Preventing Deletions with triggers

I would like to have a trigger that fires whenever a delete is attempted. 
The trigger should update the status field of the tupple (to remove the 
tupple form the active set of tupples).


Here is what I got:

CREATE or replace FUNCTION person_fake_delete() RETURNS TRIGGER AS '    BEGIN        OLD.status := 1; -- This does the
fakedeletion        RETURN NULL;  -- I thought this would prevent the delete from 
 
actually happening.    END;
' LANGUAGE 'plpgsql';

create trigger person_fake_delete
before delete on person
for each row EXECUTE PROCEDURE
person_fake_delete();

This however does not work.  the tupple is still deleted from the 
table.    Any Ideas?

Thanks,    Jeff Post