Possessing a good, strong heart at age 90 proved especially beneficial to Elaine Richter when she opened a letter from her health plan advising that she had died.
"How would you like to read that?" posed the retired social worker and World War II army veteran after she'd survived the shock of the late-November revelation from the Medicare department of Kaiser Permanente.
The letter, delivered to Richter's Rohnert Park mobile home and addressed to her estate, began, "Medicare told us of the death of Elaine Richter." It said Richter's medical coverage had forthwith been terminated.
How in the world could this happen? Richter's heart and head throbbed as she read farther down and found phone numbers for both the Kaiser Medicare center and Medicare itself.
But as she read it was past 5 p.m. on a Friday — Nov. 29 — and she knew there was no sense in phoning then. She slept that night as well anyone just apprised of her own death might.
The following day, it pleasantly surprised Richter for someone at Kaiser's Medicare center to answer her call. An heir to her late mother's Irish sense of humor, she told the Kaiser employee of the deathly notice and observed that if the declaration is true then she's quite a fresh corpse.
She was doubly heartened when her subsequent call to Medicare also was answered by a human, despite it being a Saturday. Staffers with both Kaiser and Medicare commiserated and advised that go in person to her local Social Security office and carry along the identification that would prove that she is indeed Elaine S. Richter.
She struggled to imagine how this mistake happened. And she died a little death each time there surfaced in her life another consequence of being declared deceased.
"It cascaded," she said.
Needing gas in her car, Richter drove to the station at Costco. But the card-swipe machine declined her ATM card.
She had to phone her son-in-law, also a resident of Rohnert Park, and he drove over and fronted her the cash to fill her tank.
In rapid succession, Richter discovered, too, that her credit card and her Redwood Credit Union checking account had been frozen.
Alerted to her death by the Social Security Administration, the credit union had also turned back a direct-deposit veterans' pension payment.
A scheduled prescription renewal didn't go through. The Social Security spousal benefits she received thanks to her late husband, John "Jack" Richter, were terminated. A scheduled automatic payment to the insurance company that covers her mobile home didn't happen.
She had no money coming in, no money going out and she was no longer listed among the living by the United States government. In short, Richter had a taste of what happens when one's little star in the constellation of humanity flickers out.
As she struggled these past three weeks to undo her prematurely recorded death and to understand what caused it, she did benefit from a couple of fortunate breaks.
One was that she went to a Redwood Credit Union employee she knows quite well, and that person quickly freed up her accounts. Richter suspects that in the absence of such a personal relationship, a financial institution notified by Social Security of a customer's demise might require a wad of red tape before unfreezing that person's accounts.
The No. 1 lesson Richter derived from this ordeal: "Stay on good terms with someone at your bank."
No. 2 is to remain as close as possible to everyone in your family, and that certainly includes stepchildren.
For decades, Richter has been tight with the daughter born to Jack Richter and his first wife, who divorced nearly 40 years ago. Jack died in 2010.
His and his first wife's daughter lives in Oregon. Elaine Richter was speaking with her by phone about the death notice when a thought came to her.
She was aware that her stepdaughter's mother was still named Richter when she died in New Mexico in November — only a week before the arrival of the shocking notice from Kaiser's Medicare center.
On a hunch, Elaine Richter asked her stepdaughter if she could find her late mother's Medicare claim number. She asked knowing that her own number is her late husband's Social Security number, followed by a dash and a single letter.
The stepdaughter found her late mother's Medicare number.
Aha. It was Jack Richter's Social Security number, followed by a dash, a single letter — though not the same one as in Elaine Richter's number — and then a numeral.
The two Medicare ID numbers are so close that Richter feels certain they were accidentally switched by someone in Medicare or elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy.
"They got the wrong Mrs. Richter," she said, sounding a bit like Sherlock Holmes.
She went to her face-to-face interview at the Social Security Administration office in Santa Rosa armed with overwhelming documentation that she is Elaine Richter: Social Security card, California drivers license, U.S. passport, Women's Army Corps ID — even a copy of the page from the 1930 Census in Berkeley that listed her by name at age 7.
She persuaded the Social Security fellow that she isn't dead after all.
Today nearly all the harm done by the mistake has been undone, though Richter waits still for the Veterans Administration to reissue the small pension payment sent back during the freeze.
She is one again paying bills, proof positive that she is back among the officially living.
(Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.)
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