grieving the lost Substance: recovery as bereavement
His sponsor over at the White Flag Group says some people never get over the loss of what they’d thought was their one true best friend and lover; they just have to pray daily for acceptance and the brass danglers to move forward through the grief and loss, to wait for time to harden the scab.
Context
The program's counter-doctrine to the myth of clean serenity: sobriety is not the absence of wanting but a permanent bereavement you manage daily. Gately still feels "a terrible sense of loss, narcotics-wise, in the A.M.," 421 days clean, and Ferocious Francis's counsel is that the missing is the proof you were an addict, not a failure of recovery — "you wouldn’t need help if you didn’t miss it." The Substance is figured exactly as a dead lover ("one true best friend and lover"), and the whole apparatus of clichés is what stands in for grief-work while "time harden[s] the scab." This is the theme's most compact statement that recovery is a lifelong management of loss, not a cure.