Frenchwoman Trying to Prove She’s Still Alive

Amelie Magne said Sunday she assumed she was not getting any mail last winter because of the wave of strikes and bad weather. But the post office considered the 62-year-old woman dead, and she has been fighting the mistake for four months.

Magne’s ordeal began in January when a postman, teaching a replacement, told him the woman in the house had died. But the postman pointed in error to the home of Magne’s neighbor.

Magne met the new postman, who told her that their records indicated that she had died. All her mail was being returned to the sender, stamped “deceased.”

She has slowly straightened out the problem.

“But I still have to prove that I am alive sometimes and present documents. Computers have a lot of trouble taking a resurrection into account,” she said.

Her bank had attempted to verify her death, demanding that her husband furnish a death certificate for inheritance purposes, she said, but her husband has been dead for 10 years.