A generous woman decided to do something fun with her last wishes, offering her car to anyone who would come to attend her funeral.
Her name was Diane Sweeney, a lover of family, faith, and her WV Beetle. Passing away suddenly in July of last year, she had told her nephew Rick Ingram about her plan to give away her car in a raffle if she died.
“She told a few of us her wish,” Ingram told Fox News Digital. “I remember it clear as day. She said, ‘Whoever comes to my funeral, I want them to have a chance to win my Volkswagen Beetle.’ And I said, ‘Oh, Diane, I’ll make that happen.’”
Ingram, along with his cousin, decided to really make a go of it and told Channel 4 News of Oklahoma City that they planned to take out an ad in the paper, and wanted to see if they were interested in covering the story: which they were, and which “packed” the funeral home.
One of the people answering that ad was Gabrielle Bonham of El Reno, Oklahoma, who joked with some of her friends that they should go, but then the more she thought about it, the more she really wanted to go.
She managed to convince her big sisters to take her there, and at the funeral, she got to experience firsthand the life and kindness of Ms. Sweeney who died without having ever married or had kids.
“It was very interesting not to know her and to see her life through her family’s eyes,” Bonham said.
Filling out a raffle ticket and really enjoying the experience besides, Bonham went home and heard nothing, figuring someone else had claimed the silver, 2016 Beetle. In reality, it was just taking a long time—more than a year—to organize the legal side of Sweeney’s estate, but two trusted keepers, Rudy Espinoza and Taylor Hurt, still had all the tickets with them from the funeral.
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After everything was finally signed, sealed, and settled, Hurt and Espinoza spun the tombola, and out came Bonham’s ticket. The now 16-year-old was on a trip when she got the call, describing herself as freezing with her jaw open and confusing her whole family.
“Every person that I’ve told about it has said, ‘Oh my gosh. That’s what I should do whenever I pass away.’ Or, ‘I should do something like that at my funeral,'” said Bonham. “I think that it’s really cool to see something good happen and the effect that it makes on other people who weren’t directly involved in it. Just people want to do good things. It’s amazing.”
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Meanwhile, Ingram, who made the call announcing the winner, said it went to the perfect person, a young woman in need of reliable transportation at the beginning of her adult life taking the keys from a woman who had finished hers.
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