Utah man dies, writes his own obituary

A Utah man who recently passed wrote his own obituary and had a few confessions to make.

Val Patterson died of throat cancer on July 10. Before his death he prepared his own obituary, which can be seen on the Salt Lake Tribune or the Starks Funeral Parlor Facebook page.

In his obituary he confessed he had never received his Ph.D. and he had stolen a safe from the Motor View Drive Inn in 1971.

“Now that I have gone to my reward, I have confessions and things I should now say. As it turns out, I AM the guy who stole the safe from the Motor View Drive Inn back in June, 1971. I could have left that unsaid, but I wanted to get it off my chest. Also, I really am NOT a PhD. What happened was that the day I went to pay off my college student loan at the U of U, 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 3 years of college credit. In fact, I never did even learn what the letters “PhD” even stood for. For all of the Electronic Engineers I have worked with, I’m sorry, but you have to admit my designs always worked very well, and were well engineered, and I always made you laugh at work. Now to that really mean Park Ranger; after all, it was me that rolled those rocks into your geyser and ruined it. I did notice a few years later that you did get Old Faithful working again. To Disneyland – you can now throw away that “Banned for Life” file you have on me, I’m not a problem anymore – and SeaWorld San Diego, too, if you read this,” Patterson wrote.

He also wrote that he felt invincible when he was younger and smoked cigarettes even though he knew they were bad for him.

His wife also spoke to NBC. “There’s only one Val,” said Mary Jane Patterson.”He had a great sense of humor. If you knew him, you would just be in hysterics.”

“He didn’t even graduate from college because he wanted to quit just to prove to himself that he didn’t need a degree to open any doors for him,” she said. Nonetheless, his college continued to send him alumni correspondences over the years addressed to “Dr. Val Patterson, Ph.D.”

“We just laughed at that. And it’s true what he said: He didn’t even know what it stood for,” she said. “He didn’t ever use it to any advantage at all for getting jobs or anything. In fact, he was proud of that fact that his talent with electronics was so good that he didn’t need one.”

Val had expressed his wishes to write his own obituary and Mary Jane agreed with him and said she would not change a word of it.

In it he also stated he wanted a celebration of life. He wanted it to be casual dress. Mary Jane planned his funeral though, he did not do that in advance.

Patterson’s last message to readers was “If you want to live forever, then don’t stop breathing, like I did.”