"...apparantly, I have passed away."

[SpacemanSpiff]

You have to love creative obituaries. This one was in the Richmond newspaper today:

http://www.richmond.com/obituaries/arti ... fb341.html

It opens thusly:

"It pains me to admit it, but apparently, I have passed away. Everyone told me it would happen one day but that's simply not something I wanted to hear, much less experience. But you don't always get what you want in life."

After a long list of thing that have happened in her life, she says: "And if you don't believe it, just ask me. Oh wait, I'm afraid it's too late for questions. Sorry."

It's a rather clever and entertaining obit.

[themanintheseersuckersuit]

Very good

[Estonut]

Many sources are saying that she wrote it herself (as it reads). She didn't.
http://www.richmond.com/news/local/arti ... 25edf.html

Also, her family stole the part that is getting the attention:
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/timesu ... =174524066&

[Vandal]

And it looks like there's no spell checker "on the other side"...

[silvercamaro]

I was greatly disappointed to discover that Mrs. McElhaney's obit was largely plagiarized. (Esto's second link will take you to what I presume to be the original.) Not only was the approach "borrowed," but entire sentences and sentiments in several sections were reproduced word for word. I certainly don't hold the deceased responsible, but if her daughter was working on it for six months before the mother died, she had plenty of time to think about ways to capture the spirit of the original without copying Mrs. Phillips' obit and without the excuse of immediate grief.

As somebody who made my living (such as it was) at several periods of my life as a freelance writer, I detest plagiarism. In fact, I confess that I still hold a grudge against a better-known writer for having stolen the last paragraph of a piece that I had submitted 20 years earlier. (The "borrower" in this case had been the youthful assistant to the editor of a small and short-lived humor magazine to which I had submitted.) The most charitable interpretation I can muster is that, over the years, the plagiarist simply had forgotten how those words entered his subconcious and began to believe that they were his own. It's more likely, of course, that he figured the odds would be long that I ever would see his short piece and, if I did, wouldn't do much about it. He was half right.

[SpacemanSpiff]

Sad to hear about this being mostly plagiarized.

Even sadder is that this wasn't a cheap ad. Knowing how much I paid for my parents' ads in the same paper a few years back, this was easily a $700 to $1000 ad.