BELFAST – The day before Thanksgiving, Linda Nash paused in her preparations for a big family get-together to recall the weeks she spent commuting from her home to the neonatal intensive care unit at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor. It’s a bittersweet memory, one that’s not easy for her to talk about.

In February 2002, Nash’s 20-year-old daughter, Kelley Newcomb, gave birth to a baby boy and named him Gage.

For several months, ever since discovering she was pregnant, Kelley had been in treatment at the methadone maintenance program at The Acadia Hospital in Bangor.

Kelley’s concern for the safety of her unborn child was enough to keep her compliant with her treatment and away from the street drugs she’d become addicted to, Nash said, and Gage’s birth was uncomplicated.

“But he had tremors as soon as he was born. They took him off right away and started him on medication for withdrawal,” she said. Kelley was discharged to a local home for single mothers a few days later, but Gage stayed in the NICU for about six weeks.

“The staff was so supportive,” Nash said. “They were absolutely wonderful to us.” Though she and Kelley weren’t allowed to sleep at the hospital, they spent nearly every day at Gage’s bedside, holding him, feeding him and performing as much of his personal care as they could under the supervision of the nursing staff.

“It was a very natural thing for Kelley to take care of little children and love them,” Nash said. Gage completed his treatment and went home with Kelley when he was 6 weeks old.

Gradually though, Kelley slid back into her old ways and began using street drugs in addition to the methadone she was getting at the clinic, according to Nash. Eventually Kelley asked her mother to take over Gage’s care, saying she needed to focus on her own recovery. Kelley died of drug-related causes on May 28, when Gage was 15 months old.

Nash is bitter over her daughter’s death and has become an outspoken critic of methadone therapy, which she feels simply substitutes one dangerous addiction for another. But now contentedly raising Gage in her own home, she says he is “perfect – bright, healthy, loving, athletic, well-mannered.” There is no evidence of the trauma of his early days, she said.

She plans to talk to him about his mother’s addiction when he’s old enough to understand.