‘Sober in The 6ix,’ happy to tell the tale
Lisa Simone knows all too well the horror of addiction and the many joys of recovery
Lisa Simone knows that, for the addicted, the bottom can be a hard, cold, lonely place — a crushing moment of inescapable truth about a life going to hell.
She also knows that, as painful as that is, the alternative is worse.
The Calgary native started using alcohol and drugs at 13.
Seventeen years ago, she woke up in Houston, where she was living, to find her first husband dead of a drug overdose.
She was 26 and also addicted. Her son was 2.
“It didn’t get me sober,” she told the Star on Saturday at the annual Recovery Day celebration at Toronto’s David Pecaut Square. “It broke my soul.”
Inexplicably to the unaddicted, the capacity of addicts to keep using alcohol or drugs in the face of the worst kind of trauma, or the most overwhelming evidence of the harm being done, is almost limitless.
So Simone carried on. Until she couldn’t any longer.
She had gone home to Calgary. She remarried, blended families and found herself parenting four children. She tried to get clean.
She attended 12-step meetings, stayed sober for two years, but began drinking again. She started using opioids.
“For those of us in addiction, none of us thinks it’s going to happen to us,” she said. “Until it does.”
The pain and self-loathing got worse.
Until, through the haze of a dozen pills and as many beers a day, came one of those moments of surrender and clarity.
On Aug. 20, Simone celebrated eight years clean and sober. She now lives in Chippewa, Ont., with her husband and family. She works in recovery.
Still, that doesn’t promise a life free of pain and challenge. Sobriety offers only the chance to cope, with some courage and dignity, with whatever comes one’s way.
This summer, Simone got blindsided again. Two days before her sobriety anniversary, she held a memorial service for her brother.
Scott Williams died in August of an opioid overdose in Calgary. His mother had found his body several days after his death.
Williams was an educated professional, a husband and father. Like most battling addiction, Simone said, he was a far cry from the caricature many have of addicts as irredeemably down and out, reeking, raving and living under bridges.
“Seventy-five per cent of alcoholics have a job,” she said. And even those on skid row are “somebody’s son, or brother, someone’s father. They’re loved by someone.”
Scott Williams should have been celebrating his 46th birthday on Saturday. Instead, his sister was — by “making my mess my message” — serving as a walking, talking example of hope to addicts and alcoholics. Under sunny skies at Pecaut Square, with music, performance and stories of recovery, Simone helped celebrate “Sober in The 6ix.”
“My brother never reached out for help,” she said. “I think he found it incredibly hard to ask for help. It’s the only disease that tells you you don’t have it.”
And in her little family — her only sibling gone — was the story of addiction writ large, she said. “One dies, one lives.” Who can say why? Five years ago, Simone and Annie McCullough started a national nonprofit called Faces and Voices Recovery Canada in hopes of reducing the shame and stigma around addiction.
Around the same time, McCullough helped found Recovery Day, which this year was held in 36 municipalities across the country.
To Simone, the opioid crisis has made awareness even more important. While the axiomatic destination of alcoholics is “jails, institutions or death,” opioids leave fewer options and deliver a quicker and more certain end.
“It’s only a matter of time,” she said. “It’s only death.”
Simone began her career in recovery counselling with Fresh Start Recovery Centre in Calgary, and now runs a satellite office in Chippewa.
Though alternating between tears and laughter in an interview with the Star on Saturday, she glowed with well-being and purpose.
“Recovery is happy, joyous and it’s free,” she said.
“I woke up two mornings ago, and my husband’s beside me and my dog’s beside me and the window’s open and in Chippewa you can hear the crickets.
“And I wanted to weep for how grateful I was and how much I love my life.”