My mother died seven days before the 2010 earthquake in Chile, at 100 years of age. It was February 20, 2010. I learned about her death when the nursing home where she was at called my home phone, and my friend Karelin answered. They told her the news while I was flying from Texas to Florida. Karelin called me, and then I called the nursing home. I was at the airport in Miami, leaving for Lima, Peru, to teach a course there. Painfully, I decided to continue my trip since I could not do anything at that time.

Before I left for Lima, I called back my dear friend in Texas, and she told me that she would take care of things. I had a prearranged plan with a funeral company, and they were to pick up her body, embalm her, and send her body in a temporary casket to the cemetery in Florida, where my father was buried. My mother wanted to be next to my father, and the niche was waiting for her.

The whole process was going to take a week so I would be able to go teach the course and still be there for her interment at the cemetery in Miami on my way back home from Peru. My heart felt like a hand was squeezing it and my throat was very dry during the long six-hour trip to Peru. I got there by night.

I changed my flight back so I could stay in Miami for my mother’s internment. When I arrived at the cemetery before the memorial ceremony, I noticed that the temporary sign for the memorial had my name and not my mother’s. Mi name is Maria B. Beltran and my mother’s name was Maria P. Beltran. Since our names were practically the same, I remarked to the Cemetery Director that her name was different and I wanted to be sure that it was written correctly on her tomb. So he promised he would change it as I wanted it.

However, one month later, I did not receive my Social Security check, but instead, I received a note from Social Security letting me know that I was dead!

This was my third “death”. The first one was when I had my tonsillitis surgery at nine years of age when the anesthesiologist gave me a little bit too much ether (ethanol and sulfuric acid) and I was officially dead for some minutes. The second time was when I had a cyst on my vocal cords and, to perform the operation, they had to make my blood circulate out of my body. There was a problem with the centrifugal pump and my heart stopped. Curiously enough, I have also been blind and mute. I was blinded by the sun when, while directing the group I was guiding not to look at the sun, the ramp of the observatory opened and I looked up. I was three months without seeing, but the treatment went well and my sight eventually returned. I was mute when I was recovering from surgery for the cyst on my vocal cords. (It was interesting that many of my friends called me so I could tell them how I was doing. I could not say anything, of course.)

This third time I officially died because the funeral company in Florida had not only my name but also my Social Security number and had reported it instead of my mother’s. I called the funeral company, and the man I talked to did not even apologize. The funeral company could not do anything about, he said. That was the only social security number they had in the file so they “assumed” it was my mother’s. They didn’t even bother to ask questions to the other funeral company that had shipped my mother’s body to them.

It took me more than three months to demonstrate that I was alive. In one of my numerous calls to the Social Security office the person on the phone had much trouble understanding my accent, let alone that it had been a terrible confusion because of the American tradition of calling a woman by her husband’s last name. I said, “If, when my mother became a citizen, she could have kept her real name, you would not be spending money trying to undo this mess. Besides, if I am dead, how come I’m able to talk to you on the phone?” The civil servant gasped on the phone, and said that she would see what could be done. As I said, I was three months without receiving my Social Security check. However, less than a week after my mother was interred in Deerfield Beach, I received a letter from the Social Security informing me that I had died. What efficiency!

In fact, a big part of me died. I know now that my past ended with the death of my mother. No more immediate family. I was alone and with no witnesses of my past life in Chile. It would have been easy to disappear forever. I imagined several scenarios where I ended up living on an island in the Caribbean, rescuing birds from maritime oil spills. But the proper thing to do was to try to prove that I was alive, and I finally did.