I used to work for a tech college and set up workshops for our students on a variety of topics. I set up the speaker for the first workshop and went in for minor outpatient surgery earlier in the week. There were complications and I wound up in the hospital for the rest of the week. My supervisor introduced the speaker and told me when I returned to work a few days later that it had gone well.
A couple months later, I had a very strange phone call from the workshop speaker, who thought the thank you note I had sent him several weeks before, was written by someone else at the school – and what a ghoulish thing for the school to do, since he had read in the paper that I was dead. Turns out, my family, my ex-husband’s family, and some of my colleagues had seen the obituary of a woman who was close to the same age as me, with the same name as me, who had died from complications from surgery, published in the newspaper the day I left the hospital, and nobody had said a word. It took a stranger who questioned the etiquette behind sending thank you notes from the grave to fill me in on my apparent demise. ~ Emery Lamb
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