It's late at night, after everyone's asleep and the house is quiet, that Darlene Lewis cries.

Two of her three children are dead, victims of the tsunami of heroin addiction that is engulfing the nation.All Lewis and her husband, Herman, in their late 50s and disabled, have left are memories - and the two young grandchildren, Gabriel, 5, and Madison, 2, they are now raising.While Darlene waits until darkness falls to let her tears flow, Herman retreats into his basement "man cave" in the mornings to confront his grief.A life-draining drugDarlene, known as Dolly, a former nurse, and her husband, a former warehouse worker, raised three children in their Northampton home. Ian, now 34; Dustin, who was 30 when he died; and Amber, who was 27 when she died.All three children were close, she says.Dustin was quiet and preferred solitary activities like fishing. Apart from a brief time, he lived at home. Amber was more outgoing, and loved dancing lessons as a child, and later, cheerleading. Eager to begin life as an adult, she left home at 18.Dustin's Facebook page shows him smiling as he holds his now 7-year-old daughter, Alescia. Amber's Facebook page is filled with photos of her children, smiling and clearly well-cared for, and photos of her parents and friends.The social media photos didn't show the pain behind the bright smiles.On Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2014, Dustin jumped from the Coplay-Northampton Bridge, a few blocks from home. His body was recovered the next day from the Lehigh River.Less than a year later, at 9:45 a.m. July 6, Amber posted a picture of Gabriel as a 1-year-old, munching a piece of watermelon."My little love," she captioned it.She was found dead 90 minutes later, at 11:15 a.m.Heroin, Darlene Lewis says, "takes away who you are."Heroin takes a toll"It's been a rough time for our family," the Lewis' goddaughter, Branddi Ziegler Muth says.She's set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to pay for Dustin's and Amber's funerals, and to help the Lewises with the expenses of raising their two grandchildren.Gabriel is autistic. Madison, born addicted, has been with the Lewises from birth.Darlene Lewis needs a knee replacement, but cannot because she can't take the time to recover while caring for Gabriel and Madison."Her health care gets put on hold because she has the little ones," Muth says.She set up GoFundMe site a day or so after Amber's death, not only to pay off the funeral expenses and help the Lewises, but to "raise awareness, maybe held save someone else's family."Muth is still trying to reconcile their deaths."I honestly believe Dustin thought he was doing what was best for everyone else. The night before he died, he told Darlene he didn't want to keep coming in and out of Alescia's life, between bouts of being clean and relapsing. It wasn't fair to her," she says. "The next day, he jumped off Coplay-Northampton bridge."Toxicology reports indicated he had no drugs in his system when he died, Muth says.Darlene Lewis will for the rest of her life replay the last conversation she had with her son."He was depressed, and exhausted from his relentless, and fruitless, efforts to find work," she says. "He said to me 'I can't go back to that living hell I lived in.' "Just got hookedIn his teen years, Dustin "had trouble with marijuana, and went to rehab," Lewis says. From there, he had shoulder surgeries, and was prescribed Percocet for pain. "Ever since then, it snowballed until he told me he was using heroin," she says.Lewis describes Amber as "outgoing, a party girl who sometimes drank.""I never would have thought she'd do heroin because she was so against it when her brother was doing it," Lewis says. "She got hooked just before becoming pregnant with Madison."Amber had moved back in with her parents. She tried methadone, but was unable to resist the craving for heroin. There were stints in rehab, repeating the cycle of using and getting clean."Insurance only covers so much. You go into rehab, then you come out and you're on your own," Muth says. "It tears lives apart. People don't realize when they're using that it doesn't just affect you; it affects everyone around you, the people who love you - your children, your parents, your brothers, your sisters. Everybody."Both Dustin and Amber were in and out of rehab."But when they came out, they hung around with the same people," Muth says. "They would go into rehab, come out, get a job, relapse and get high, go back to rehab, come out, get a job. ...""It's a lifelong issue," she says. "You can't just say 'I went to rehab for 30 days, I'm good.' "So, an exhausted Lewis copes, taking life one day at a time."My faith is a very strong point for me," she says. "I look back on all the paths God has laid out for me. ...," she says, her voice trailing off.MEMORIAL FUNDBranddi Ziegler Muth of Nesquehoning has started a GoFundMe page to raise money to pay for the funerals of Dustin and Amber Lewis, and to help their parents care for Amber's children, Gabriel, 5, and Madison, 2.The Lewis Family Memorial Fund as of Sept. 4 had raised $2,155 from 39 donors."Amber and Dustin struggled with heroin addiction for many years. Although we all have done what we could to be there for them, it just wasn't enough. The hold this drug had on them just was too high," Muth wrote on the page.The page is at

http://www.gofundme.com/yq3kbqs.