#40 A Fake Obituary Made Real
I took a hard news/soft news journalism class in college where one of the assignments was to write an obituary for one of my grandparents. (The professor told us to write it on a deceased grandparent, but if all of your grandparents were still alive we had to choose one. In my case, all of my grandparents were alive.) I procrastinated the assignment until the night before it was due because it seemed like a dumb assignment.
Scramming for an easy grandparent to write about, I gave my mom a call and asked her for some basic biographical information about my maternal grandfather, who was still alive.
As we were talking about my grandpa’s career, my mom couldn’t recall the name of one of the companies he worked at. She lectured me about waiting until the last minute to write the assignment because it was late – 10:30 pm my grandfather’s time. However, she said she would give him a call to see if he was still awake and able to answer that question once my assignment was due the following morning.
When my mom called my grandfather, my grandma answered the phone in a panic. My grandmother frantically explained that the paramedics had just arrived and were performing CPR on my grandfather because he had stopped breathing and passed out. My mom was able to stay on the phone with my grandmother until they took my grandfather to the hospital, where he was declared dead.
In the time my mom and I had been talking on the phone about my grandfather’s “obituary,” he was dying (out of the blue, at that. He had been otherwise healthy considering his age). We ended up using the obituary I wrote for that writing assignment as his actual obituary. Still freaks me out when I think about the timing.
Credit: sm127