Bill Harris was preparing the body of an 18-year-old high school student for an unimaginable moment last year when he noticed six words scribbled in ink on the palm of one hand: “Born a king. Died a slave.”

The moment was the young man’s funeral.

And the slavemaster — the Pennsylvania funeral director said, was opioid addiction.

“I think he knew he was going to die in that moment,” Harris said, his voice suddenly trembling. “A slave to addiction.”

People dying young is part of a new, heart-wrenching norm for funeral directors such as Harris. Men and women who have spent much of their adult lives arranging funerals for the aging and retired suddenly have found themselves doing the same for a generation of young lives being stolen by powerful drugs like heroin and Fentanyl.

Matt Decort understands better than most.

The Decort Funeral Home owner is 33 years old — just a few years shy of the age of the average overdose victim last year in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, 50 miles east of Pittsburgh.

Decort said he has watched onetime classmates, old friends and neighbors struggle with addiction.

And sometimes they’ve ended up inside a casket in his funeral parlor.

“When it’s people you grew up with…it hits close to home,” Decort said.

‘The wrong thing’

Decort said he tries to erase the stigmas that still follow overdose victims — that they all are impoverished, lonely and down on their luck.

“Every drug-related funeral I’ve had, they were people who came from great families,” Decort said. “It’s not as simple as people think.”

People from all walks of life struggle with addictions — whether it’s alcoholism, hoarding or heroin, he said.

It doesn’t mean those addicts were bad people.

“They just got caught up in the wrong thing,” Decort said.

And too often “the wrong thing” wins out, Hoffman Funeral Home co-owner Chris Hoffman said.

“A lot of times, it’s a young addict just out of rehab,” Hoffman said. “They think they are clean — and their family thinks they are clean — and all of a sudden they are back to using again.

“They think they can just go back to the dose they were using.”

But this time, their bodies cannot take it, Hoffman said.

Sometimes the young embrace the misguided notion that they are invincible, Hoffman said.

Drugs such as heroin and Fentanyl beg to differ — and they don’t discriminate, William T. Hindman said.

Many times, drugs are claiming people well into middle-age — “people you would never think have this kind of problem. But they do,” Hindman, whose family operates multiple funeral homes central Pennsylvania, said.

“It’s tragic,” he said.

They’re not alone

Pockets of North America are reeling in the wake of a sudden surge in fatal overdoses.

In British Columbia, Canada, a funeral association sent bulletins to its membership, urging funeral directors to begin carrying the overdose reversal drug naloxone.

The group cited fears that mourning addicts attending an overdose victim’s funeral might decide to numb their pain with deadly drugs.

In Dayton, Ohio, the Montgomery County Coroners office had to temporarily rent refrigerated trucks to store bodies last year.

But the count kept piling up in the 500,000-population county.

Earlier this month, after the overdose death count climbed to 163 cases in 33 days, Montgomery County Coroner Kenneth Betz turned to a Dayton-area funeral parlor to temporarily store four bodies, the New York Times reported.

“We now call funeral homes immediately” to ask if there’s space available, Betz told the newspaper. 

Lost generation

In Wisconsin, a local funeral home posted billboards on the city of Fond du Lac’s main street after staff there became frustrated about burying “too many” young men and women due to drug overdoses.

That Wisconsin undertaker displayed a funeral hearse and a grim message: “Side effect of heroin: Your vehicle changes.”

There was advice, too: “Be aware. Speak up. We can wait,” the billboard showed.

Funeral home operators across the nation are taking notice, according to Robert Biggins, a spokesman for the National Funeral Directors Association.

“It’s probably topic No. 1 right now,” Biggins, a 40-year veteran of the industry who operates a funeral home in Rockland, Massachusetts, said.

“We’re seeing cases where a funeral home might be seeing a family two or three times because there are siblings involved.”

And, somehow, it just keeps growing worse, he said.

“It’s a tragedy that’s taking away a good portion of a generation,” Biggins said.

Sudden death

Younger adults don’t always make advance arrangements for their funerals.

When death comes suddenly, families are left to pull together enough money to handle funeral arrangements, Harris said.

It has become more common for families to turn to cremation as a lower-cost alternative to traditional burial.

Visitations and funeral services are skipped, Harris said.

Sometimes, families struggle to afford anything.

“A lot of times, addiction has already had an financial impact on these families. They’ve had to put up with someone stealing and cheating to support their habit,” Biggins said. “Then, suddenly, they are gone — and there’s a funeral to pay for.

“That’s why you’re seeing an explosion of these GoFundMe (website) pages, people reaching out for help,” he said. “It’s not that they don’t want to help. They can’t.”

‘I’ve buried children’

Harris has been in the funeral service business for 40 years. Like many colleagues, he’s handled burial arrangements for thousands of people.

Death has become part of his daily life.

But Harris found himself heartsick and shaken in late December while preparing a five-month old child for its funeral — the result of her parents’ overdoses days earlier. Their deaths left the infant alone in a cradle for days before she died, too, investigators said at the time.

“I’ve been in this business a long time,” Harris said. “I’ve buried children before. But I just couldn’t stop thinking about that baby’s final moments.”

Like the families they serve, funeral directors are searching for answers to difficult questions.

“The toughest part is that there’s no answer for this epidemic,” Decort said. “There’s no end in sight.”

Hurst writes for the Johnstown, Pennsylvania Tribune Democrat.