A good job, a happy relationship and life with her children and grandchildren is the “rainbow” at the end for a woman who fought through long years of addiction and made it out the other side.

Denise Bowens-Tucker shared her story as part of the commemoration of September as Recovery Month, honouring people who have reclaimed their lives, with those who help make recovery possible.

“It feels good,” Ms Bowens-Tucker, 52, told The Royal Gazette of sober living.

“I don’t have to worry. I have a roof over my head. I’m still working doing caregiving. I know now when I make money, it goes to my bills, to my grandchildren.

“It was a journey and it was an experience I would never want again. There’s more to life than drugs — than being out there.”

Recovery is ultimately about personal choice, she said: “It’s all in the mind. If you’re going to rehab, go to rehab for you. Get yourself clean for you. At the end of the day, at the rainbow, the Lord has got something for you.”

Her beam of joy, captured in 2019 by a photographer covering the Bermuda Day Parade, inspired a mural overlooking Cavendish Car Park just outside Hamilton.

The painting, created by Andre Trenier and based on a photograph by Meredith Andrews, was unveiled last year. To Ms Bowens-Tucker, it shows “the joy of life”.

“I might not have it all. I can’t give my children and grandchildren everything they want, but I can give them what they need.”

She has spoken of her experience over more than a decade of addiction marked by homelessness and trauma.

“I haven’t been to the schools, but I share,” she said.

She credits her “life-saver” daughter with the determination to turn her life around.

Adopted as a youngster by the late educator Dalton E. Tucker, Ms Bowens-Tucker is the first to admit she was a problem child.

“She had rules and I didn’t abide by those rules,” she said.

She recalled how she “ended up running from house to house because I wanted to do what I wanted to do”.

Eventually she found work at the Matilda Smith Williams care home and “had a choice to do nursing — but I wanted to party”.

As Ms Bowens-Tucker began to have children of her own, she went under the care of Teen Haven, and then stayed with an aunt, but in the mid-1990s she was thrown out after getting into trouble with dealers who wanted her to work as a drug mule.

She was offered her first taste of crack cocaine by a boyfriend and ended up addicted. She washed cars for cash and slept rough before getting emergency housing.

Ultimately, after years of addiction, the Department of Child and Family Services gave temporary custody of her children to her sister.

Ms Bowens-Tucker recalled having to appear in family court, distraught and angry.

“I went off in court,” she said. She was told to come back in six months’ time.

Determined that “the system would not bring up my children”, Ms Bowens-Tucker came to a decision that was “the first time it ever happened” — and stopped using drugs.

She enrolled back in nursing, managed to get an apartment and was rehired at a place she had worked before relapsing.

In 2015, not long before Ms Tucker died, she was able to “make amends” and apologise to the woman who had raised her.

Looking back takes Ms Bowens-Tucker into many painful memories.

“Rain, blow or shine, I was out there,” she said.

“One year, my third son was supposed to get christened. That money went to the pusher. It hurt me afterwards, but at the time, it went.”

She said her life as an addict “was not me — I had been just trying to fit in and do what I wanted to do, and I lost everything”.

“Every year at New Year’s, out on the streets, I would say, I’m done, but then think, where do I go? I’m not going to Salvation Army or to rehab. It would be another year.”

Now, with her life in order, Ms Bowens-Tucker thanks the courts along with Child and Family Services, her family, and everyone else who helped her.

“It’s up to you,” she said. “You want a better life? You have to make that change, and that’s what I wanted — because of my children.”