Mistaken Obituaries

 

The mistaken obituaries of Tony Dow and Alfred Nobel How the reality of death liberates us to live fully today by Dr. Jim Denison

Tony Dow, a teenage star in the popular 1950s and 60s comedy series Leave It to Beaver, died Wednesday at his California home at the age of seventy-seven. Since many of you are not old enough to remember the show and others of you have likely not thought about it in years, why am I beginning today’s Daily Article with this news? Because Mr. Dow’s death was erroneously reported the day before he died. It seems his distraught wife believed her husband was dead and notified his management team, who reported his death to the world. He was actually still alive but in hospice care suffering from cancer. He passed away the next day. This story brought to mind one of the most famous cases of mistaken death in history. In 1888, a man named Ludvig Nobel died in France from a heart attack. However, at least one French newspaper believed that Ludvig’s better-known brother Alfred had perished and proceeded to write a scathing obituary branding him a "merchant of death." This was because Alfred had invented dynamite and had become hugely wealthy from nearly one hundred factories that made explosives and munitions. After this erroneous obituary, one biographer said Alfred Nobel "became so obsessed with his posthumous reputation that he rewrote his last will, bequeathing most of his fortune to a cause upon which no future obituary writer would be able to cast aspersions."   That cause was the Nobel Prize.