‘Dead’ French woman hopes to get life back, after four-year legal ordeal
- Jeanne Pouchain, 59, has spent the past four years with no legal identity or access to state and health services
- She was declared dead in 2017, and unlike what she had assumed at first, it was not easy or quick to clear up the error
Declared dead by a French court in 2017, Jeanne Pouchain has spent the past four years trying to escape a bewildering legal twilight zone and prove to officialdom that she is, in fact, very much alive. She says the experience has been devastating.
“My name was Jeanne. It still is Jeanne, after I’ve been declared dead in 2017,” said the 59-year old, smoking cigarette after cigarette.
She breaks into tears at times when recounting her ordeal – and what she plans for when she will officially be “alive” again.
During the day, I manage to feel more or less alive, but my nights are awful … it haunts my nights
It all started, Pouchain recalls, when the family received a letter four years ago from a court saying mistakenly that she was dead and that her husband and son had to pay for money she was alleged to have owed.
The letter was part of a complicated legal procedure launched by a former employee of Pouchain’s cleaning business and, unlike what they had assumed at first, it was not easy, or quick, to clear up the error.
Pouchain, unable to work and afraid to leave her house because she had no valid ID or social security number any more, started living as a recluse. Some of the family’s belongings were seized by court bailiffs, while all their savings, and more, went into trying to get things back to normal.
“My life, well, it’s nothing. I feel I’m of no use. I’m nothing and I’m of no use. And this is hard,” Pouchain said, speaking in the house she shares with her husband Pierre-Jean in a small village near Lyon, in southeast France.
