There were promising signs, her family says, that Molly Parks had begun to reclaim her life.
Shed 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 shed 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 Post from his home in Saco, Maine. But its 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 at24.
The next morning, her father turned to Facebook and began writing about his childs struggle to stay alive:
My daughter Molly Parksmade 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 couldnt 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 itll help. Sadly for ours it didnt. I hope my daughter can now find the peace that she looked for [her] on earth.
The Facebook posteventually turned into a fiercely candid obituary .
I see a lot of obituaries from families that are losing twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, and forty-somethings, and theyre all saying they died suddenly, Parks told The Post on Wednesday, shortly before leaving for the Old Orchard Beach Funeral Home, for visitation.But thats not the truth, and we know that because we just went through it.
The obituary has resonated online; Parks said hes heard from people all over the country. Many of them, Parks said, thanked him for sharing the story of his familys struggle with a daughters addiction.
This week, Manchester police said theyve seen 24 possible drug overdose deaths in 2015, according to the New Hampshire Union Leader . In that same period, the paper notes, police have responded to 163 calls involving overdoses.
Eighty-eight percent of those calls, according to the Union Leader, involved heroin or the narcotic pain reliever Fentanyl.
Authorities blame heroin laced with Fentanyl for a rash of overdoses in New England in recent years, according to the Boston Globe .
Parks told The Post that his daughters death was likely no different.
Its probably the Fentanyl that got her, he said, fighting back tears, not the heroin.
In the obituary, family members pointed out that Molly Parks had nearly overdosed on another occasion. Though she would eventually succumb to her addiction, the obituary underscores that for those who knew Parks, addiction was a single piece of a much larger personality.
She 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 dont get it. She didnt look like an addict. She wasnt what you think of as a junkie.
And that, Parks said, is why the family decided to wage its final battle against her addiction using the only weapon it had left: transparency.
Even if one person reads that and says, Oh my God, that can be me, and stops if we could save one life we could be happy, Tom Parks said. That would mean that Molly didnt die in vain.
He added: My daughter was a good kid and she had a heart of gold.
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