Obituary: Gary Donald Joseph

(3-minute read)

Gary Donald Joseph

Gary Donald Joseph, 84, passed away peacefully at Albany Medical Center on January 8, 2025. Now he will never know if he was wiping his butt correctly. It was the only question in life Gary asked himself consistently. It was, ultimately, the human question. He assumed he was doing it correctly. Though he didn’t have a clear memory of being taught, he knew that his parents - Gary Ronald Joseph and Mina (McScooby) Joseph - wouldn’t have steered him wrong. But what if neither of them had known how to do it right and had just made something up? There was only one way to do it, right? Once. Fold. Twice. Right? But the thing is sometimes he’d step out of the bathroom and as the door swung shut he’d catch a…a whiff. Maybe that whiff came from the bathroom. But maybe it came from him. Which would mean…like his own eventual death, this was a thought he could flush from this mind easily enough. But just when you assumed it was gone, the thought floated back up with a gurgle. Sometimes he’d swipe and there would be more, and he’d swipe again and there would be even more, and he’d just keep going and going and Christ it was like trying to wipe a bucket of pistachio ice cream. He’d have to stop or else he’d lose his watch in there. Other times he’d drop a hot track and there would be nothing. No trace. This couldn’t be the way. But what could other people be doing? Fully exasperated by 1987, he toyed with adding a little wrist-flip at the end. The results were all over the place. Literally. Maybe this was what all that two-ply ultrasoft stuff was about. Encyclopedias couldn’t help him. The walls of bathroom stalls suggested answers, but were maddeningly inconclusive. Google could have set him straight. Easily. But Gary was under the impression that IRS agents read your Google searches, and thus never asked. His final words were “rubber cheerio, rubber cheerio.” This was a much-discussed topic at his wake, at Newcomer-Cannon funeral home last Saturday at 4 (oh shoot, I was supposed to tell you about that. Did you send flowers? I was also supposed to tell you that the family requested that you specifically send flowers). His wife, Ida Joseph, chalked it up to dementia. His semi-adult children, Rickert, 48 and Dina, 44, recalled his fondness for the prize toys in breakfast cereals. But it was a synonym for anus that Gary had overheard in July of 1973. He was a searcher to the end, Gary was. We take comfort in the hope that where Gary is now there are no butts. Or if there are butts, they are strictly decorative. At the very least we hope it’s a bidet-forward kind of place.