Joe Heller always wanted to have the last laugh. So
when he died at 82 on Sept. 8, his daughter Monique Heller sought to
provide it by writing a paid obituary in the local paper describing her
father’s inimitably irreverent and preposterous personality. Her humorous tribute was published — online and in print — last week in The Hartford Courant and immediately caught digital fire.
“There wasn’t a road, restaurant or friend’s house in Essex that he
didn’t fall asleep on or in,” Ms. Heller wrote, adding that her father
“left his family with a house full of crap, 300 pounds of birdseed and
dead houseplants that they have no idea what to do with.”
When young men
sought to pick his daughters up for a date, Mr. Heller would first run
their license plates and check their vehicles for safety, including an
inspection of how worn their tires were.
When
suitors entered the home, he made sure to be cleaning one of his guns,
and that his collection of shotguns and harpoons were clearly on
display, Ms. Heller said.
On Friday
morning, a Navy honor guard — long known as the Antique Veterans
Organization because of its aging membership — delivered a rifle salute,
played taps and performed a ceremonial flag-folding ceremony.
The
honor guard’s commander, Joseph Barry, admitted that Mr. Heller would
have “dropped a few F-bombs” in declaring the whole thing superfluous.
After
the burial, Ms. Heller held the American flag presented in her father’s
honor and said perhaps the obit had struck a chord with regular people.
“People like my dad are the backbone of this country,” she said, “and I think the world wants to hear their stories.’’