Pain and promise

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/02/2025 (580 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

According to the provincial government, 445 Manitobans lost their lives to drug addiction in 2023. It’s a staggering number — all were someone’s child, all were precious. All were our brothers and sisters who, as Scott Oake emphatically argues in his new memoir, did not make a choice to become addicts. They had a disease: “Who would choose to live a life full of such pain and desperation? Nobody. Bruce certainly didn’t.”

In For the Love of a Son: A Memoir of Addiction, Loss and Hope, legendary Winnipeg CBC sports commentator and journalist Scott Oake, who many of us grew up watching on TV, recounts the devastating story of his eldest son Bruce — a beautiful young man who succumbed to the devastating impact of drug addiction, despite the unconditional love and care perpetually exuded by his incredible parents.

Raw and honest, Oake’s memoir — written with Edmonton’s Michael Hingston — begins with his early career and family life: making his way to Winnipeg, marrying Anne, cultivating his rich career on Winnipeg and Canadian TVs and the birth of Bruce.

For the first two years of his life, Bruce was an easy baby. But then Scott and Anne began to see changes that manifested themselves in increased anxiety and an eventual diagnosis of ADHD and Tourette’s.

Questioning his parenting and what went wrong, Oake asks a brutally honest question from a deeply loving father: “What kind of switch had been flipped inside of him — and how could I flip it back?”

Bruce went on to struggle with school and social connections, and by high school took to increasingly risky and dangerous behaviour and delving into weed. He was getting into more and more trouble, constructing webs of lies and exhausting any and all help Scott and Anne were trying to offer as parents.

But Oake doesn’t want to suggest that Bruce’s story was all trial and trauma. Far from it: “Whenever I start thinking about Bruce’s life, it’s easy to look past the happy memories and zero in on the difficult ones. But not every day was a catastrophe,” he says.

In powerful yet vulnerable prose, Oake explains how Bruce slipped deeper and deeper into drug use, gang involvement and addiction to opioids. With stints in a variety of expensive recovery centres spearheaded by his parents, Bruce would struggle again and again with this terrible disease. And Scott and Anne stood with him — whether in Halifax or Calgary, they did what they had to do to love him, all without a handbook for parents on this kind of behaviour.

“We didn’t understand that addiction is like cancer. You might think it’s gone for good, but there’s no guarantee it won’t come back when you least expect it,” Oake says adeptly and chillingly.

In 2011, at age 25, Bruce succumbed to his disease. It was crushing for the Oakes, the worst possible outcome, and will be particularly heartbreaking for anyone with children to read and imagine.

The Oakes’ grief, however, did not paralyze them. Rather, they were motivated, based on the models of recovery centres that had helped Bruce, to create a space in Winnipeg that could help those struggling with addictions to a pathway of recovery. The Bruce Oake Recovery Centre was born.

Despite the enduring notion that all children need love, and that addiction recovery is centred around love, there are still those who will put up barriers and dole out scorn and blame. The Oakes faced their fair share of scorn from populist politicians and misinformed residents living near the proposed site of the centre on Hamilton Avenue, which at the time was a boarded-up arena.

Despite these pitfalls and opponents, the Oakes were successful in creating the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre. (One would hope the detractors of the project are now supporters of the $15 million facility, and will be among the first to donate to the forthcoming $25-million Anne Oake Family Recovery Centre, to be built adjacent to the Victoria Hospital.)

Sadly, Anne passed away in 2021, shortly after the centre opened. Somehow Scott has managed to carry on, remaining a staunch advocate for those who struggle with addiction. His courage and strength is inspiring and predicated on the reason he tells his story. “In reading this book, I hope it’s clear that Bruce, for all of his troubles, wasn’t a monster. He had a disease, and it ultimately claimed his life,” he says.

This might be the most significant lesson Oake brings to readers — that all children are beautiful. All adults were once children that had stories and families and class photos, and those we see in our city who are struggling are worthy of love, compassion and support.

For the Love of a Son is a beautiful book about grief, tragic loss and a belief that we can make a better Winnipeg and a better world.

Matt Henderson is superintendent of Winnipeg School Division.