Like millions of grandparents across the country, Marci Worthington is raising the child her own could not.

A heroin addiction left her child unable to care for her two young daughters, and the children fell — as they often do — to their grandparents.

An epidemic of opioid abuse in Connecticut and throughout the country has killed parents, and left others incarcerated, homeless or barred from parenting.

The children left behind are often raised by relatives, typically grandparents, said Ana Beltran, an adviser to Generations United, a national advocacy group for intergenerational families.

Citing census data, Generations United estimates more than 20,000 grandparents in Connecticut are responsible for grandchildren living with them.

In July, President Donald J. Trump signed legislation that created a task force to help grandparents raising their grandchildren. One of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, said that in 2015, 8 percent of all newborns in her state were born to women addicted to opioids or other drugs.

“The opioid crisis,” Collins said, “has called on grandparents in epic numbers.”

Interviews with about a dozen service providers and experts offered a complicated picture of how surging opioid abuse has affected parenting in Connecticut. Most said anecdotally, they’ve seen an uptick in grandparents reaching out for help raising their grandkids, often citing their child’s drug use as the driving factor.

OPIOID CRISIS

But without statistics, it’s difficult to pin down whether more grandparents are actually caring for grandchildren because of their child’s addiction issues, or if people are simply speaking more openly about drug issues in their families, with the opioid crisis declared a full-blown public health emergency.

“It’s by no means a new problem,” said Paul Knierim, the state’s probate court administrator. “And without hard numbers, it’s hard to say, ‘What’s growing awareness, versus what’s a growing number of incidents?’”

Still, Knierim, who oversees a probate system that adjudicates hundreds of drug-related custody disputes each year, estimates a quarter of the courts’ guardianship cases stem from opioid abuse.

The percentage of children in state care living with relatives or friends — “kinship care,” as the Department of Children and Families calls it — has doubled from 21 percent in 2011 to 42 percent this year.

A shift in DCF policy, away from nonrelative placements and toward kinship care, is partly behind the increase. But service providers also linked the uptick to spiraling opioid abuse.

“I’d say a little over half the grandparents we work with got custody of their grandchildren because their children are on drugs,” said Yolanda Ortiz, a program manager for the Community Renewal Team.

Ortiz oversees 24 subsidized townhouses in Hartford for CRT’s Grandparents Raising Grandchildren program. The apartments are always full, Ortiz said. Drug abuse keeps the waiting list taut.

‘A GROWING EPIDEMIC’

“It’s a growing epidemic, for sure,” she said. “The drugs are out of control right now.”

In 2017, 1,040 people died of overdoses in Connecticut, a nearly 200 percent increase in a five-year period.

About 25 people in every 100,000 died of an opioid overdose in the state in 2016, nearly double the national average, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Robert Killian, a former probate judge in Hartford, said before today’s opioid scourge, losing custody of your child was “the ultimate insult” and often enough to push addicted parents toward treatment.

“That, in of itself, was enough to convince them to get better,” he said. But today, with many of the parents entangled in the probate system addicted to heroin or prescription painkillers, “there really is no return from the abyss you’re staring into,” Killian said.

“So thank God for the grandparents.”

Many in Worthington’s position never become the child’s formal guardians, making it difficult to enroll them in school or manage their health care, said Beltran, of Generations United.

Grandparents recognized by the state as the child’s foster parents are entitled monthly parenting-assistance payments, but those who take in their grandkids informally are not.

The probate courts have a program, dubbed the Grandparents Fund, that disburses small grants to low-income guardians who are not receiving foster-parent assistance.

“We can give them a few hundred bucks to help them set up a household — to buy a mattress, maybe,” Killian said.

FINDING SUPPORT

There are dozens of support groups in Connecticut for grandparents like Worthington. They meet in the evenings mostly, at senior centers and libraries and churches.

The group at the Plainville Senior Center has grown so large it can no longer accept new members, said Ronda Guberman, the center’s assistant director.

Finances weigh heaviest on their minds, she said. Many are too old to return to work. Some were living in senior housing when they took in their grandkids, and had to move out. But Guberman also hears, mingled with worries about money, a sense of guilt at having raised a child with addiction struggles.

“It’s, ‘Where did I go wrong?’” she said. “And now they have to do it all over again.”

Worthington doesn’t belong to a support group; between the baby and her three school-age sons, she doesn’t have time. But at the Enfield day care where the child stays while her grandmother is at work, Worthington has heard three other babies are being raised by grandparents because of their parents’ drug use.

“We’re in the same boat, but sometimes I think their boat isn’t as bad because their girls aren’t homeless,” she said. “Most of them live somewhere. They’re holding it together a little bit.”

Worthington doesn’t feel sorry for herself. She had thought by 47, she’d be spending less time parenting and more time with her husband. But she’s thankful her granddaughter is living with family and not in a foster home. She only cries when she sees people her daughter’s age going to college, graduating, starting careers.

“I start crying for five minutes,” she said. “And then I got to get back to real life.”