“The Will”

There’s a whole lot of storytelling going on all over the world, as my mail continually indicates. Here’s a “new” story that was first reported to me in a letter of December 3, 1986, from a Harvard physics professor. He heard it from his sister, who said it happened to a friend’s mother’s friend. But I came across virtually the same story with just a few variations in details in Cindy Adams’s New York Post gossip column on January 28, 1987.

A woman is shopping on Madison Avenue in New York City, when she needs to use a restroom. Finding none in any of the stores, she enters a funeral home—the only other public place nearby—and uses the rest room there.

On the way out, she passes a darkened room decorated with flowers. In the center of the room is an open coffin with a dead man’s (or woman’s) body inside. There are no visitors in sight.

She feels a little guilty about using the facilities on the sly, so she steps into the room and signs the guest book.

Not long afterward she gets a call from the dead man’s (or woman’s) lawyer (or the state attorney general), who says that the deceased, a person of great wealth, had provided $ 10,000 in his (or her) will to whoever attended his funeral. The woman had been the only person to show up.

I received three readers’ responses to the column containing the above material. One was simply a clipping of my column from a local newspaper with a red-inked correction of the phrase “for whomever attended his funeral.” I wrote back explaining that this mistake was the result of an editor’s alteration of my original wording, which read as shown above. I do understand the point—that the object of the preposition “for” (or “to”) is the whole phrase “whoever attended,” though it always surprises me that people read the daily paper so closely as to catch such errors.

The second letter came from a woman in Maryland, who sent me the complete name and address of the woman from New York who had told her “The Will,” including exactly to whom the incident had occurred (a friend of her friend), as well as the name of the funeral parlor. The actual amount of money received, she said, was only $1,000. I wrote immediately to the New York woman for further information and got no reply. This proves nothing, by the way.

Letter number 3 about “The Will” came from a woman in Wisconsin who said that she had heard a slightly different version of the story some fifteen years ago while teaching school on a banana plantation in Honduras. (Sometimes I wonder if people make up these things.)

There, she said, an English botanist, whose name she supplied, related an experience of his father, who had been an Anglican priest. He said that after the funeral service for one of his father’s parishioners, who was an old and “rather unpleasant man,” only one mourner followed the coffin to the gravesite: “He was immediately invited back to the solicitor’s office and told that the old man’s will stated that whoever came to the grave, other than priest or lawyer, was to receive his entire and considerable estate.”

I’m not sure just what to think about this story, except that it encourages me to put in an appearance at any poorly attended funeral, for whoever is dead, of which I may happen to become aware. (If that sentence is wrong, it’s my editor’s fault.)