Parking Meter Headstone

Claim:   Photographs show a gravesite adorned with a parking meter reading "TIME EXPIRED."

Status:   True.

Example:   [Collected via e-mail, July 2007]

A friend died who had a great sense of humor and always used to say that when she died she wanted a parking meter on her grave that says "Expired." So her nephew got her one on ebay! She said that her grave is right by the road so everyone can see it and many people have stopped to get a chuckle.

Origins:   The

above-displayed pictures do show the Okemah, Oklahoma, gravesite of one Barbara Sue Manire, who passed away on her 64th birthday in 2005 and is now interred at Highland Cemetery beneath a whimsical symbol of time expired: a parking meter with a "64 year time limit." (Her headstone also bears the legend "OUR MOM ... HER HUMOR LIVES ON.")

As Barbara Sue's daughter, Sherri Ann Weeks, explained, the unusual decorative feature at the gravesite was indeed her mother's idea:

The parking meter wasn't placed at the time Barbara Sue Manire was interred, however. Sherri and her brother, Terry Heiskill, mulled the matter over for about a year before the latter purchased a meter through eBay. A hole was drilled in the marble base at the burial site to accommodate the parking meter, which was given a coat of paint to match it with the gravestone. Sherri told us that the family "are happy about the attention this [picture] has received because we know that our Mom is up above ... looking down and still laughing."

Last updated:   9 March 2008

  Sources:

    Hill, Bob.   "Tombstone Humor Can Be a Grave Matter."

    The [Louisville] Courier-Journal.   21 February 2008.