BIDDEFORD

There are no more 2 a.m. phone calls from her brother. No more homemade birthday cards, created and signed by David, will arrive in the mail. David Bridges Jr. died at age 35 on Feb. 4 of a heroin overdose.

His sister, Jennifer Ready, mourns. She remembers the late-night calls and the good times when he wasn’t high, when he came to her home on a pleasant residential street in Biddeford and was a nice uncle to her children.

“He never crossed the boundary,” she said. “They saw the clean David.”

Those clean days were few, after a lifetime of using and committing crimes to get money for drugs. There were years in jail and prison, and, he told her, the drugs flowed freely there too. But David was her brother, and she loved him — and she tried to get him help when he reached rock bottom.

The help didn’t come soon enough — there were no detox beds available to ready him for the next step — and a month after his last cry for help, he died.

Ready keeps a voicemail that Bridges left her on Jan. 7, where he tells her he is planning to check himself into the hospital. He’d given up his heroin stash, and moved out of the place where he’d been staying. He was ready, he told her.

“I’d rather be clean,” he said on the voicemail.

Bridges had been turned down by one program, which told him to come back once he’d detoxed, but there were no detox beds anywhere. And for a heroin addict, tomorrow or the next day or the next week is a lifetime without a fix.

“He realized he needed help,” she said.

For years, she said, he hadn’t cared about getting help. But this time, she felt, he was truly ready.

Bridges’ story parallels that of Billy Munroe, who died on the streets of Portland on Oct. 18; he was 36. His mother, Terri McLeod, said her son developed an early fondness for alcohol, and she remembers telling the local storekeeper that she believed he was stealing vodka from his store.

Billy Monroe was 15 years old and overdosing when his mother learned for the first time he was doing heroin. The spiral continued — until the fatal overdose, last year.

To try and deal with her grief, McLeod established the Facebook page “All Those That Have Been Lost to Heroin.” It helped her grieve, and she wanted to be able to show her son’s daughter — her granddaughter — that it wasn’t just her dad who was addicted to heroin.

McLeod said she’s hoping her Facebook page will spur conversation and help break the stigma surrounding heroin addiction.

“I’ve met people who have lost someone (to heroin) but don’t put it out there,” said McLeod, of South Portland. “But the best relief they can give themselves is to be honest about the issue.”

The page has drawn people from near and far, including Ready.

“I post inspirational things for people,” Ready said.

For the most part, Ready deals with her own grief herself. But, she said, the group page gives her a place where she can talk to people who are in the same situation.

Her brother’s addiction began early, and so did the crime that often goes along with it. Ready wonders whether their father’s death to a cocaine overdose when she was 2 and her brother was 5 played a role.

“He and dad were very close,” said Ready.

After their father died, David was never the same, she said. Besides his drug addiction, her brother was a cutter, harming himself with sharp instruments, she said. He committed crimes to feed his addiction, ending up in jail or prison.

“He had a good heart and he loved his nephews,” said Ready. And she is frustrated that there are few treatment programs available, especially for people like David, who have long term addictions.

“What the addict becomes is a terrible thing,” said Ready. But the person (before the addiction sets in), is a good, kind-hearted person. The heroin turns them into a monster.”

Addiction, Ready said, affects the whole family.

McLeod agrees, and thinks back to the day in October when the telephone rang, and the words she had been expecting for years were spoken: her son was dead.

“You can never prepare yourself for that call,” she said. “You know the call is coming.”

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