My son Isaac was one of these kids who was adorable and smart and funny, but he never felt comfortable in his own skin. The first time he smoked weed, he came home and said to me, “I just want to tell you mom I am never doing this again. I hated the way it made me feel. I was in my friend’s apartment, I was out on their terrace and I was afraid I was going to jump off. I got so paranoid.” I thought, “I’m so happy he tried it. He’ll never do it again.” Isaac was a great basketball player in high school. He was the star and team captain, but in his junior year I started seeing a decline. Even when he was on the court, he didn’t have the same energy, and he was out of breath. He was probably just smoking too much. Anyway, he graduated high school and went to the University of Rhode Island, URI, whose nickname, sadly, is “You Are High.” He was in a fraternity, and drugs were rampant. In his first semester he called me up crying, saying he couldn’t handle it. He needed help and that was the first time he went into outpatient treatment in New York. About a year later, he overdosed for the first time. He was in the apartment with a friend. I wasn’t there. Fortunately, a friend of mine showed up and found him. He was already turning blue. She called 911, and they were able to revive him. I took pictures of him in the hospital and made sure to show them to him. “You were near death,” I told him. “Your organs were shutting down.” He swore up and down he’d never do it again. He went to outpatient treatment again and then returned to school, which of course was a mistake. Then he went to inpatient treatment. He was living in a sober facility after being in treatment, and then finally came home to New York City to live with us. Six weeks later, we found him unresponsive in the room right next to us. He’d had an accidental opioid overdose. He spent six weeks in the hospital in a vegetative state. We prayed and did every ridiculous thing that you can imagine, hoping for a miracle. But we lost him. He died in January 2014, when he was 23. I felt a lot of guilt when Isaac died. As a parent, I blamed myself: “I could have done this, I could have done that.” I come from a traditional Jewish family and we sit shiva for a week. I told all the people who came over, ‘I’m going to do something to make meaning out of his life.’ They all said, ‘we’ll be there for you. ‘ One day I woke up and said to my husband, “I had my big idea.” I’ve worked my whole life in a family diamond business. But I wanted to do something in the nonprofit space. I knew that when Isaac got sober, one of the hardest things for him was finding ways to live his life without substances. He didn’t know how to have fun without getting high. I decided to start a community center in 2015 where young adults like Isaac could go and have fun and learn new life skills and find their passions and exercise and learn a healthy way of living. It’s for adults around 18 to 35. One of the first things we did was a basketball Olympics because Isaac’s passion was basketball. We had four teams and people did basketball skills and drills and relay races, and then we had a dinner and an auction. Once COVID hit we did a lot of daily, virtual events. Now we’re back to doing in-person events. I think we’ve done over 500 free events since we started, including sailing, trapeze school, go-karting, mini-golf, laser tag, rock-wall climbing, yoga, meditation, art and mindfulness, wellness healing sounds, journaling, knitting, cooking, and more. We’ve also gone bowling. But finding a bowling alley that is not about the bar is more challenging than you can imagine. We found a place in Brooklyn that was a really cool bowling alley with a kind of a depressing-looking bar in the corner that nobody really wanted to go to. That was the only place I’ve had an event with an actual bar. Otherwise, we make sure that everything is without substances. A few months ago, we signed a contract for an actual physical clubhouse, which has been my dream. It’s on 49th street and Second Avenue, in Manhattan. We had tried to rent for a long while and kept getting rejected. Landlords’ image was of addicts coming and going. We said, “No, it’s the opposite! We’re not going to have any crazy parties here. We’re going to be your perfect tenants.” The hope and plan is to expand BIGVISION across the country. We recently launched a North American Initiative to celebrate sobriety along with Sans Bar, an Austin, Texas, sober pop-up bar and music venue serving alcohol-free beverages. The 2023 Sans Bar Zero-Proof 17-City North America Pop-Up Party will make 15 stops around the country, including New York City, Phoenix, Miami, Dallas, Kansas City, Portland, Charleston, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City, as well as stops in Vancouver and Toronto. We’re funded by donations. We do two major fundraisers. One is the basketball tournament, which we hold on June 23, Isaac’s birthday. Then we do an auction, in December. I’m not a clinician. We’re about lifestyle and helping people sustain their recovery. The work begins once you come out of treatment. That’s where the biggest challenges are, and that’s where we step in. We like to see ourselves as the answer to this broken system of people going into treatment and coming out and being left to their own devices without any real structure or guidance. I saw it with Isaac. How many people leave treatment and go back to using right away? Isaac felt so alone and ashamed. He wouldn’t tell people that he was in recovery. He sort of saw it as a moral failing. This is a real struggle, and we are trying to be part of the solution.
