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Stephen Knight was 51 years old — and only eight months sober — when he got a knock at his front door in Dallas. It was a friend, also struggling with addiction, who’d recently relapsed, and

she was holding her dog, a Maltese-dachshund mix named Jayde. The friend had decided to return to rehab, but because her family had stopped talking to her, she needed Knight’s help. “She

told me, ‘I need you to take me down to the shelter so I can surrender Jayde because I have nowhere to put her,” says Knight, who’s now 65. He looked into Jayde’s eyes and instantly felt a

connection. So rather than help his friend find a new home for the dog, he offered to adopt Jayde instead. “It was kind of life-changing, in a way,” he says. In fact, Knight’s life was about

to change in ways he never expected. Within the year, the former schoolteacher would start fostering dogs for others with addiction on the road to recovery, eventually opening his own

nonprofit called Dogs Matter, which he says has helped more than 1,700 dogs as well as their owners who had nowhere left to turn. Knight had none of this in mind when he took Jayde in, back

in 2011. He just wanted a reason to feel normal again. HAVING SOMETHING TO WAKE UP FOR Knight’s childhood was difficult. He turned to drinking by age 12, and marijuana by 18. Fueled by

self-hatred over his sexuality — he was gay and closeted, and those who’d learned his secret told him he was “going to hell” — he turned to crystal meth in his 30s. Over the next few decades

it became a daily habit, which evolved from smoking to intravenous use, and it didn’t end even when he contracted HIV. “I surrendered to just being an addict the rest of my life,” Knight

says. “I was probably six months to a year away from being dead. I stopped taking my HIV medications because I didn’t care anymore. I just didn’t feel like I was worth it.” Stephen Knight

with his dogs Lady, Nova and Piper. Knight created Dogs Matter in order to foster dogs while their owners went to rehab. AARP Studios What finally gave Knight the strength to make a change

was a letter he received from his mother. “She didn’t want to have to bury me, is what it said,” he says. “I read that and I was like, I can’t do that to my mother.” He got himself to rehab

that same year, and while he managed to kick the habit, Knight worried about relapsing. “When you get sober, you start over,” he says. Many of his closest friends and family had given up on

him, and he felt “very much alone.” Until Jayde entered the picture. For Knight, it was entirely new terrain. He’d had dogs growing up, but his parents mostly took care of them. Suddenly, he

was responsible for another living thing. “I had to wake up in the morning and walk her. I had to feed her,” he says. “I just couldn’t lay in bed and feel sorry for myself.”