David McElroy

If you could write your own obituary, what would it say? Would it just be a standard list of the names, facts and dates of your life? Or would you use it as a chance to admit the things you’d never confessed before?

For 59-year-old Val Patterson, his obit was a chance to confess and a chance to express who he really was. The Utah man died of throat cancer last week and his first-person obit is funny and charming, but it also confesses at least a couple of secrets. (You can read the entire text of the obituary at the end of this article.)

Patterson had to confess to the other electronics engineers that he worked with that he didn’t really earn the Ph.D. from the University of Utah that he had hanging on his wall.

“I really am not a Ph.D.,” said Patterson’s confession. “What happened was that the day I went to pay off my college student loan at the University of Utah, the girl working there put my receipt into the wrong stack, and two weeks later, a PhD diploma came in the mail. I didn’t even graduate, I only had about three years of college credit. In fact, I never did even learn what the letters ‘PhD’ even stood for.”

His other big confession was of a crime he committed when he was 18.

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“I’m really not in a hurry to go home to my wife,” said Jim. “We don’t really understand each other, so I spend most of my time now that I’m retired looking for reasons to get away from home during the day.”

I’d seen Jim before, but we’d never spoken until Tuesday afternoon. You know how older men like to congregate in certain community gathering spots, frequently for breakfast? There are some guys like that who sometimes hang out in the afternoons at a hamburger joint where I often go to write.

Jim normally hangs out with some other older guys who come into this place in the afternoon, but none of his buddies were around. He’s 74 years old, so he’s been retired for years now. I don’t remember how many he said it had been.

Jim is bored. He used to be a partner in a construction supply business that was absorbed by a larger company. He didn’t get rich when the company sold, but he said it was enough for him to retire in style and do whatever he wanted. The only problem is that he had spent his entire life doing things that weren’t especially meaningful — just to arrive at retirement and wonder what he had been doing for all these years.

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Have we become a society that has no regard for human life? Or have we always been that kind of callous society? Are we becoming more civilized over the centuries? Or are we hopelessly fallen savages who are fooling ourselves by pretending to be more civil? I can’t decide.

There’s a game that certain thuggish teens in Chicago play called “Pick ’em out and knock ’em out.” (Maybe it’s played elsewhere, but I’ve never heard of it until now.) Three Chicago teens ran across a 62-year-old man last Tuesday when they decided to randomly play this sick game.

“I think I’m gonna knock out this (expletive),” said the 16-year-old who started it, according to prosecutors. They say he started the video recorder on his cellphone and handed it to a 17-year-old to record the attack. He and an 18-year-old took turns recording the beating.

The three thugs surrounded Delfino Mora, an unemployed, partly disabled man who was in an alley collecting cans for recycling. The 16-year-old asked whether Mora had any money. When Mora didn’t respond, he punched him hard enough to knock the older man down. When his head hit the concrete, there was a loud crack that can be heard on the video recording, according to prosecutors.

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