This is a true story a friend told me today:

"My grandfather died when he was 99, just a month short of his 100th birthday. It was accidental: he was burned to death. He was living in a nursing home and they had a rule that the residents couldn't smoke in their rooms, but he was an outspoken, crusty old codger so they made an exception in his case and let him smoke his pipe.

He was wearing a sweater that I had knitted for him when I was in high school, oh, it was 30 years before that, back in 1965. And the yarn was old and dried out and brittle. The ash from his pipe fell on that sweater and it started on fire.

The nursing home had been having trouble with the fire alarm going off for no reason, so when it started this time, the nurse just turned it off without checking to see if there was a fire and she went back to what she was doing.

The orderly was walking down the hallway and looked into my grandfather's room, and there he was, on fire. But instead of getting a blanket to smother the fire, or trying to roll my grandfather on the floor, the orderly pushed him out into the hall and towards the exit doors with flames shooting off of him, sweater fully engulfed.

My grandfather had burns over 95% of his body, the only unburned parts were where the back of his legs and his back touched the wheelchair. So he died.

There had been a big party planned for his birthday. My grandfather was a big fan of the Lawrence Welk show, and one of the accordian players from that show was scheduled to come there, to that small town in western Colorado, and play for him.

People have said we should have sued the nursing home, but our family felt like it would just keep the events fresh in our minds, and we really thought the nursing home had learned its lesson, and a lawsuit wouldn't bring him back. Actually, they didn't learn their lesson because a couple of years later they had a similar event, so maybe we should have sued them after all.

My grandfather was born in Norway in the 1880s and he came to the United States when he was 19. The man at Ellis Island didn't understand him when he said his name was Bjorson, so gave him the last name of Johnson. In Norway he drove a horse-drawn taxi that carried about 20 people over the high mountains, and when they came to a snow slide, the passengers had to get out and help shovel the road clear so the taxi could get them to their destination.

My grandad had a lot of stories, but I was young at the time, and wasn't all that interested. Now that I'm old enough to want to hear them, of course there is nobody to tell them."

What a story. I can picture the flaming grandad being pushed down the hall. Sometimes truth beats out fiction.