N.J. Son's Heroin Death: Parents' Painful Obituary Tells All

Andrew Oswald's big heart stopped beating recently.

The New Jersey man was 23 years old and appeared to be back on the right track. He wanted to turn his dangerous behavior into something positive.

Somewhere in the Scranton, Pennsylvania, area on Jan. 27, Andrew died from an overdose of heroin. His parents had tried repeatedly to get him help, but it was helpless.

Andrew, of Hamilton, had such a "big heart," they said. They thought they had a chance.

"As a child, Andrew was a treasure and was loved deeply, with so much promise, and yet he still died from an overdose," his parents, Andrew and Stephanie, wrote.

His parents ultimately found something they could do: Andrew and Stephanie penned a several-hundred-word obituary that starkly recounted his life, his addiction to heroin and how it ultimately killed him.

Right off the bat, the obituary that appears on the D'Errico Whitehorse Service website dives right into the middle of Andrew's self-destructive life:

"On January 27, 2017 our beautiful son, Andrew, died from an overdose of heroin," the parents wrote. "He was 23 years old."

The parents said they wanted to share his story "in the hope that lives may be saved and his death will not be in vain."

"Addiction is a mental illness," they wrote. "No one plans to be an addict."

This type of obituary tell-all is, perhaps, becoming a trend.

A similar obituary was published recently for an Alabama woman, and last month, a western Pennsylvania mother wrote one for her 20-year-old daughter who was, in her words, "funny and full of life and she was a drug addict."

The stories all seem to follow a similar pattern.

As a child, his parents said, they never envisioned Andrew ending up this way. But addiction, they said, does not discriminate.

"Using heroin once is all that it takes to get hooked; from then on you are playing Russian roulette," they wrote. "This is what happened to Andrew."

They called Andrew "an old soul" who, as a young child, was "filled with curiosity and a great sense of humor."

"He was bright, sensitive, smart, kind, and charming," they said. "His passion was music and he introduced us to a new, wonderful world of sound." He had an amazing talent for writing, they said.

During his middle school years, Andrew started experimenting with drugs, but he told his parents, “this is not for me.”

But then it was.

Andrew eventually got sober, spending 90 days at a Pennsylvania rehab facility and three months in a sober living house. He got a job as a counselor, helping adults and children with developmental disabilities and behavioral health issues, and then moved into an apartment with two of his sober friends.

"He seemed to be thriving until we got a call from a friend telling us he was injecting heroin," the wrote. "We did everything we could to get him to stop, but heroin won the battle.

"The day Andrew died, we died along with him."

You can read the whole obituary here.

D'Errico Whitehorse photo