Tomorrow an obituary will go out that says a man died on July 2, 2009.

That’s right. Technically he died in the future, although his funeral is tomorrow.

The paper is printed and labels are being attached to the July 1 edition of the Lebanon Express as I write this. There is little that can be done with the July 1 print version at this point.

How could we make such a mistake? I’m not sure. The obituary was proofed by four sets of eyes, yet we still missed it. Although we did catch that the funeral home said the 85-year-old man was born on March 24, 2009 (and fixed that) this mistake in the actual text of the obituary slipped passed us.

We regret the mistake and have fixed it for tomorrow’s online version… But the print edition?

We will reprint the obituary on July 8 and I have fixed it so the date is correct on our website.

Like I said, you can’t stop a moving train.

UPDATE: We received an updated version of the obituary from the funeral home today, July 1. The corrected version said he died July 27, 2009.

A group of my friends had a Notebook (you know one of those composition books with the black and white stonewash cover) that we passed back and forth. We wrote letters in it for close friends to read, doodled, and professed the love for our latest crush in The Notebook.

We also did a fair share of what would classify as “bullying.” Girls who were dating our sworn, sixth-grade crushes were made fun of. Boys who liked us, but were “gross,” were also dissected.

Was this wrong? Well of course. But I didn’t realize it when I was in sixth grade.

I don’t know what the girls at Seven Oak wrote or what their notebook contained. Maybe it was similar to mine, but maybe not. What I do know is that things haven’t changed much since I was in school… And if these girls have any sort of book like my group of girls did, someday they will regret their Notebook days just as I regret mine.