When 94-year-old Torontonian Mary “Pat” Stocks passed away in her sleep in early July, it was amidst waning health, so her death hardly came as a surprise to her three children and 10 grandchildren.

But what did come as a shock was her light-hearted obituary, rife with jokes. It was penned by Pat’s son Sandy after her death.

The 669-word piece, published in Saturday’s Star, is an unusual twist on the obituaries that regularly fill the paper’s memorial page because it’s sprinkled with laughs about Pat’s foul mouth, her questionable cooking skills and her wild methods of guiding her children through the “school of hard knocks.”

Unlike most obituaries, it has gone viral, eliciting emails from all over North America and hundreds of Facebook shares.

It starts off with Sandy, trying to flog the odds and ends uncovered at Pat’s Don Mills area home upon her death.

“She left behind a hell of a lot of stuff to her daughter and sons who have no idea what to do with it,” Sandy writes. “So if you're looking for 2 extremely large TV's from the 90s, a large ceramic stork (we think) umbrella/cane stand, a toaster oven (slightly used) or even a 2001 Oldsmobile with a spoiler (she loved putting the pedal to the metal), with only 71,000 kilometers and 1,000 tools that we aren't sure what they're used for. You should wait the appropriate amount of time and get in touch. Tomorrow would be fine.”

Later, the piece pokes fun at Pat’s skills in the kitchen, a circumstance born out of her husband’s penchant for overcooked cuisine.

“She believed in overcooking everything until it chewed like rubber so you would never get sick because all germs would be nuked. Freezing germs also worked, so by Friday our school sandwiches were hard and chewy, but totally germ free,” the piece reads. “All four of us (kids) learned to use a napkin. You would pretend to cough, spit the food into it and thus was born the Stocks diet. If anyone would like a copy of her homemade gravy, we would suggest you don't.”

In between mentions of Pat’s regular mile-long treks through blizzards to get to school and her “lack of patience,” Sandy writes, “She liked four letter words as much as she loved her rock garden and trust us she LOVED to weed that garden with us as her helpers, when child labour was legal or so we were told.”

It ends with a call for a donations in her honour to the Covenant House and a message saying that, “A private family 'Celebration of Life' will be held, in lieu of a service, due to her friends not being able to attend, because they decided to beat her to the Pearly Gates.”

For those imagining just how dismayed Pat would be if she knew the tone of the piece her family wrote, Sandy assured the Star “this is what she would want.”

“She probably would have laughed her head off and thought we got her to a t, there’s no doubt about that,” he said, describing his mother as “prim and proper,” but the kind of person who would never hold back an opinion or try to skirt the truth.

It was those traits that Sandy had in mind when he sat down to write the obituary, after his sister Shauna was too distraught to write it herself.

Most of the obituaries that had run before about Pat’s late friends were bland and lacked the whimsy or colour that seemed synonymous with Pat, a former Red Cross truck driver who married a World War II veteran who passed away at least a decade ago.

Together “no-nonsense” Pat and her husband Paul, raised what Sandy calls a “dysfunctional family” of four kids, 10 grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and four Collies all named Tag.

“We would come home and Tag would be gone, but instead, there would be a new little puppy named Tag,” recalled Sandy. “We would say “Where is Tag?” and she would say, ‘That’s it. Right there.’”

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Even as she aged, Pat never lost her funny bone, enjoying conversations with her grandkids, playing bridge at The Granite Club and driving in three-inch heels on icy roads. She was also adamant about keeping up her cooking duties, preparing turkey dinner for the Stocks clan every Christmas until her death.

Relying on memories like those, Sandy giggled and cried his way through a draft of Pat’s obituary before gathering the family at his niece’s home to read it and get their approval.

When he was done reciting it, there were no objections, he said, and so it went to print, attracting attention from avid readers as far as Missouri who shared the piece on social media.

His mother, he hopes, is laughing about what he wrote like most others are.

If he could tell her anything now, he said it would be, “I know you wanted everything private, but sorry, Mom, I wanted you to be recognized for what you were because you were great.”