Miss Manners: Mother-in-law said uncle was dead when he was actually alive

[ermingarden]

Dear Miss Manners: A few days ago, my mother-in-law informed me of the death of her husband’s brother. I passed along the news to more distant relatives who needed to be informed.

A day later, however, my father-in-law told us that the uncle in question was … not actually dead. I updated the relatives, but I had trouble not making it sound like a farce, which seemed disrespectful of the uncle in question.

I am curious if there is a more polite way to tell people, “My mother-in-law is declaring people dead when they’re not.”

“It seems that there has been a mistake and fortunately, Uncle Lou is not, in fact, dead.” Miss Manners hopes that the relief this news provides will overshadow the blame of whoever’s mistake it originally was.

Comments

[ermingarden]

This is just so strange! What is going on? Was LW's MIL genuinely mistaken? If so, was it a reasonable mistake to make? (Is MIL perhaps beginning to show symptoms of dementia?) Or was this some weird vindictive thing? The letter gives us so little to go on!

[adrian_turtle]

I've seen informal "death announcements" that felt like reasonable mistakes. Tuesday a person sends out email saying Dave just died in Buffalo, with a few lines about how wonderful Dave was, shiva information soon. And Wednesday, oops! Dave is still alive and entered hospice care in Buffalo Monday, no calls please.

[castiron]

I could actually see this happening in Spouse's family. Spouse has a sibling who's estranged from the rest of their siblings, and if one of Spouse's relatives said "I heard that Estranged Sibling died last week", we'd have no reason not to believe them. (I wouldn't be the one updating the other relatives, though! At most I'd be writing or Facebook messaging the child of Estranged Sibling who I'm in contact with to express my sympathies.)

[melannen]

We had the opposite of this happen - we went to visit an elderly relative in the nursing home while visiting her small town, saw that her son had signed the logbook earlier that day, asked her how he was, she got mad and told us he was dead.

We called her daughter later and turns out he had in fact died several months ago, requested no announcements even to extended family or memorials -- and her pastor had the exact same (fairly rare outside of this small town) name.

Would not be surprised if the pastor had people reporting him dead to out-of-town relatives for awhile...

[conuly]

...why did he request no announcements, do you know?

[melannen]

Dunno. As you can probably tell from that story, we weren't super close to that branch. I suspect it was a general "I don't want a fuss" thing taken to extremes, with also a dose of "dealing with my mother's family is always an ordeal*, I don't want you to worry about it while you're grieving". Those would both be in character.

But it was basically impossible to confirm short of calling someone who was closer to him - there was literally nothing online about it.

*Also why we weren't super close to that branch.

[minoanmiss]

... how did his signature end up in the log?

[melannen]

The pastor with the same name was visiting his parishioner!