Honest obituary about a sad life goes viral

Minnesota
“He never belonged anywhere”: Brutally honest obituary about a sad life goes viral

Brian Eldrige dies as lonely as he has been all his life. His brother hadn’t seen him for a year either. And chose to record his sad life in a painful obituary.

When a person dies, those left behind often want to emphasize the positive. The beautiful, the love of a lost person, how that person touched other lives in a positive way. But the life of Brian Eldridge, who died at the age of 76, was not one full of positive and happy memories. So be decided Brother Steve to honor death differently accordingly.

“Brian was a quiet, shy boy and man. As a child and adolescent, he was bullied for his shyness and vulnerability. As an adult, he didn’t fit into the picture,” begins the obituary, published in the Pioneer Press, a local newspaper in the metro area Minneapolis-Saint Paul appeared. He wanted to be “brutally honest,” Steve Eldridge told the newspaper in a later conversation. “No one really knew him.”

“Brutally Honest”

You can read that from the ad. Instead of praising his achievements, she describes his struggles with finding a real job. Shares how he keeps his head above water by collecting recycling material. How he’d been taken advantage of by employers and how he’d finally been fired out of thin air from his last job as a cleaner last Christmas. His private life also remains unembellished. “He had no friends or family to look after him on a regular basis. He was quiet, intelligent, generous and lonely. When they found him in his apartment, he had been dead for at least four days. I will miss him,” she concludes sad announcement.

Steve admits to the newspaper that he has a guilty conscience. He also paid too little attention to his extremely shy and often cranky brother, last spoke to him in May for his birthday and has not seen him since October. “I’m struggling with whether I should have taken better care of him, stayed closer to him,” he admits. The death was only discovered because he wanted to visit Brian on the way through. After four days of no response to calls, his brother sent the police to his home. Then she made the sad discovery.

According to his brother, Brian was lonely throughout his life. He was extremely reserved and had become more and more eccentric over the years. So he didn’t want to exchange his beloved jacket for a newer one, even after decades it was nothing but holes. The fact that he didn’t want to cut his hair, which ended up hanging down to his thighs, only added to the run-down impression. “He grew it for 45 years,” Steve recalls. “Our mother offered him $10,000 if he would have it cut. But he wouldn’t.” There could have been a strategy behind it, he speculates. “Maybe he wanted to put people off talking to him. I don’t know.”

Wave of sadness for a lonely one

After the obituary was announced, there was a veritable outpouring of dismay. Many readers contacted the newspaper and spread the ad on social networks. “We can all learn something about life from his story,” says one dismayed reader. Several priests read the ad in church services, and a pastor even offered the family a free burial.

Steve declined the offer, saying he would bury his brother in a private ceremony. He appreciates the expressions of condolence, he tells the newspaper. But they also left a stale taste because they only come after his passing. “Why hasn’t anyone ever asked him who he is, what his name is. “Nobody invited him home or even talked to him,” he explains his frustration. “It’s just a sad story.”

Sources: obituary, Pioneer Press.