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This post has been updated.
“Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15, 2016.” So begins the obituary of a Virginia woman in the Richmond-Times Dispatch.
I guess no one told her about third party candidates. But Noland isn’t alone. Obituaries have become valuable real estate for expressing one’s political opinions from beyond the grave.
Take Jeffrey Cohen and Katherine Michelle Hinds, both of whom requested that, in lieu of flowers, mourners not vote for Donald Trump. Or Elaine Fydrych and Carl Crocetti, who wanted the opposite—no flowers and no votes for Clinton.
Virginia resident Earnest Maynard Overbey earned a posthumous thanks from Trump for requesting in his obit that people “please vote for Donald Trump.” The obituary, while hilarious, is a fake, according to Snopes.
But the most scathing comes from the obituary of Trump’s cousin, Thomas P. Trump, which refers to the presumptive Republican nominee as “a walking mucus bag.”
Obituary of Donald Trump’s cousin. pic.twitter.com/tHtcPcCmWL
— Johnny White (@Stateline69J) April 16, 2016
The phrase “speak no ill of the dead” doesn’t seem to go both ways.
Rachel Kurzius