SIMMONS: Scott Oake shares son's struggles with addiction in moving memoir

This was the summer assignment of a lifetime for the hockey man Scott Oake.

He was broadcasting rowing, canoeing, kayaking — everything on water — at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, smiling the way he always smiles on television, making us feel comfortable, bringing us along with him the way the best always do, never letting on for a television moment that his life was falling apart.

The flight to Beijing was 13 hours from Vancouver. Oake spent the first hour reading his rowing files. The next 12 were spent wondering and worrying and strategizing about his oldest son, Bruce.

It is all there now in print, the story told by one of Canada’s most eloquent sports broadcasters. The book is called For The Love of A Son, A Memoir of Addiction, Loss and Hope. It is published by Simon and Schuster and about to be released in the coming days.

The book made me laugh a little, relate a little, cry a lot, understand a battle my family has shared with that of the Oakes, how drug addiction becomes a family challenge of sorts that almost is impossible to win.

Bruce Oake died of an overdose in the early morning of March 28, 2011. He was only 24. He died after attempting rehab all across Canada.

He went from Winnipeg to Toronto for help, later went to Halifax and after that spent time in a facility on more than one occasion in Calgary — all with the belief and hope of ending his addiction to drugs.

The difficulty with any addict, and with addiction itself: The people who have to believe the most are not necessarily those who are addicted. All the support around them doesn’t necessarily change anything if the addicted person doesn’t have the strength to want to change their life.

After Bruce died, Scott and his late wife, Anne, who seemed like such a special person, wanted to find some sense and purpose from their son’s lost life. And after much thinking and planning, they came up with an idea: Why not open a centre for addiction in Winnipeg in Bruce’s name? Why not create purpose in his name that they couldn’t find in his life?

It took almost 10 years for the The Bruce Oake Recovery Centre, a facility of 43,000 square feet, to be built and opened. The facility offers long-term live-in and outpatient treatment for those seeking recovery from alcohol and drug addiction.

There aren’t enough of these kinds of facilities across Canada. There may never be enough, considering how many out there still need help.

“Grief can get the better part of you,” Oake, the Hockey Night in Canada giant, told me recently. “It can consume you. We haven’t risen above it, but we wanted to do something meaningful (in his name).

The opening of the centre — and soon there will be a second centre, for women, in Anne’s name — was challenging enough. Getting through the days, as a parent, a father, a husband, with a younger son, after losing a child, that was a challenge no one ever is prepared for.

Then came the idea of the book, which wasn’t really Oake’s idea. This wasn’t a cathartic project. This wasn’t a story he yearned to tell. But the combination of life and death and then life again, he was convinced needed to be told.

“I’m proud of the book. It was a difficult, emotional exercise, a worthwhile one, I think,” Oake said. “I don’t look at it very often. I can’t. I get to a section sometimes and I try and read it, but it’s still too difficult.”

The stories of Bruce and the family’s fight for Bruce are not unfamiliar to anyone who has lived this awful existence. There is hope and belief, love and support, but the challenge itself is often overwhelming.

The Oakes tried almost everything with Bruce. Love and tough love. Support and no support. They paid his bills and more bills, then stopped paying his bills. They heard the stories addicts tell — so many of them heartbreaking and impossible to believe.

So there is one facility now and another on the way and every time Scott Oake walks into the Bruce Oake Centre, he reaches to a glass memorial on the wall that houses Bruce’s remains. He rubs the top and says hello to his late son, his way of keeping in touch. The Centre is the best memory of a lost son and a name so very much alive

Oake worked with a co-writer on the project. He needed another voice to direct him. From Winnipeg — or wherever he happened to be working — he would call author Michael Hingston in Calgary and dictate what he had written down.

“Basically, I spoke gibberish to him and he turned it into a book,” the self-deprecating Oake said. “After Anne’s passing, I’d try and write something and stop every two minutes, trying to make sense of my own words. I couldn’t have done this without Michael.”

Scott and Anne had a remarkable relationship with Bruce, despite all the difficulty.

“We never lost contact with him,” Oake said. “We spoke to him virtually every day of the journey. He always was on our minds. And we never gave up on him.

“There were confrontations, many of them, but all those came from love. People don’t understand the power of addiction. it’s a disease. We ended up with an education on it that I would have preferred not to have.”

The usual cycle of book releases is that they come out before Christmas, the busiest time of the selling season. But this book is coming out in late-January.

“This is not a Christmas read,” Oake said. “I look at this as turning tragedy into triumph. I joke to people: Buy this book and you can cry yourself to sleep.”

Every dollar from book sales goes to the foundation. They also accept donations at 1-866-612-6253.

ssimmons@postmedia.com

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