On September 20, Steve Wright marked one year of sobriety. “My birthday was on September 23, and I wanted to be clean and sober for it,” said the resident of Aster House, CHD’s 16-bed residential recovery home in South Hadley. That makes two straight birthdays—and counting—while in recovery.

Wright is a Springfield native who played on the High School of Commerce’s 1977 Division 2 state champion team—the first western Massachusetts hoop squad to win a state title. Basketball is his love, but he used a football analogy to describe his long battle with alcohol use disorder—a fight “that has taken me to a lot of facilities from here to Boston,” he said. “I have been in and out of countless programs, halfway houses, 90-day programs, 30-day programs, psych wards, and jail. I like to think my life has four quarters, like in football. I had the first quarter, the second quarter, and the third quarter, and at 65 years old, this is the fourth quarter of the game for me. This place has given me an opportunity. I went from feeling hopeless to hopeful.”

He had previously enjoyed five years of sobriety, “but I picked up in July of 2023, and by September, I was homeless,” he said. “I was mentally, physically, and spiritually bankrupt.” Wright, In desperation, called AdCare Treatment Hospital in Worcester, then spent three months at that city’s Hospital for Behavioral Medicine, beginning his second recovery journey. Because he had used the services of CHD’s STAR Psychiatric Day Treatment in Springfield in the past, he was able to make contact with Timothy Riordan, assistant program director at CHD’s Adult Mental Health-Springfield. Wright said that Riordan and Kate Fitzgerald, program manager at AMH-Springfield—who developed his aftercare plan—were responsible for putting him on the right track and getting him into Aster House.

“I had never heard of Aster House,” he said. “I didn’t know what to expect, but I was willing to do whatever I had to do to feel whole again.” He arrived at Aster House on April 2 and has high praise for the program’s director, Dan Regan, “who has an open-door policy,” as well as Assistant Director Courtney Supple, clinician Carlin Liquore, and counselor Justine Tompkins. “They have something special about them that is healing and reassuring,” said Wright. “I’ve come to love these people because they’re doing for me what I couldn’t do for myself.”

Still, he wants to make it clear that he’s not minimizing his own role in his ongoing transformation. “What I’ve learned here is that I may not be responsible for my disease,” he said, “but I am responsible for my recovery.”