Looking for the dead

Today I got a call from a lady looking for information about a friend of hers that had died. She was certain that he died a few weeks ago while hiking. Her father and another library worker had told her that they had seen an article in the paper talking about his death but she was not able to find anything.

So I did my usual searches. I looked at archives. I did a news search because the circumstances that she told me made the death a bit unusual so I thought perhaps there would be news coverage. I searched for a good two hours without finding ANYTHING related to this gentleman's death.

I was a bit mad at myself because I don't like not finding what I'm looking for. I feel like a failure and I don't like feeling like a failure so I try not to fail.

So I continued to search. And then I found it. The gentleman in question wrote a lot of articles for a local paper. He was published A LOT and it made some of the searches difficult...until I started looking at the dates of the articles published. He's been responding to articles published after he "died". Not just posts mind you, but publishing posts that are responding to articles that were written and published after he died.

I told the lady that it was all I could find on him but she was adamant that it wasn't him and they must have been "saved up".

Whatever lady. I would have thought you'd be happy to find out your friend isn't dead.

Or maybe he's a zombie... and that makes me and my coworkers...

~blue-seme via deviantart