When I was 14 my father died of a heroin overdose. I am only child and ever since I was 7 or 8 I knew about his addiction. He was the younger of two children and we lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He was a man with a good job, extremely brilliant and a very humble person.

I had to deal with things that only a person who has gone through this can imagine, even at that short age. When my mother and my father were together my father used to beat her up due to the effects of that garbage, and I had to witness all of that but at that time I didn't understand what was going on because I was too little to understand.

Then I started to grow up and my parents got divorced when I was 6 years old. I was emotionally devastated. Sometimes I had to shower him up because he was so wasted that he couldn't get up from bed. He stole money from all of us to get some of the poison that had him possessed for years and years.

One day I found him shooting heroin in his veins, and a couple of months later he failed a drug test in his job, he went into treatment and he decided to move away from the house of my grandfather to my aunt's house in Cidra, Puerto Rico. He also asked for a trade to work in other place in the company so that he could start to change his life. He bought a new car and suddenly, he was a new person.

One day he decided to go hang out with some friends that used to work with him and short after that he decided to visit us. He looked sad, he said goodbye to all of us and then the very next day he was found in Santurce, PR. inside his car, dead of a heroin overdose. He was only 39 years old.