One of Charles Boehm’s last memories of his father is when he nearly burned his tent down during a family camping trip, then spent the rest of the day swearing about it like a sailor.

“A nice man, he was. A pure speaker, he was not,” Boehm told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

When Robert Adolph Boehm died on Oct. 6, at age 74, his son decided to honour his memory by writing an obituary as chaotic, irreverent and expletive-laden as his father was in life. 

Not only did it feel like a fitting tribute, he says, but it’s also brought him some much-needed levity and a sense of community during a very difficult time.

‘The world is just a lonelier place’

The obituary, posted online by Robertson Funeral Directors, opens with a bang.

“Robert Adolph Boehm, in accordance with his lifelong dedication to his own personal brand of decorum, muttered his last unintelligible and likely unnecessary curse on October 6, 2024, shortly before tripping backward over ‘some stupid mother**ing thing’ and hitting his head on the floor,” it begins.

The asterisks, Charles says, were the funeral home’s doing.

While Charles makes light of the tragedy in the obit, in reality, his father’s sudden and unexpected death turned his life upside down.

Dianne Boehm, Charles’ mother and Robert’s wife, died just eight months ago, he said. The loss was “like an amputation” for his father after nearly six decades of marriage.

“It’s a colder world now without, you know, your parents in it. I’m now the oldest generation,” Charles said. “The world is just a lonelier place.”

As with any death, Robert’s generated a long list of chores and paperwork to be done in the midst of grief. Writing his obituary, Charles said, started to feel like just one more thing on a seemingly endless to-do list.

So he did what many of us do when we’re feeling stuck. “I looked up online what goes in an obituary,” he said.

One of the advice articles he found linked to another viral and comical 2019 obituary for Joe Heller of Centerbrook, Conn., which opened with a line about the deceased having made his “last undignified and largely irreverent gesture.”

“When I read that, I immediately started to chuckle and I was like, you know what? That reminds me of my dad,” he said.  “A lot of other people took him seriously. But any time I remember him, he was always joking around.”

Robert, his obituary notes, was born in Winters, Texas in 1950, “after which God immediately and thankfully broke the mold and attempted to cover up the evidence.”

He somehow managed to avoid the Vietnam War draft, which his obit notes “was probably for the best, as when taking up shooting as a hobby in his later years, he managed to blow not one, but two holes in the dash of his own car on two separate occasions.”

It concludes: “We have all done our best to enjoy/weather Robert’s antics up to this point, but he is God’s problem now.”

A love letter to his father’s hometown

The obituary has been shared thousands of times on Facebook and is generating “overwhelmingly positive” comments from all over the world, Charles said. 

“It’s like people are with me. Everybody’s remembering my dad the way I remembered him, and that makes the world a better place,” he said. 

His wife and kids, he says, have taken to teasing him about his newfound fame, bowing reverently in his presence and joking that they’ll soon have to pay a fee to spend time with him.

“It’s definitely taking some of the weight off of having to deal with all of the negatives about this,” he said.

Another good piece of obituary advice he found online suggested writing as if it was a letter to a loved one. So he decided to pen his father’s obituary as if he was addressing the people of Clarendon, Texas, where his parents spent their final years, and were well-loved.

“Over the last eight months since my mom passed, my dad, like I said, he was grieving very, very hard, kind of hit rock bottom in a couple of ways, and they picked up the slack when I wasn’t there,” he said.

Neighbours fed and walked Robert’s dogs while he was in hospital. A local mechanic noticed his tire was blown out, so he towed the car overnight, replaced the tire, and dropped it back off, all free of charge. 

His parents, he says, didn’t have much money, so he set up the GoFundMe page “Honoring Robert Adolph Boehm,” to cover the cost of his funeral, with any extra going back into the community.

“They did all of the things that I wasn’t able to do living in Houston to take care of my dad. So that obituary was supposed to be an apology … for the trouble that he caused in town, and thank you for taking care of him.”