Families hope candid obituaries will spare others anguish of addiction

"I talked to Kristen about it while she was laying in bed," Wilkinson said. "I said, 'Kristen, do you want me to tell your story?' and she said yes. I said, 'Do you want me to take your picture and show it?' and she said yes."

Seventeen years of heroin use left Kristen Bachner with abscesses up and down her arms and legs. In February, she had open heart surgery to replace a heart valve destroyed by infection. She was 30.

"She swore she would never use again," Wilkinson said.

"She went back to using pretty quick."

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Five months later, she was back in the hospital with arm and neck pain. Blood clots and infection affected her cervical spine. At 31 she was paralyzed from the neck down. Surgery would likely kill her. If it didn't, she'd still be a quadriplegic.

She knew she was dying.

"It's hard to hear your daughter say that she's petrified, scared of dying, and tell her not to be scared," Wilkinson said.

She turned her grief outward – for both herself and Kristen.

"I think she would want teenagers – people that are using now, people that are friends and family, people that love addicts – to remember... the addict is not the same person once they do that drug," she said. "They are still a person. They call them a junkie, but they're still a person. They don't mean this."

"I wanted to tell people about her and break the stigma of heroin addicts," Wilkinson said. "She grew up in a happy home – middle class, went to Disney World with me and her brother. We had many happy Christmases together. She played basketball. She had people that loved her very, very much."

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On Legacy.com, editor Stephen Segal noted the shift in attitude, which has led to a pushback against the stigma of addiction.

"More and more often, the families of those who die from addiction are choosing to tell those stories publicly, in grief, but without shame, hoping that a true recounting of these personal demons might help others find a different path," he wrote.

Wilkinson said some have called her brave for sharing the intimate details of Kristen's disease not just in her obituary, but across social media as well.

"I don't feel like I'm brave," she said. "I just feel like I wanted to tell her story and tell them that this girl could have been anybody's daughter. She was my daughter, and her dad's daughter. And we loved her."

Segal said the honest obituaries are aimed at dismantling a remaining stigma that can be detrimental to recovery.

"There's this dangerous idea that's grabbed hold of the popular consciousness over the years that drug addicts are a whole separate category of people," Segal wrote.

Wilkinson once felt the same.

"I used to feel the way that other people felt at first – that, you know, they're junkies, and why can't they overcome this? What is wrong with them that they can't overcome this?" she said. "Now I finally see how hard it is."

She said she was open with most of her close family and some close friends about Kristen's addiction, which consumed more than a decade of her life.

Families left behind, particularly parents, are finding that addiction is frighteningly nondiscriminatory.

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"Well-off, poor, black, white — it doesn't matter," said Mark Lancellotti. "Big families, small families, older people, younger people — it doesn't matter. It's just so random, so random to the point that it's all encompassing."

Jones said she has several friends whose children suffer from addiction, and Zack lost friends to the disease as well. She faced others who believed Zack's addiction was a choice.

"I used to say if I had a child with brain cancer, at least I'd have sympathy," she said.

He hated his addiction, she said.

In a letter he wrote to a family friend in the aftermath of an overdose and stint in rehab, he said he felt trapped.

"I feel like I'm wandering in the dark and everyone is asking if I saw a light after all this but I am still living completely in dark," he wrote. "I am scared and don't know what to do, please don't share this with my mom, it will scare her."

Wilkinson said Kristen hated what she'd become.

"I think she meant it every time she'd say she didn't want to live her life like this," Wilkinson said. "Her sister asked her before she died ... 'Kristen, what if you knew you were going to die in five years. What if you knew that and you were still addicted?' Kristen said, 'I don't think I'd want to live five more years if I'm addicted.'"