Breakout help

I’m making a breakout/arkanoid game. I have the ball moving and everything but I can’t for the life of me get the bricks to disappear. The brick/ball collision is working fine, as when they collide the brick disappears, but when you die, the brick comes back. I attached the fla so i could explain this. At “waiting”, it first loads up the bricks. After this, when you click, the ball launches up and is able to collide with the red brick in the “level” movie clip. When you die, the main timeline is brought back to “waiting” in order to let you reshoot the ball and play again. After your initial shot, instead of “level1”, you’re brought to “level1continue”, basically saying this is your next shot. What i want is for the brick to disappear and stay gone, even if you die. I tried doing this with a variable “dead” but was unsuccessful. Any ideas on what I could do?