Near death experience?

How would you like to arrive at the voting booth and be told you couldn’t vote because you were dead? Doesn’t make an epitaph for your tombstone spring to mind, does it?

Well, that’s what happened on Super Tuesday to an 84-year-old woman in Fall River, MA; and, no, she didn’t arrive at the voting site riding in a hearse.

The woman said she had been voting for years without any problems and she was not expecting any Tuesday. Then, she got the grave news that she was dead. That surprising news was unearthed when the precinct warden informed the woman she was not on the list of registered voters.

“The warden, she looks at me and she says, ‘Oh, you died,’” the woman told a radio news reporter. “They put me on the ‘deceased’ list.”

The woman decided right away to bury the notion that she was dead.

“I’m still alive and kicking,” she informed them.

I don’t know what the precinct workers were thinking at this point, but obviously they knew they were not dealing with a corpse. So, what I’m confident was a lively inquiry began and it was discovered that a mix-up had occurred. The woman was cleared to vote. She did, and said she plans to do so for years to come.

While being told, “Oh, you died,” may not be a near death experience, I know from personal experience that it can be somewhat surprising. Several years ago when I picked up a copy of the NewsPress to read my father’s obituary, I was surprised to read my name, not his, on the obituary. But that’s a story we can dig up on another day.