This December, Wil will turn 69. He’ll also mark four and a half years of continuous sobriety — the longest stretch he’s had since he was 11 years old.
Wil grew up an only child in what looked, from the outside, like an ordinary family. There was no abuse, no addiction in the house, nothing obvious to point to. But by middle school, he was already using — alcohol, inhalants, anything he could find. By 19, he’d tried nearly everything. He left home at 17 and spent the next several decades in a cycle that would become painfully familiar: get sober, rebuild a piece of his life, and watch it come apart again.
He found Alcoholics Anonymous in the early 1990s and, in his words, never really left — he was just more often “in” than fully “out.” He built a career, held a state job for 20 years, and even found love later in life, marrying a woman with a decade of recovery of her own. But underneath the stability, the pattern kept repeating. He’d get busy, get comfortable, drift from meetings, and eventually end up back where he started.
By the time he came to Ashley in 2022, Wil had lost count of how many 24-hour chips he’d picked up over the years. What made this time different wasn’t a dramatic rock bottom — he’d had plenty of those before. It was exhaustion. It was the look in his wife’s eyes. It was finally being tired of hurting the people who loved him.
What he remembers most about his time at Ashley isn’t any single breakthrough — it’s the accumulation of small moments that added up to feeling truly cared for, many likely for the first time. Staff made sure his dietary needs were met without him having to ask twice. His small group work, especially with his counselor, gave him language and direction for a recovery he’d been circling for thirty years. And one ordinary moment — being asked to make coffee before a meeting — became, unexpectedly, the moment something in him finally shifted toward real willingness.
Since leaving Ashley, Wil has built a life centered on service and presence. He’s the GSR of his home group, participates in meetings inside local jails, and mentors others in recovery — sending words of encouragement to people who may or may not respond, because, as he puts it, it keeps his focus on someone other than himself. His mornings start with gratitude and meditation, a practice that blends the Steps with an eastern spiritual outlook that makes sense to him. He doesn’t claim to do recovery perfectly. He just tries, as he says, to “make better quality mistakes.”
Wil is looking forward to returning to Ashley’s campus for Alumni Reunion Weekend this September — not to walk the halls, he says, but simply to be back among people who understand.
To anyone still in the cycle Wil spent decades in: recovery doesn’t require a perfect bottom, and it doesn’t require getting it right the first time, or the tenth. It just asks you to stay willing.
