Obituary Man Wrote Before His Own Death Goes Viral

Gary Wolfelt, 72, died earlier this month in a small plane crash in Ohio. Per FOX 59, citing the man’s widow, he built the plane himself — a 17-year ordeal — and was the only passenger.

While he didn’t quite know how he’d die when he wrote his tongue-in-cheek obituary, Wolfelt acknowledged just how lucky he was to survive so many near-misses with death throughout his long — and, seemingly, very fulfilling — life.

“Hello. I am Gary. I am completely dead now. I am surprised that it took this long to happen,” he bluntly began his obituary, before recalling the “several close calls throughout my lifetime.”

“I guess that I was just lucky that something didn’t get me long before now. I had a long series of events and mishaps that looking back should have killed me long ago,” he claimed.

Of his close calls, Wolfelt said he got hit in the head with a fly ball when he was in grade school, before his sister’s horse kicked him in the gut. “Any higher and my heart probably would have stopped … any lower and I probably would have been singing soprano for the rest of my life,” he quipped. He said he was also hit by a car in his 30s — his fault — before, in his 40s, a building he was tearing down “came crashing down around me and a large brick chimney just missed falling on me by about 10 feet.”

“By now I am beginning to think that there must not be any more room in heaven or hell for me and so I was just stuck in purgatory for a while longer,” he added.

In his 50s, he continued, he was knocked down nineteen stairs by a safe that landed on top of him — calling that incident “the worst,” before thanking “pain killing drugs.” Then, in his 60s, he fell off scaffolding and cracked his head. That fall, however, turned out to be “fortunate” — as a doctor’s visit for it led to a prostate cancer diagnosis. The early detection allowed it to be treatable, initially, before he had to have his prostate removed in his 70s … leading to “an internal leak that nearly killed me.”

“I cannot tell you here what sort of event actually killed me as I wrote this obituary before I was completely dead. Someone else will have to fill in the details later on I guess,” he wrote, before going on to apologize to anyone he “might have offended or mistreated” through his life, admitting to be “far from a perfect human.”

Referring to wife Esther, he got a little more sentimental, saying, “It is not likely that many men have had it as good as I have had it at home. I was well fed and well loved from the start to finish.” Saying their home was one filled with dogs and not children, he wrote that, “Hopefully if there is a life after death, I will end up with Esther and all of our dogs in a sunny field of tall grass with music playing all around me.”

He also listed their marriage as one of his “most important accomplishments,” before thanking “those of you who loved me while I was here on Earth … and I appreciate you letting me love you right back.”

“Good bye and Peace. I am hanging up now,” he concluded his post. In one of two postscripts, he also explained why he didn’t want a funeral — writing, ” I don’t want people coming by to look at me all dressed up and stretched out in an expensive box looking as bad as I will probably look in a completely dead condition.”

In lieu of flowers, he told friends and family to instead “keep the money and take yourself out for a nice dinner or do something nice for someone else.” He suggested they later have a party on his behalf, with a “full size stand up cardboard cutout of me” at the event — which, he joked, could be used “for a dart board afterwards.”

Read the full obit here.