CREEDE HINSHAW: Romanian finds himself at a ‘dead end’

I read a story in the New York Times (“Being Dead, He Learned, Is Hard to Overcome,” March 30 by Kit Gillet) about a man who couldn’t get his death certificate revoked. I wish I had come across it in time to use in my Easter sermon.

Seems like this Romanian fellow decided a couple of decades ago to bail out on life. He had a crummy, unsatisfying marriage, maybe was tired of the responsibilities of parenthood, possibly was going through some personal crisis in life. Anyway, he left home in Romania one day and moved to Turkey, where he lived for a couple of decades, making no contact with family, friends or neighbors.

Meanwhile, his abandoned wife and children were left without information on what happened to this man when he abruptly stopped contacting them. Had he died friendless? Was he killed in a car crash? His family knew nothing.

Who knows? Maybe everybody was happy with the arrangement that all contact was ended. Or maybe the guy was terribly crushed that nobody tried to find him. There’s nothing more disappointing in the game hide-and-seek than to learn you’ve hidden so well that the seekers called off the search.

After 10-15 years, the wife, living in a limbo of sorts, went through the legal process of declaring her former husband dead. There had been a couple of earthquakes in Turkey during his absence. Maybe he’d been swallowed by the earth and lay nameless in some grave. The authorities issued the certificate and she became a widow.

Behold, the dead man appeared in Romania earlier this year, but he returned dead. He’d been expelled from Turkey because he was there illegally, and when he arrived at the airport in Bucharest the customs officials told him he was no longer living.

This announcement came as a rude shock because he was living and breathing. But the authorities had the death certificate. His wife (widow?) was living in Italy; his daughter and her three children (whom he’d never seen) were living in Spain; his apartment was empty and it was seemed likely that his widow now owned the space where he was staying.

So far, the Romanian authorities have refused to rescind the death certificate because the dead man appealed to the wrong court. Excuse the pun, but he has found the Romanian legal system to be a dead end.

The homiletic possibilities for such a story are rich. Here are three: First, if you abandon your home, family and responsibilities without thought for those you have left behind, you almost deserve to fall into a legal Sheol. Second, trying to come back from being legally dead may not be as difficult as coming back from the literal grave, but it’s apparently not easy. Third, if a person walked in the footsteps of the one person who has come back from the grave this would never have happened in the first place.

Contact Creede Hinshaw at [email protected].