Addiction drains life out of body and soul

The pretty blonde appears cheerful and smiling, healthy and happy in a photo montage of her life.

Snapshot: A young Monica and her mother schussing down a ski hill.

Snapshot: Monica wearing a high school graduation gown and an I-did-it grin.

Snapshot: A thoughtful Monica reading a storybook to her young son and niece.

The disc doesn't include pictures of the decrepit Monica. The one with hollow cheeks and wrinkles unbecoming her age. The one with ugly sores. The one whose bones protrude from her sallow skin. The one her family could hardly recognize. The one they don't want to remember. The one they can't forget.

Families don't put those kinds of images on a funeral DVD.

Despite some struggles — her parents' divorce, pregnant at 16, bouts of depression, weight gain — Monica Baird seemingly had it all together.

The 22-year-old single mother was sarcastically witty and full of laughter. She doted on her preschool-age son. She wrote in a poem, "I didn't know I was capable of feeling so much before I was a mom."

She didn't mind pitching in. She helped her sister and brother-in-law landscape their yard. She had finished her prerequisites and was on the waiting list for the Salt Lake Community College nursing program. She aspired to be a doctor.

That was before methamphetamine.

Addiction drained the life out of her body and soul. She carried a scant 100 pounds on her 5-foot-6-inch frame. She turned irritable, angry and mean. She sent her son out to play alone so he could learn "more responsibility." She harshly scolded and grounded him when he wandered too far. He was 4.

She lost her job as a scrub tech at a hospital. She was evicted from her apartment. She jacked cars for meth money.

Her family didn't know her anymore. The daughter, the sister, the mom they knew wasn't capable of so much unfeeling.

In late October, Monica's druggie boyfriend nearly strangled her to death in a sleepless rage. She fled and desperately tried to check herself into a women's detox center at 3 a.m. on a Sunday but was turned away for lack of a bed.

A week later, on Halloween night, she died of heart failure, three days shy of her 23rd birthday. She left behind a 5-year-old son. She had used meth for about a year.

"Her addiction devastated our family, and we are all reeling from the shock waves that it has created," said older sister Margaux Lodge, a Salt Lake-area sales representative. "It's especially hard that we never even got to say goodbye to her. She just died all skin and bones, like a neglected animal left to fend for itself in the wild, and there was nothing we could do."