Every Columbus Day weekend since 1972, hundreds of St. Joseph’s Addiction Treatment & Recovery Centers graduates, representing many hundreds of years of collective recovery, return to campus to celebrate lives free from addiction and to provide inspiration to the residents currently in treatment.

A highlight of the three-day event is the Reunion Dinner, during which speakers, chosen for their commitment and contributions to recovery, share their stories.

This year’s dinner speaker was Lucy Hall Gainer, a St. Joseph’s graduate and board member, and founder of the Mary Hall Freedom House, an addiction treatment facility for women based in Atlanta.

A passionate advocate for recovery, Lucy was kind enough to allow her talk to be shared with readers in the Tri-Lakes to inspire hope for those who might be in need of care.

–

“Good evening, all. My name is Lucy, and I’m a person in long-term recovery, and what that means is it’s been almost 27 years since my last drink or drug. And I’m going to try my doggonedest to get through this (talk) without getting too emotional because the honor that it gives me to stand before you tonight, it just overwhelms me with such gratitude and humility at the same time because I know what it’s like to walk through the doors and sit where the women sit.

“So I want to take a minute and recognize the women residents who are currently at St. Joe’s. Stand up! Stand up! (Loud cheers) And I’d never do that without giving the brothers at St. Joe’s a holler. Y’all stand up. (Cheers) And because of the great work, I would love to recognize the veterans program at St. Joseph’s. (Cheers) Will y’all stand up? (Cheers)

“It is truly amazing. I give honor to God, first and foremost, but I also want to holler at Robert (Bob Ross, St. Joseph’s CEO) and the Board of Directors. It has truly been an honor in this past year just being on the (phone) line with you. If I could take a private jet and get up here for every meeting, I would. But the mere fact that you let me participate, it truly is an honor, and I thank God for it, so thank you all.

“I grew up in Tuckahoe, New York. Anybody know where that is? (Loud cheers) So I was born and raised in Westchester. I’m the youngest of seven kids, and my mom died of alcoholism when I was 6 years old, so I did not know my mother. By the time I was 13, I had four more family members — my grandmother, my aunt and two brothers — overdose on heroin. So my thing was, I didn’t know there was ever a way out. But one day somebody said, ‘You have the right to remain silent.’ And when they took me to the jail, I cried so much in the back of that police car, they didn’t even put handcuffs on me because I just lost it.

“I used to get dressed up and shoplift. I’d never steal from you, but I’d steal from Caldor’s, and that’s where I got busted. But when I went to probation in Yonkers, a woman said, ‘I want you to go pee in a cup.’ I said, ‘What do you want me to do that for?’ She said, ‘Well, I need to know if you do drugs.’ And I said, ‘Well, I do.’ She looked at me and said, ‘What do you want to do about it?’ and I said, ‘What am I supposed to do about it?’ Because the life that I lived, that’s all I knew. Where I came from, they worked all week and got high all weekend. So that’s what I thought I was going to grow up and do. But by the grace of God, they sent me to St. Joe’s. And I’ll never forget my first session with my counselor, Mark. He said, ‘So Lucy, what is your biggest fear?’ I said, ‘I fear I’m gonna die just like my mother and never see my daughter.’ He said, ‘Well let me help you with that. We are all gonna die. We are all gonna die. But you get to choose right now whether you’re gonna die like your mother. You don’t have to die in active addiction. You get to choose your journey in life.’

“It was like the scales fell from my eyes. I really did not know that I had a choice that I did not need to get high. And so up here for those seven weeks — and believe me, they were seven hard weeks! Family week? I’ll never forget it. My father did not come, but my stepmother did. She said at that session, ‘I hated you. My husband lay awake at night and cried because we did not know where you were.’ That was hard to hear, but it was the truth I needed to hear. Twenty-seven years later, that’s the thing I remember — that woman telling me she hated me because her husband didn’t sleep at night. I needed to hear that I was killing my own father, my hero. So that was one of the things that gave me strength to keep going.

“But when St. Joe’s sent me out the door seven weeks later to Schenectady, to the women’s (after-care) program, that was where I gained my most strength. I can remember my first job at Peter Harris Clothes. I used to put the tickets on the clothes. I think minimum wage was about three dollars and 75 cents back then! I remember those things when I went through here.

“Then I remember visiting my brother in Georgia in January. The amazing thing about that was I went to visit him in January, and they were wearing this. (Lucy points to her dress.) When I came back to Schenectady, there was snow up to here. I said, ‘God, please let me out of here!’ So I moved to Atlanta. And when I got to Georgia, there was nothing like St. Joe’s down there for women.

“I started working for a shelter, and back then, I didn’t know what shelters were about. I had no idea that shelters were where you went when your house caught on fire or you lost your job. Actually back then, shelters were places where people who were undereducated, underinsured, underemployed — domestic violence, addiction, all of that was in those shelters. I was told that every 90 days, they had to get out and go somewhere else.

“I said, ‘This is crazy.’ So by the grace of God, I met a man who was pretty wealthy, and I called him up and said, ‘Mr. D., I want to come to talk to you and your wife.’ He said, ‘Why my wife?’ I said, ‘Well, she has the heart; you have the money.’ He said, ‘You’d be surprised, Lucy, but come on over.'”

—

Lucy Hall Gainer’s story will be continued on tomorrow’s Opinion page. Jim Grant is communications director of St. Joseph’s Addiction Treatment & Recovery Centers in Saranac Lake.