Sounds Like Weird
15 October 2013
Deadbeat dad leaves wife, gets declared dead, eventually turns up to be re-declared alive. Fails.
Edge Case Deirdre is all over the interesting possibilities in this one: he can’t really collect social security of his own. If you can’t serve someone with divorce papers, and you can’t find them, declaring them dead generally is the last resort.
They just usually don’t show up years later (too many years in this case) to object.
I don’t know why I was reminded of this when I heard the story, but….
My first husband, Richard, was raised believing his mother was his sister and his step-grandfather was his father (and his grandmother was his mother). Only on his mother’s deathbed did he find out that he was adopted by her parents. So her maiden name was Savino (after she was adopted), same as his.
I legally changed my surname and because Richard and I were together but not yet married at that point, I just tacked his on, so my maiden name became Saoirse-Savino. Which was also my married surname.
So when Richard died, I was talking to the guy at the funeral home, who was arranging the announcement for Richard’s death, and he asked my maiden name and Richard’s mother’s maiden name, and boggled at the fact that they all were Savino.
“I know I’m gonna get calls on this,” he moaned.
I still get the occasional chuckle out of that.
Sure enough, when the paper ran the obit, my maiden name changed to Saoirse and his mother’s changed to the believed surname of his birth father (Aigner, who apparently had never known he had a son).