Content note: This article discusses death and addiction loss.
Recovery communities are built on stories — including the ones about those we’ve lost.
It happened again. Someone died in the rooms.
Maybe it was an old timer with cancer.
The young emotionally unstable fent. addict that just never got it.
Your good friend who had back surgery and started taking percs every three hours instead of four.
Sometimes it almost feels like you experience more loss and death in the rooms than you ever did out in your addiction.
Psychologists have studied many of the strange ways people react to death - things like meaning-making, survivor’s guilt, and gallows humor - especially in communities that experience repeated loss.
“I didn’t know he was so bad.”
“Well he never did finish his fourth step.”
“Dude was unteachable, what do you expect?”
Every conversation seems geared toward justifying why we aren’t next, and reassuring ourselves that whatever killed them was something they did wrong.
Existential cope.
If death is random, then none of us are safe.
So we justify why it wasn’t random.
Building stories restores order. Grief researchers call this meaning-making, the attempt to reconstruct meaning after tragedy (Neimeyer, 2001). Creating meaning after loss is one of the central processes people use to psychologically adapt to bereavement and regain a sense of stability in their lives (Holland, Currier, & Neimeyer, 2006).
I don’t know about you, but those moralized recovery narratives - “they didn’t work a program,” “they stopped calling their sponsor” - make me mad when I hear them.
That need to restore a sense of control. To dilute someone’s life into a cheap AA fable. A cautionary tale.
“Bill the Bunny and the Butchering Booty Bump.”
Making sense of grief, the ambiguity of death, is part of the grieving process. Maybe you can tell I’m still in my own process. We all are eventually.
Being mad at my friends for how they grieve is just another way to restore a sense of control. A way to gain a little moral high ground.
Hypocritically, of course.
(for you readers that are honing your advanced codependency skills)
Faced with death, we’re forced to wrestle with the fact that we are going to die too. Whether we’re ready to deal with that or not.
So we grab onto things.
Clutching beliefs - “Just do the work.”
Defending our worldview - “He took a drink and the drink took him.”
Distancing ourselves from the person who died.
All ways of saying:
“I’m different. I’m safe.”
Maybe you’re one of the ones where the wounds cut deep.
Maybe it’s your first death.
Or maybe it’s still the first death, twenty years later.
That first year in the rooms can feel like endless loss.
And it’s cliché, but the thoughts still come.
Why them and not me?
I did way more fucked up stuff.
Why didn’t I reach out more?
It’s not like AA is the military, where we would expect to have survivor’s guilt.
But survivor’s guilt often emerges in communities that experience repeated exposure to death, where individuals struggle with the question of why they survived while someone else did not (Hedlund et al., 2023).
But we are on the front lines of constant death. For some of us it becomes so normalized that we grow numb to the grief of our fellows.
And then some of us feel it deeper than others.
The thoughts loop.
“What if I just…”
“What if I had…”
The eye rolls from your friends start.
Friends that seemed well-meaning before. They listen, but their feet are pointed away from you, looking over your shoulder as if someone more interesting is going to walk in the room and save them from your grief.
Maybe they aren’t even doing those things at all.
“Maybe I’m just oversensitive, like everyone says.”
Or maybe you are the type waiting for the perfect solemn time to drop the most screwed up joke you can think of, just to lighten the air.
It's not just us in recovery communities that like dark humor.
Emergency responders, ER nurses, and soldiers are all well-documented users of gallows humor. Studies of emergency and medical workers show that dark humor often functions as a coping strategy to manage stress, trauma, and exposure to tragedy (Maxwell, 2003; Lancaster, 2021).
But dark humor always carries risk.
Try making some of the dark jokes we make with people outside the rooms and you’ll quickly discover that the normies do not find them charming.
After a while you learn: those jokes only work with your people, and it's not just us in recovery either.
There is nothing like a mean joke, to the wrong person, to turn into an unforgivable character indictment.
We all have our process.
We all have our pace.
And just because death is common in our community doesn’t make it any less real.
I know I just spent several paragraphs calling out the ways we cope. But like anything else in recovery (except maybe using for some of us), a little nuance and balance is in order.
Joking can be healthy - as long as we aren’t hiding.
Drawing lessons from someone’s death can be adaptive - as long as we remember there was a human being there.
Talking with friends can bring peace to our hearts, as long as we don’t take emotional hostages and ignore their increasingly obvious hints that we should probably call our sponsor.
Or go to therapy.
Or maybe take our fucking antipsychotics… JOHN.
I said I’m still in my process.
The truth is, people are going to keep dying in the rooms. Some from addiction. Some from life. Some from things we’ll never fully understand.
We’ll keep telling stories about them.
Keep arguing about what it means.
Keep joking when the silence gets too heavy.
And maybe that’s the closest thing we have to a grief process in AA — carrying the dead forward with us, one meeting at a time.
Their stories become part of the language of the rooms.
About the Author
Azad Abed-Stephen, APCC, SUDCC is an addiction therapist and educator working in community mental health and treatment. His clinical work focuses on recovery, trauma, serious mental illness, and crisis response.
References (APA 7)
Holland, J. M., Currier, J. M., & Neimeyer, R. A. (2006). Meaning reconstruction in the first two years of bereavement: The role of sense-making and benefit-finding. OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying.
Hedlund, A., et al. (2023). Survivor guilt and traumatic loss: A review of psychological outcomes. Frontiers in Psychology. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10590163/
Lancaster, C. (2021). Humour as a coping strategy in ambulance services. British Paramedic Journal. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8415210/
Maxwell, W. (2003). The use of gallows humor and dark humor during crisis situations. International Journal of Emergency Mental Health.
Neimeyer, R. A. (2001). Meaning reconstruction and the experience of loss. American Psychological Association.
Yoshimura, S. M. (2024). Sanity through insanity: The use of dark humor among veterans and trauma-exposed groups. Behavioral Sciences.