This is a story about a woman who is not dead, an obituary in the New York Times that says she is, and the four months she has spent trying, without success, to correct this small but genuinely upsetting error.
The woman — I will call her Marina, because that is the name she has chosen for this piece, and because when I asked her why, she said, “I have been thinking, over the past four months, about the small ways one becomes a different person, and I would like a different name for the version of me that has been through this” — is forty-eight. She lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She is a curatorial associate at a small museum in Lower Manhattan. She has, by every account I have been given, an ordinary, well-organized life. She has a husband. She has a fourteen-year-old daughter. She has a bad shoulder from a bicycle accident in 2019.
She has, since the morning of February 8, 2026, been officially dead in the paper of record.
The morning
Marina, on the morning of February 8, was in her kitchen making coffee. Her husband, Alex — who I will name because he has agreed to be named — was at the small round dining table with the physical copy of the New York Times. He had been, at that moment, reading the international section. He was, according to him, “not paying particular attention.”
He turned to the obituaries.
He read one that caught his eye. The obituary was small — perhaps four column inches. It described the passing, at forty-eight, of a Brooklyn resident named Marina B — I will not use her last name, or Alex’s, or their daughter’s, because Marina has asked me not to. The obituary noted that she was survived by her husband and daughter. It noted that a memorial service would be held the following weekend at a Unitarian church in Park Slope. It did not include a photo.
Alex read the obituary twice.
Then he stood up, walked into the kitchen, and said to his wife: “I need to show you something.”
Marina, who had been pouring coffee, said: “Okay.”
He showed her the obituary.
She read it. Then she read it again. Then she said, in what she has told me was the strangest sentence she has ever said in her adult life: “That is me.”
The other Marina
I will move quickly past the initial confusion, because the initial confusion — Alex’s, Marina’s, and the two frantic phone calls Marina made to her mother in Rhode Island — is not the interesting part of this story.
The interesting part is what followed.
Within approximately ninety minutes, Marina and Alex had determined the following facts. First, that a woman named Marina B, of Park Slope, had in fact died on February 5. Second, that this woman was not, in any sense, the Marina in the kitchen. Third, that the two Marinas were, apparently, of the same age, in the same neighborhood, with the same first and last name, and — a fact that has since become part of the difficulty — the same middle initial.
The other Marina, from what Alex and Marina have been able to piece together, was a longtime resident of Park Slope who had lived approximately eight blocks from Marina and Alex. She had worked in publishing. She had been survived, according to the obituary, by a husband and daughter. Marina, our Marina, has since learned that the other Marina’s husband was named Alex.
Alex.
Marina has told me, in the flat voice of a person who has stopped being surprised by anything, that when she first realized this, she “put the coffee down and sat on the floor for a long time.”
The correction request
Marina, once she had recovered from the initial shock, did what any reasonable person in the modern age would do. She called the New York Times.
She called the corrections desk. She was, after some initial routing, connected to a person she has told me was “kind, careful, and unwilling to commit to anything.”
She explained the situation. She explained that she was not the Marina B who had died. She explained that she had been named in the obituary. She explained that her friends had, over the course of the previous ninety minutes, begun to call. She explained that she would like the newspaper of record to run a correction.
The person on the phone, according to Marina, took her information carefully. He told her that a correction would be considered. He told her that the corrections desk would be in touch.
Marina, over the following four months, has had approximately seventeen additional conversations with the New York Times about this matter.
The paper has not, so far, run a correction.
Why not
I want to explain why the correction has not been run, because it is the part of the story that has taken Marina — and me, in the course of reporting this — the longest to understand.
The New York Times has not run a correction, according to Marina’s understanding of what she has been told, because the obituary was not, strictly speaking, wrong. The woman who died was named Marina B. She did live in Park Slope. She was, in fact, forty-eight. She was, in fact, survived by a husband and daughter. The obituary was, on its own terms, entirely accurate. It described, correctly, the passing of a specific person.
The problem was not that the obituary was inaccurate. The problem was that a second person exists, in the same neighborhood, at the same age, with the same name, who has been receiving, since February 8, condolences she cannot decline without seeming to make the situation about her.
The Times, according to Marina, has been sympathetic. The corrections editor has, over the four months, offered her several options. She could, they suggested, write a brief letter to the editor. She could ask them to add a note to the online version of the obituary clarifying that a second person of the same name lives in the same neighborhood. She could, they said, wait for the situation to “resolve on its own.”
She has declined all three options.
She has explained, in each of her conversations with the newspaper, that what she is asking for is not a letter to the editor. What she is asking for, she has said, is what she has been requesting since the first call: a small printed acknowledgment, in the paper of record, that she is not, in fact, the Marina B who has died.
The newspaper, so far, has not been willing to do this.
The reason, from what Marina can piece together, is that the paper’s policy on obituaries treats a correction differently from a clarification. A correction implies that something was reported incorrectly. Nothing, in the obituary, was reported incorrectly. What is being requested, then, is not a correction but something the paper does not have a standard procedure for — a public statement, in print, that a second person of the same name is still alive.
The paper has, so far, not found the right category for this request.
What has happened to Marina in the four months since
I want to be careful here, because Marina has asked me to be.
Marina is, by any external measure, fine. She has continued to go to work. She has continued to raise her daughter. She has continued to have coffee with her husband every morning. She has, in the practical sense, gone on with her life.
She has also, however, been experiencing a small and specific unraveling.
The condolence cards, in the first two weeks after the obituary, arrived at a rate of approximately six per day. Some were from people she knew. Most were not. Some were addressed to Alex. Some were addressed to her daughter, whose name — which was included in the obituary — is also, coincidentally, the same as Marina’s actual daughter’s.
Some of the cards, Marina has told me, made her cry. Not because of the misidentification. Because of the small careful words her acquaintances had written about her, believing her to be dead. She has told me that she has read, in the past four months, approximately thirty-seven descriptions of the person she is, from the point of view of people who thought she was gone.
She has told me that some of the descriptions were kinder than she was expecting. She has told me that some of them were less kind. She has told me that most of them were things she had not, in her actual life, ever heard anyone say about her — because, of course, most of us do not, until we die, hear what the people around us actually think of us. The dead, and only the dead, receive this information.
She has told me: “I am walking around Brooklyn now, in a body that people have told the truth about.”
She has told me: “It is not a small thing.”
The service
Marina did something, in the second week after the obituary, that she has told me she is still trying to understand.
She went to the memorial service.
The service — held at a Unitarian church in Park Slope, on a Saturday afternoon in mid-February — was for the other Marina. The one who had, actually, died. Marina, our Marina, went. She did not tell anyone she was going. She did not tell Alex. She wore, she has told me, “the darkest coat I own,” and she sat in the back row.
She wanted, she has told me, to see the family.
She saw them. The other Alex — the widower — was, she has told me, “a small, kind-faced man who looked exactly like every widower has ever looked in the entire history of small kind-faced widowers.” The other daughter — also fourteen — sat between him and an older woman Marina believed to be the grandmother. The daughter, at one point during the service, laughed at something someone said. Marina has told me she has thought about the sound of that laugh, in the four months since, more than she has thought about most things.
She did not, at the service, introduce herself.
She left before the reception.
She has, in the four months since, walked past the family’s house three separate times. She has never rung the bell. She has never sent a card. She has told me she does not know what she would say. She has told me she is not sure whether saying anything would be a kindness or a cruelty. She has told me she has decided, for now, to say nothing.
Where things stand
At the time of this writing, four months after the obituary, Marina has not received a correction. She has stopped, in the past six weeks, calling the newspaper. She has told me she is not sure she is going to call again.
She has told me she is not sure what she wants anymore.
She has told me that when the obituary first appeared, what she wanted was for the record to be corrected. She wanted the newspaper of record to say, in print, that she was alive. She wanted the small clean administrative acknowledgment that most of us have, without knowing it, every day of our lives — the acknowledgment that we are, in the accounting of the world, present.
She has told me that four months later, she is no longer sure that a correction would actually fix anything.
She has told me: “I have been told what people think of me. I have been to my own memorial service. I have watched, from the back of a Unitarian church, a family grieve a woman with my name. I do not think a small paragraph on page A24 of the New York Times, four months from now, is going to un-do any of that.”
She has told me she does not, however, know what will.
What this is
I have, in the weeks since I first heard this story, thought a great deal about the difference between being alive and being counted as alive. They are, most of the time, the same thing. They are not, however, always the same thing. Marina has been alive throughout the entire four-month period. She has also been, in a way that has turned out to matter, formally dead in the paper of record.
The lesson I keep trying to draw from this, and failing to, is something about how much of our lives are held together by small administrative confirmations that we usually do not notice. The tax bill that arrives in our name. The library card that expires in our name. The vote that gets counted in our name. The obituary that does not, thank god, run in our name. (For a related earlier piece on the small ways modern life keeps track of us without our knowing, see the Wattalife story about the woman who has been receiving someone else’s mail for nine years.)
Marina told me, in our last conversation, that she has begun, in the past few weeks, to keep a small piece of paper in her wallet. On the paper she has written her name, her address, her date of birth, and the words: “I am alive. If you are reading this, please believe me.”
She has not, so far, needed to show the paper to anyone.
She keeps it there anyway.
—
Margot Hale is the editor of Wattalife. She has, since reporting this story, checked her own name against the obituary listings twice, on separate mornings, at different newspapers, before concluding that she is, as of the time of this writing, still alive. She has decided to check again next Tuesday. She is not, however, going to make a habit of it. She does not, she has told herself, want to become that kind of person.