Published: April 30, 2008 10:56 am            

Grim Reaper gets a wrong number

METHUEN, Mass. — Rose Griffin got a call late Friday night from someone looking for her son Timothy.



When she said Timothy Griffin didn't live there, the caller hung up, saying he must have the wrong number.



But Griffin was so angry at the late hour of the call that she dialed the man back, using the number showing on her caller ID.



"I said, 'Who the hell are you, calling my house at 10 o'clock looking for Timothy Griffin?'" she said.



That's when the man said he was calling to make funeral arrangements for Griffin's late mother, Rose.



"You're talking to the dead person," Griffin, 75, told the caller — funeral director Paul Blanchette.



And that's when Blanchette, who knows Griffin personally, recognized her voice.



"He said, 'Oh my God, it's you,'" Griffin recalled.



Blanchette works for Cataudella Funeral Home, where Griffin has registered her name so that when she does die, the funeral home will make the arrangements.



But Griffin, a greeter at Wal-Mart in Methuen, is pleased to report she isn't ready to meet the Grim Reaper.



"I'm too mean a person to die yet," she joked. "What is the saying? 'Only the good die young.'"



The macabre mix-up began with an answering service message to the funeral home to contact Griffin's 51-year-old son about arrangements for his mother, said Joe Cataudella, a co-owner of the funeral home. The son lives in an upstairs apartment at his mother's Oak Street home.



Cataudella said the call to the answering service must have been "a cruel prank."



"I've been doing this for about 35 years," he said. "It has happened a couple times through the years but not very many times. I can only remember one or two at the most."



Griffin has no idea who was behind the prank but she knows what she'll say to him if she tracks him down, though she's not telling.



"You don't want to know," she said.





J.J. Huggins writes for The Eagle-Tribune in North Andover, Mass.

        

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