An environment built around alcohol converted to an environment built around sobriety: that´s the summary story of Elise V. of Ballard.

There´s more to it, of course. Elise, a regular at the monthly Long Timers Meeting at St. Paul´s, is the product of an upper middle class suburban life that onlookers would envy. From the inside out, though, it was an intergenerational life of booze and chaos.

She was born in New York City, but spent most of her life in Dover, an upscale suburb of Boston. She did her first drinking draining the dredges of her parents´ cocktail glasses, but liquor became a serious occupation while she was at Junior College in Beverly, Massachusetts. "I don´t think I was ever sober while I was there," she said.

One year was the end of her college career. She married and began having children after her freshman year, producing three over the next seven years. "I never drank when I was pregnant. I was too sick. It was the Higher Power, I´m sure. On the other hand, I noticed after each pregnancy that I needed more booze."

"My husband was in the investment banking world. Travel, conventions-the drinking was legendary. It´s amazing any of us is still alive."

Elise´s mother committed suicide when Elise was 16 years old. "My father was a raging alcoholic. Everyone in the family except one grandmother was an alcoholic. My sister died six years to the day after my mother´s death. Drinking is what we did. I kind of raised myself. I´m a survivor of a totally alcoholic, crazy family. I´m the one that´s left, and I´m sober."

Her children were 10, 15 and 17 when Elise decided that things had to change. "I was terrified I would do to my children what had been done to me." Her decision for sobriety was not greeted with universal joy, however. "My daughters were just beginning to drink, and they were furious. They didn´t want to hear anything about A.A.

"My biggest problem was telling my husband I was going to stop drinking. I was afraid I´d lose my marriage. It helped a lot that I was going to Al Anon as well as A.A. I gutted it out for a year, going to only one meeting a week. He was very angry, but he did much of his drinking away from home. At the end of that first year, I asked for a separation.

"He agreed, but six months later, he asked to come back home ´cause he needed me and the children. I said okay, but told him he had to do something about his drinking. We got back together in ´81."

By then Elise had been in A.A. for two years. Her sobriety date is Oct. 14, 1979. Three years earlier, on the advice of friends, she had called a therapist, who insisted she go to Al Anon before she would see her. There, she was told she needed to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and when she did, "this woman got up and told my story. I came away from there wondering if I might be an alcoholic too. No one would give me the answer. It was left to me to decide. That was a powerful tool, and after awhile, I quit drinking.

"That´s when the fun started. I began having all these obsessions about alcohol. That was all I thought about. But it wasn´t until a Christmas party that year that I finally turned the corner. I had a terrible time. I knew I had to get out of there and get to a meeting, and when I did, there was a man there who said ´I´ve been saving this chair for you.´ It was a wonderful way to get help. That was the meeting where I finally said ´I´m Elise, and I´m an alcoholic.´"

Her husband had been home for two years when, one night, he didn´t come home at all. "I still don´t know what happened to him," Elise said. "He was really terrified. When he got up the next day, he said he wanted to see my therapist. He did, and when he came home that night, he told me he was glad I was sober. From that point on, he got sober himself. He now has 25 years in the program."

Their marriage was still in trouble, though. "I decided to give him five years of sobriety before deciding what to do."

Elise went to a week-long retreat sponsored by the Hazelden Treatment Center near Minneapolis in 1987, and later that year attended an A.A. anniversary dinner in New York. A man she had met at the retreat was also at the dinner, one thing led to another and she concluded she had to get a divorce.

The couple divorced, but, Elise says, "we have remained the best of friends. We´ve known each other for 50 years."

In 1989, she remarried and moved to New York City, her new husband´s home. "A.A. in New York is fabulous," Elise said. "You can go to a meeting there 24/7 within blocks of your apartment. And I found a wonderful Al Anon meeting." But in 1992, her husband was transferred to Pennsylvania. "It was a big blow to both of us. We were entrenched in New York A.A., and now we had to start a new program in the Philadelphia suburbs." Three years later, her husband died of cancer after a long illness.

Elise, though not deeply rooted, stayed on in Pennsylvania and accidentally discovered strengths she didn´t know she had. An Episcopalian, she had served on her church´s search committee looking for an assistant pastor. A woman priest was hired, but four months later, the head priest fired her. Elise described him as a "rageaholic." In any event, she joined a group to demand an accounting, and the upshot was that the priest was ousted.

"That was a powerful time in my life, to question authority. I never could have done it without the strength of A.A." When the dust had settled, she organized a healing service to bring the battered congregation back together. "We ran it like an A.A. meeting," she recalled.

Elise stayed in Pennsylvania until two years ago, when family events led her here. Her grandson was born here in 2005, and then twins last year. Elise came out to help with the children and look the city over. "It was very, very different from anything I knew," she said. But there was family here, so she bought a house in Ballard and settled in. More or less. She has been spending so much time with her son and his family that she has only begun to unpack.

"I spend three days a week being a grandmother, and I love it. Better still, all my kids are sober too." One daughter lives in Colorado and the other in California.

"The whole family is sober. It´s a miracle."

But there were still dues to be paid, in the form of a traumatic counseling session sponsored by Bastyr University, the naturopathic university in Kirkland. Her son was in his second year of graduate school, and was offered a "family dynamic weekend." The entire family, including her former husband, gathered in front of a classroom filled with 27 students and went through the toughest sort of confrontational encounter imaginable for two days. For example, the first question was to Elise: "Why did you divorce your husband?" "I started crying, and I cried for two weeks. In retrospect, it was a good thing for all of us, but especially for the kids. They´d been through a lot. The kids all talk by phone every Sunday now. The students said they were amazed at the honesty of all five of us."

Elise has moved on now. "After 66 years on the east coast, it´s been a huge adjustment, but I´m here to stay. I want to get involved with a church again, and maybe resume my singing. Until I got married, I used to sing a lot. I was a soprano then. Maybe I´m a bass now."

Wherever she is, "A.A. is my life. It saved my life, it saved my sanity, it gives me a choice every day of how to live my life. This program for me is physical too-it helped me through breast cancer in 1998- and emotional and spiritual. And the greatest thing for me is how it has taught me the love of God."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.