[1347] in Humor
HUMOR: If you ever die again, I'll kill you...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Mon Mar 11 16:01:04 1996
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 15:40:19 EST
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 16:31:22 +0000 (GMT)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
Date: Mon, 04 Mar 1996 15:05:02 -0500
From: bostic@bsdi.com (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: Joseph Harper <joeha@MICROSOFT.com>
This item comes by way of Becky Thompson:
Baytown, Texas:
Herlinda Estrada signed her husband's death certificate and joined other
grieving family members in a hospital waiting room. Then her husband
walked in.
Jose Estrada didn't exactly wake from the dead, but his return seemed just
as miraculous after a series of coincidences lead Herlinda Estrada to
mistakenly believe that her husband had died of a heart attack along a
jogging trail.
Since he turned up safe and sound, the couple's 29-year marriage has never
seemed sweeter.
"You begin to understand just how important the people in your life really
are and how much you would miss them if they were gone," Jose Estrada
said.
"I kept thinking about the Jimmy Stewart movie, 'It's a Wonderful Life.'
I kept thinking it really is a wonderful life."
The mix-up began on February 11 when Jose Estrada, 48, decided to go for
a run on a jogging trail near his home. He was recently diagnosed as a
diabetic and was following his doctor's orders to loose a few pounds.
Estrada parked his pickup in a lot near the trail and started on his run.
What he didn't know was that paramedics had just left the area with a
heart attack victim about his age who had collapsed and died along the
same trail. The dead man carried no identification, leaving only a set
of General Motors keys as a clue to his identity.
A sheriff's deputy called to the scene decided to see if the man's keys
fit any of the GM vehicles in the parking lot. Against all odds, they
fit Estrada's truck.
The deputy contacted Herlinda Estrada and broke the news, asking her to
identify the body at a hospital in Houston.
"They took me into the room to identify Jose, and all I could see was this
swollen, pale body under a sheet on the bed," Herlinda Estrada said.
"There was a tube in the man's mouth and tape over his mouth and eyes, so
I couldn't really see his face."
She held the dead man's hand and it felt like Estrada's. Then she saw
that the clothes the man was wearing looked like her husband's.
"I thought, 'This must be Jose,'" she said. "You're in such a state of
shock, anyway, you're not thinking straight."
Jose Estrada, meanwhile, finished his jog and picked up some groceries on
the way home. While putting away the groceries, his wife's boss called.
"She said, 'Jose! You're not dead. Someone called and said you'd had a
heart attack and died! But you're not dead!'" Estrada recalled.
Estrada raced to the hospital for a happy reunion with about 15 family
members, friends and neighbors.
Relatives said the scare gave them a new appreciation for one another.
"After I stopped hugging him and laughing, I started crying," Herlinda
Estrada said. "And I told him, 'If you ever die on me again, I'll kill
you myself.'"
