…your aunt called the editor and begged him not to run it.”
My aunt Joyce. The woman whose attic I was standing in.
I sat down on a dusty trunk and went through the rest of the box. Under the newspapers was an envelope of photographs from 1996. My cousin Lisa, smiling, beside my old blue Honda. Lisa, wearing my college sweatshirt. Lisa, with her hair cut and dyed exactly like mine.
In 1996, I was twenty-four and teaching English in a village in Ghana with the Peace Corps. I had no phone and got letters once a month. Before I left, I had lent Lisa my car and left my old driver’s license in the glove compartment by mistake.
In the box I found the police report. A single car crash on Route 9, late at night. The driver had been thrown from the car. She was identified by the license in the glove compartment and the registration in my name. My parents were on vacation in Florida, and couldn’t be reached for two days. Joyce was the one who told the police it was me.
My parents rushed home and went to the funeral home. They realized immediately the woman was not me. It was Lisa.
That’s when they asked the newspaper for a correction. And that’s when Joyce begged them to let it go.
I found her letter to my mother, dated the week after the crash. Lisa had been in trouble for years — drugs, debts, a court date she was about to miss. She had been using my name and my license to rent apartments and borrow money. If the correction ran, everyone would know. “Let her rest under your daughter’s name for now,” Joyce wrote. “I’ll fix it. Please. She’s my only child.”
My parents agreed, for a while. Then life went on, and nobody fixed anything. They told me there had been a bad accident and that Lisa had died. They never told me whose name was on the headstone.
I drove to the cemetery that afternoon. There it was, behind the church I had grown up in. My name. My birthday. 1972 to 1996.
For thirty years, my cousin had been buried under my name.
I contacted the county records office and the newspaper. With my parents’ old letters and Joyce’s confession, the newspaper published the correction at last. Thirty years late, on the front page of the local section: “Woman Who Died In 1996 Crash Identified As Lisa Ann Moore.”
I paid for a new headstone with Lisa’s real name on it. At the small service, two of her old friends came. One of them cried and said she had never understood why Lisa’s name wasn’t anywhere.
I don’t hate my aunt. She was a grieving mother who made a terrible choice and spent the rest of her life keeping a box in the attic. Maybe she wanted someone to find it.
I kept one copy of my obituary. It’s a strange thing to own. But it reminds me that the truth always finds its way out. Sometimes it just needs someone to clean the attic.
