"He Is God's Problem Now"

A son bids farewell to his father with a fittingly irreverent obituary

- Cathy Free

WHEN CHARLES BOEHM sat down last October in his Houston home to write his father’s obituary, he was stumped.

“I'd never written an obituary before, so I decided to Google ‘What do you put in an obituary?’” he says. His father, Robert Boehm, had died at age 74 after falling and hitting his head in his Clarendon, Texas, apartment.

Charles, 41, found the usual tips online about including a summary of the person’s life and a list of survivors. Then he stumbled upon an obituary for a man from Centerbrook, Connecticut, which began, “Joe Heller made his last undignified and largely irreverent gesture on Sept. 8, 2019, signing off on a life, in his words, ‘generally well-lived and with few regrets.’ 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.’”

The obituary then informed readers that Heller had left his family with a house full of junk, 135 kgs of birdseed and various dead houseplants.

“I read it, and I thought, That sounds like something my dad would do,” Charles says. “He made a lot of obscene gestures.” Why not make his father’s obituary as funny and unpredictable as he was in life?