“Mary Anne chose to pass into the eternal love of God”
Born and raised in Virginia—often a swing state, we might add—Mary Anne Alfriend Noland, a wife, mother, grandmother and 1970 graduate of the University of Virginia School of Nursing, up and died just six months before the 2016 presidential election, timing her obituary references as an extreme aversion to the choice of candidates.
And just in case this sounds maybe a little too much like poetic justice to be an actual obit, please know that Mrs. Noland’s obituary has passed the Snopes test and been deemed legit.
“If someone wants to contact me, that would be nice”
Clearly, Mrs. Mary “Pink” Mullaney was a giver of reliably pithy life advice, because when the widow died in 2013, one (or more) of her many loved ones crafted an obituary for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal that featured what we can only guess to be a mere handful of Pink’s chestnuts.
In addition to the above-quoted message-in-a-bottle-style advice, Mullaney had a suggestion for dealing with uninvited critters trespassing in your out-buildings: “If a possum takes up residence in your shed, grab a barbecue brush to coax him out. If he doesn’t leave, brush him for 20 minutes and let him stay.”
As for why you might be craving a chicken sandwich after church, it might be because Pink advised her loved ones to bring one to Sunday service and give it to a “homeless friend” after mass.
“Tell them that check is in the mail”
“Waffle House lost a loyal customer on April 30, 2013” begins the New York Times obituary of Antonia “Toni” Larroux of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. And it only gets more amusing from there. Larroux’s children from her marriage to Jean F. Larroux Jr., Jean Larroux III and Hayden Hoffman, decided to honor their mother with an obituary that reads like a standup comedian’s tight-five.
“The family started to write a normal obit,” Larroux III told HuffPost, before realizing that their mom wouldn’t want it that way. Some of the obituary’s greatest hits include a suggestion that Larroux III and Hoffman might be illegitimate (we assume from the context that folks had been speculating for years) and a spoiler alert to the effect that Toni and her sisters were not, in fact, natural blondes.
“Your father is a very sick man”
When Connecticut native Joe Heller, a chemist and former Yale Law School librarian, died in 2019 at the age of 82, he left behind a legacy of humor—literally, in the form of three witty daughters. They begin their dad’s Hartford Courant obituary as follows: “Joe Heller made his last undignified and largely irreverent gesture on September 8, 2019, signing off on a life, in his words, ‘generally well-lived and with few regrets.'” They go on to say, “When the doctors confronted his daughters with the news last week that ‘Your father is a very sick man,’ in unison they replied, ‘You have no idea.'”
He was a lifelong prankster, according to the obit, and when Heller was born “God thankfully broke the mold.”
“She loved [her family] more than anything else in the world, except …”
Jan Lois Lynch of Boston was a single mother who loved her family, including her four sons and eight grandkids—albeit maybe not quite as much as some of life’s other pleasures. When she died in 2018 at age 75, her loved ones authored this good-hearted Courier Press obituary, specifying exactly what those other pleasures were, and we quote: “the New England Patriots, the Boston Red Sox, Tom Brady, cold Budweiser, room temperature Budweiser, cigarettes, dogs, mopeds, clam chowder, boating, fishing, Florida, the Atlantic Ocean, grouper sandwiches, adventures, road trips, the beach, Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football, fall foliage, airplane food, ingrown toenails, the O.J. chase and the O.J. trial—in that exact order.”
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