The Basha died on a Sunday. So the following day, Monday, my friends and I met Eva from the funeral home at the government buildings to wade through the paperwork. I was numb, and had forgotten virtually all the Spanish I’d ever learned, so having friends to guide me, and translate for me, was necessary and amazing.
We went to the first office, and were told by the receptionist to leave our documents (birth certificates, marriage license) and go to the coroner’s office. We argued that we would probably need the documents in the next office, but they waved us off and said that they needed them.
The coroner was, of course, in a different building. The coroner also wanted the papers that we had left in the first office – as we’d feared. Luckily I had other forms of identification for both of us, and the coroner’s office accepted those. At the coroner, there were lots of questions to begin filling out the death certificate. They asked about his health, recent surgeries, what had happened yesterday. The stated cause of death, after autopsy, was “Natural o por Enfermedad” (natural or due to illness). They assumed a heart attack, but could give me no information whatsoever. At this point, I realized that more information would not change anything. He would not come back if I kept digging into the cause of death. More questions would be cold comfort at best, so I signed the papers that allowed the body to be released to the funeral home, and we were sent back to the first office.
This office (I have no recollection of what the office was – the only specifics I remember were from the coroner’s office) would only allow one of my friends (the translator) to be with me. The man in the office went through all sorts of legal statutes and had me tell him, to the best of my recollection, everything that had happened yesterday. There were lots of papers to sign, he had me validate that the birth certificates were ours, and the marriage license was ours. More papers. More signatures. More “statute blah, paragraph blah, hereby blahblahblah”. All in Spanish of course! We finally got the governmental document that said “He died” and had to take that to yet another office, the Registro Civil, to be officially filed.
The Registro Civil is in a completely different part of town, but this is where all of these documents are finalized and stored. When they finally gave me the death certificate, they explained that it was PURPOSELY incorrect. On the death certificate the Basha was listed as single – no family, no spouse. They explained that they HAD TO write it this way because our birth certificates and marriage license were in English, they could not be accepted. I would need to get them translated by a certified translator, and then they could list me as his spouse. They said I had 50 days to get that done and get the death certificate changed, but after 50 days it would take a judge’s approval to make any changes.
After all the stress, the language problems, being completely unmoored in my life, I took what they gave me and went home to collapse.