety, that’s all there is. 

When I got sober, my favorite way to deal with dead air was by reading drinking memoirs. Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp, The Night of the Gun by David Carr, Blackout by Sarah Hepola, and Lit by Mary Karr are some of my favorites, the latter especially. In these books, the drunkologues are nice enough—that’s recovery speak for when an addict recounts their worst days of substance misuse—but what really gets me is hearing that small but persistent sense of grace in the author’s voice as they’re writing about more mundane stuff, that sense that whatever it is they’ve found on the other side of addiction is absolutely good enough, even or maybe especially if it lacks the sensationalism of a story about crashing your car into a telephone pole. 

That is the feeling I get from Ben Gaffaney’s substack, Hopping off the Bus to Abilene. Ben, who just marked five years (yay!) and who uses the pen name Ben TG in his posts, has all the material he needs for his own harrowing drunkalogue, and he sprinkles it in from time to time—rehab, wrecked marriages, being jailed after a DWI (more on this below), child custody negotiations. But it’s all the other stuff that keeps me coming back: little adventures with his son, tours through his ‘90s music taste, reflections on body image, all of it shot through with literary references, perfectly lo-fi pics of his poetry collection, and Ben’s own pencil-sketch drawings. The result is this lovely and affecting pastiche of sober life that’s cheerfully unassuming but also quite inspiring. One thing I’ve learned in sobriety is that stillness doesn't have to feel like dead air. Ben’s writing reflects the work of making that happen.  

Given that he’s such a joy to read in his newsletter, I figured Ben would have a lot of great things to say in response to the Healings FAQ, and sure enough, he did. There are so many good nuggets below. I can’t wait for you to discover them.  

What happens when we die?

When I was 8 and 9, all three of my remaining grandparents died in quick succession, in their 50s, and I developed some early nihilism. I refused to say “god” during the pledge of allegiance and when my fourth-grade teacher asked me what I think happens when we die, I answered, “Remember what it was like before you were born? It’s like that.” I have a clear memory of her face, concerned and unsure how to respond.

At the time, I thought I was probably right, that I’d uncovered a truth the adults didn’t want us to know, equating Jesus Christ with Santa Claus.

My adult version of this is that humans simply aren’t equipped to know what happens when we die, so it’s not worth worrying about. 

The problem is that my son is inching closer to the age where he’ll ask that question, too. My parents are Catholic, so they went with god. Me and my son’s mom are not religious at all, so I’m not sure if “Well, kiddo, no one really knows,” is going to give him a lifetime of nightmares.

On a scale of 1-10 how afraid are you of dying? Explain.

9. Before my son was born it was 10, but these days my greatest fear is something awful happening to him, so that gets to be 10. My suspicion that we’re just killing time between the voids horrifies me and if I let myself out of denial, that inconceivable gone-ness will keep me up at night.

I try to calm myself with the logical nonsense of eternal existence. Don Hertzfeld’s “It’s Such a Beautiful Day” illustrates that absurdity in a way I love, with main character Bill existing through epochs until the universe blinks out. Or I tell myself that the human conception of immortality is too literal, subject to the limits of my brain, so perhaps it’s just a fear of the unknown, same as, like, going to an escape room with my coworkers.

What’s the closest you’ve come to death? What did you learn, if anything?

I wonder if my spiritual practice would be more evolved if I had a tangible near-death experience to draw from. My appendix ruptured when I was 10 or 11 (somehow my mom and I can’t remember, but I have a giant scar to prove it actually happened) and sometimes I think about how in any earlier time in human history I’d have died 40 years ago. 

At 17, I was on the landline when my parents’ house was hit by lightning. It launched me across the room – there were witnesses – and all the electronics in the house got fried. I didn’t go to the hospital or suffer any injuries, just a jolt. I don’t remember it, though.

The right answer is probably my long history of drunk driving. I blew a .240 when I caused a wreck on the last night I drank. I ran a stop sign and was broadsided, but it was a neighborhood, and no one was going too fast. I was driving a 2008 Toyota Tundra that weighed nearly 6,000 pounds – my wife had a horse – so I absolutely could have killed somebody else. I drove drunk dozens or hundreds of times prior, some on highways, so I was probably one hiccup, doze-off or deer in the road away from death.

No diseases, no assaults, though. I didn’t learn a thing.

Do you believe in God? Explain.

Spirituality does not come easy for me. I always described myself as “areligious” rather than atheist or agnostic, because I never thought much about god, or even some replacement for god. About the most I think about it is when I consciously lower-case the word. I don’t even have lapsed-Catholic spirituality, where I try to fill the hole with “Me and the universe are made of stars” or “I am in commune with nature” or “Given the complexity and biodiversity of our planet, there must be something more that I can’t conceive.” Those never felt like anything more than just a thing to say.

And say them I have, because nearly everyone in my life is invested in their church or spiritual practice, or at least searching. So I mask because it feels like there’s something wrong with me, and discovering there’s something wrong with me, that’s my #3 fear.

Do you have a spiritual practice? If so, what is it? If not, why not?

I practice the steps of AA. In rehab, I made a big freaking deal about Step 2 (“Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”), and ultimately settled on “community” as the representation of my higher power, so I could move on to writing my personal inventory. Maybe I have unrealistic expectations of spirituality, because “community” feels like such a panacea to me, not something to draw spiritual strength from. I do get value from listening at AA meetings, sharing and communing.

I also love yoga, and I’m comfortable participating in the chanting, largely for the meditative aspect of it. That said, yoga for me is about accepting my much-loathed body and taking up space, keeping me upright and treating it as more than a receptacle for my brain. My favorite teacher ends her class with Sat Nam (Sanskrit for “truth”), which I tend to process as “and I am here now.”

I read a lot of contemporary poetry, and I love the sense that someone is trying to communicate something ineffable, in a perfect assembly of words and spaces that could never be anything else, a thing that is exactly as it is, expressing only what it can. I think that supplicating myself to interact with an art object is the closest I come to the joy I hear others describe with religion.

Give me an example of a sacred text for you personally – a work of some kind (book, album, song, painting) that’s essential to the formation of your spiritual worldview. Explain.

I’m going to go with “This Nest, Swift Passerine”, a book-length poem by Dan Beachy-Quick. A segment of this was included in “The Arcadia Project,” a poetry anthology I brought to rehab in 2019. 

Halfway through my month, my wife, who had been very supportive, suddenly ceased all communications without explanation. Silence for a week, maybe 10 days, I don’t care to look it up. It was terrifying, never leaving a message, never picking up my calling card calls from my room, never sending an email, never answering my letters. During that time, I read this every morning:

I saw a snake by the roadside and touched him with my foot to see if he were alive. He had a toad in his jaws, which he was preparing to swallow with his jaws distended to three times his width, but he relinquished his prey in haste and fled; and I thought, as the toad jumped leisurely away with his slime-covered hind-quarters glistening in the sun, as if I, his deliverer, wished to interrupt his meditations – without a shriek or fainting – I thought what a healthy indifference he manifested. Is not the broad earth still? He said.

“Is not the broad earth still?” is the only poetry I have tattooed on me.

You’d think with all my talk of areligiousness and the void that Buddhism would be a fit for me. That conception of one human’s life as an ephemeral air bubble disappearing in a roiling stream – sounds right, right? I’ve poked around Buddhism a bit, but the problem is that I don’t have any motivation to adopt anything.

Everyone’s got some spiritual side, so when it comes to spirituality, I must have a god-sized hole somewhere. I haven’t found it yet.

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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.

Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, now or ever.