The informant was my daughter. I stared at that line because I had spoken to her the week before, and she’d been sitting across from me at my kitchen table. I called the hospice in Fort Wayne and asked for their records. The woman said she couldn’t discuss a patient without authorization, so I sent them a copy of my driver’s license and the death certificate they’d mailed me. Two days later, someone from their records department called. She said the certificate belonged to a woman with my exact name and birthday, but the photograph in their intake file wasn’t me.
I asked how someone could have been admitted using my identity. She said the person had arrived with my information already printed and that the emergency contact was my daughter. Then she gave me the admission date. It was the same week my daughter had asked to borrow my driver’s license because she said she needed it for some paperwork. I called my daughter and asked her directly. She started crying and said she hadn’t known anything about a death certificate. I asked why her name was on it, and she said she’d only signed something because a woman told her it was necessary to help an elderly relative.
I asked for the woman’s name. My daughter wouldn’t say it at first. Then she whispered it. It was the name of my mother’s closest friend, a woman who had died in 2018. I thought she was confused until I pulled out an old address book and found the same name and phone number. The number was still active. I called it. A woman answered, and before I could introduce myself, she said, “You weren’t supposed to receive that certificate.” Then she told me the reason my identity had been used wasn’t to collect insurance or open an account. It was because someone needed an official record showing that I was dead before they could claim something that had been left in my name.
