The first thing Jeanne Clark noticed was the little rubber bands popping up in strange places around her Norwichtown home.

It was around 2003, when the word “heroin” still triggered images of longtime drug users wandering the streets, trying to find the next high.

Clark thought those rubber bands had fallen from the hair of one of her boys’ girlfriends.

She never imagined they had fallen from tiny plastic bags holding a substance that would take both of her sons’ lives. One died before opioid use had reached epidemic proportions. The other died in 2016, one year after overdose deaths seemed to peak in Connecticut.

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Growing up, Chase and Christopher, separated by just 22 months, were nearly inseparable.

Both played baseball and hockey. Chase, the youngest, tried soccer, too.

After high school, Christopher took business courses at Three Rivers Community College and entered into the field of carpentry.

Chase went to Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston and got a bachelor’s degree in construction management before becoming a licensed arborist.

In retrospect, one might point to Christopher’s minor run-ins with police — records show he was convicted of misdemeanor liquor and marijuana possession in separate incidents near the turn of the century — as a sign of the brewing problem. Clark wrote it off as typical youth experimentation. Both brothers were gainfully employed, and people always complimented her on her charming sons.

But she saw changes when the two were together at her home. Once lovers of the outdoors, they’d stay inside while she labored in the garden. Once full of energy, they struggled to get off the couch.

If Clark knew then what she knows now, perhaps she would have confronted them sooner.

Instead, she didn’t learn they had turned from social OxyContin use to heroin until 2005, when Chase frantically woke her in the middle of the night in the midst of a drug-induced frenzy. 

Her first reaction was one of humiliation.

"I was embarrassed to know that my children were using drugs," said the 63-year-old Clark, now a Noank resident.

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The story isn’t one of a doctor’s pain pill prescription gone wrong.

Christopher first used OxyContin after one of his friend’s uncles, looking to show the young men a good time, gave him and his group some to use for fun.

Clark wouldn’t learn until later that both of her boys had struggled through their teenage years with peers who were calling them gay, even though they weren’t. Christopher, well liked and surrounded by friends, was depressed. Chase’s social anxiety was severe.

Clark believes Christopher was trying to help Chase when he turned Chase on to the pills he was popping on the weekends.

“Anybody looking at this story would say, 'Well, these kids had a problem and they were into drugs and, so, that’s what happens when you use drugs,'” she said. “You die or you go to jail because it’s not legal.”

But hers were good kids who grew up in a nice home, she said. Their experimentation with drugs in social settings wasn’t unlike that of many other college students.

“They had no idea that it was going to become this epidemic and it was going to affect their lives — or my life — the way that it has,” Clark said.

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When she learned of her sons’ drug use, Clark sought out an excellent counselor who helped her navigate the treatment system.

Despite his help, she found frustration at every turn.

People would advise Clark to have a treatment program set up before hosting an intervention in her kids’ lives. But most treatment centers need to perform an in-house evaluation before they’ll say whether they will accept someone.

When Chase and Christopher would agree to get help and pick a program that seemed best for them, the evaluators wouldn’t always agree — and it was up to them to place the young men.

So the next years followed like those of many addicts: interventions, treatment programs, periods of sobriety, backslides, run-ins with the law and, of course, overdoses, each one bringing Clark a stronger sense of desperation.

Through it all, Clark confided only in close friends, compelled by society to keep her secret hidden away.

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Christopher first went through a 30-day Stonington Institute program. After that, he got onto methadone, an opioid medication that reduces withdrawal symptoms without getting the user high. But when he didn’t have the money for his dosage one day, he was turned away. When he didn’t have the right amount in his system the next day, he was turned away again.

Eventually he agreed to give Connecticut Valley Hospital a try. Evaluators again approved him for just 30 days.

Clark was skeptical — how could 30 days possibly be enough? But after his stint there, he landed in a sober house in Westbrook and got a new job in carpentry.

Christopher, who had been spending many weekends with Clark, had planned to spend the first weekend of March 2008 socializing with other guys in the house. Clark, taking a sober house as a place of sobriety, didn’t call him on Saturday. She wanted to give him space.

On Sunday, she called to check in. Until they heard his phone ringing, his housemates thought he had gone home for the weekend.

Officials determined Christopher had overdosed and died on Friday, Feb. 29, 2008. He was 26.

“When he passed away, I knew this was going to be an epidemic,” Clark said.

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To say Clark was devastated is an understatement. But Chase?

“That was like cutting off his right arm,” Clark said.

But Chase had survived an overdose in a car in West Hartford on one of the hottest days of summer. He had survived an overdose behind the wheel that sent his truck careening into a median and mangled his legs.

Determined, Chase completed the 15-month program he was in the midst of when Christopher died, one run by Teen Challenge in New Haven.

He worked for a tree service business and then started his own. He attended a local church’s young adult program to try to make new friends. Wanting to be 100 percent opioid-free, he worked to wean off Suboxone, a blend of buprenorphine and naloxone that’s used to reduce symptoms of withdrawal.

But on a Christmas Day a few years ago, Clark saw the first signs heroin had sneaked back into Chase’s life.

Wanting to believe his odd behavior wasn’t from drugs and not wanting to falsely accuse the son with whom she had built a close relationship, she didn’t approach him immediately.

By mid-2014, though, it was obvious. Chase, not wanting to lose his business, was reluctant to enter treatment. Clark’s hands were tied.

Still, there were periods of sobriety. The weekend before his death, he was sober, if sluggish. Clark remembers asking him to come to church, then saying “you have to start to doing some things” when he declined.

Worried she was too harsh on her fragile son, she stopped by his room Monday morning to apologize. 

“What he said to me was, ‘That’s OK, Mom. I’ll go when I’m feeling better. At least I was clean and sober,’” she said.

That afternoon, a store employee found the 32-year-old unconscious in a vehicle in a New London parking lot. He died three days later, on Thursday, April 7, 2016.

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Clark doesn’t believe in tough love. She had marched to Town Hall to file papers to evict her sons multiple times — she moved to Groton to get away from the drugs, she reasoned.

Each time she recalled the story of parents she knew who learned, not long after they threw their son out, that he had frozen to death.

“I realized the problem was something that he didn’t have any control over and he was really trying,” Clark said. “I’m glad that I didn’t throw him out.”

Clark believes parents should form relationships in which children feel comfortable reaching out for help. She wants people to understand that drug use alters people’s ability to produce endorphins, stifling their energy and happiness.

She talks about Vivitrol, or naltrexone, as a solution she considers better than methadone and Suboxone. One shot of Vivitrol stops a person from craving opioids for a month, during which time he or she ideally can focus on attending meetings and reforming habits.

Knowing the treatment system — one in which private facilities sometimes charge $10,000 a month — will be hard to change, she hopes to see more education among doctors, parents and children alike about the addictive nature of opioids. She encourages research into alternative therapies like acupuncture and yoga, too.

She finds solace in her church family, and in that the opioid crisis is no longer in the closet.

"I don’t know today yet if the kids in school are really connecting those pills with opiates and heroin," Clark said. "We're getting there."

l.boyle@theday.com