Why this father didn’t hide his daughter’s heroin overdose in her obituary

He shunned the usual 'died suddenly' explanation

(Tom Parks)

When the father of 24-year-old Molly Parks took on the painful task of writing his daughter's obituary, he made sure her battle with addiction was not hidden away but central to it.

There were promising signs, her family said, that Molly Parks had begun to reclaim her life.

She'd been in and out of rehab three times in the last year, but after the most recent stint, in November, Parks landed a job delivering pizza in Manchester, N.H.

She worked 55 hours a week, trying to save enough money to pay off a used Buick she’d recently purchased using a tax return. After years of battling addictions — first alcohol, then prescription pills, and later heroin — family members hoped she had finally wrestled control of her life away from her demons.

"She was here last Monday and she looked great," her father, Tom Parks, told The Washington Post. "But it’s so hard, of course, and she got sucked back in."

Four days after visiting home, her body was discovered in the bathroom at her job. There was a needle stuck in her arm. Molly Alice Parks was dead at 24.

The next morning, her father wrote about her struggle to stay alive on Facebook:

"My daughter Molly Parks made many good choices in her too short life and she made some bad choices. She tried to fight addiction in her own way and last night her fight came to an end in a bathroom of a restaurant with a needle of heroin.

Her whole family tried to help her win the battle but we couldn’t show her a way that could cure her addiction. We will always love her and miss her. If you have a friend or a relative who is fighting the fight against addiction please do everything you can to be supportive. Maybe for your loved one it’ll help. Sadly for ours it didn’t. I hope my daughter can now find the peace that she looked for [her] on earth."

He later elaborated on this, explaining how damaging 'died suddenly' phrasing can be.

"I see a lot of obituaries from families that are losing twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, and forty-somethings, and they’re all saying they died suddenly," Parks added. "But that’s not the truth, and we know that because we just went through it."

Parks' honesty about his daughter's life highlights that it is not only those who fit the stereotype of a 'junkie' that may be in need of help.

Molly was, her family recalled, brash and witty. She enjoyed theater, fashion and burying her nose in a book — especially Harry Potter. She favored bright red lipstick, played the piano and fell in love with "Gone With the Wind" as a teenager.

"She was smart, entertaining, engaging, all of it," her father told The Post. "People don’t get it. She didn’t look like an addict. She wasn’t what you think of as a 'junkie.'"