This Bill W. Memorial issue of the Grapevine is from March 1971, a little over month after the passing of AA cofounder Bill Wilson. This is a dedication to the life of service that Bill W. led in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Neither Co-Founder of the Alcoholics Anonymous Fellowship is with us any longer, and we, their survivors are on our own.
Dr. Bob passed away on November 16, 1950.
Bill found eternal peace on January 24, 1971.
Beyond the sorrow of the moment, Bill and Dr. Bob remain for us what they were in the years when AA came into being through their leadership: symbols of firmness of purpose and serenity. We have all partaken in some measure of sobriety they achieved and of the message they carried until their final moments among us.
Full comprehension of their achievements is difficult to set down in black and white. Both men filled the vacuums of their own souls with their “language of the heart” to find sobriety, and then passed on what they had found to hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions by now) of other alcoholics. Each of us, in the lonely universe of individual consciousness, must reckon what he or she has taken of the gift that they shared with us. The measure of our debt is, of course, drawn somewhere near the limits of gratitude itself, in the infinity of love.
They are both gone now.
-Excerpt is from the March 1971 AA Grapevine
