Maria, the mother of Mireya Masó, is 89 years old and for the last four months she has been recorded as deceased without her or her family knowing it because, she says, of the alleged mistake in identification by a police officer, who confused her with another woman from Identical name and surname and almost similar age who died in March also in Barcelona. Her family found out about the mistake after the pharmacy did not give her the prescribed medications because she was discharged. She was listed as dead. Mireya has managed to “resurrect” her mother administratively, but she denounces the bureaucratic journey and the little empathy and help that she has had to solve someone else’s mistake.
“I’m exhausted,” repeats Mireya Masó in conversation with La Vanguardia. This Barcelonan has spent practically the last month from window to window to find out why she had given up her 89-year-old mother for dead and how she could do to reverse the mistake. The first indication that something was wrong was at the pharmacy. There they told one of the two caregivers that Maria has, who is over 89 years old and totally dependent on her, that they could not give her the prescribed medication because she “was dead.” Mireya was unaware of that strange episode until days later, at the beginning of June, when one of her caregivers called her to ask for an explanation as to why she had been discharged from social security. Thus began Mireya Masó’s journey to find out what was happening and discover that the administration had given her mother for dead.
“In all institutional websites you find chaos. You must be an expert to move in them ”, denounces Masó. Luckily, she is used to dealing with these issues, but she wonders what would have happened if all this had fallen to less experienced people. After countless calls, she began the pilgrimage after discovering that her mother had not received her pension since April. “In the Social Security they gave me an appointment for a month from now, so I showed up without an appointment,” explains this Barcelonan. “I asked for an appointment everywhere because I found that my mother had fallen out of the system,” she continues.
The INE, Social Security or the Civil Registry have been some of the places where he has gone to knock on the door to ask for help and explanations several times but without achieving results. Despite the fact that she verified that there was no death certificate, Mireya regrets that they asked her for a doctor’s certificate certifying that she was alive. And although she was out of the system, at the CAP where she visits Maria, she was given a special card to be able to be visited, essential attention in the case of an elderly person.
After many inquiries and returning to the civil registry “almost like a lawyer” from all the paperwork she had to do, she asked to testify before a judge, she says. And that’s when she started to find out what had happened. In mid-March, a woman with the same name and surname as her mother and a very similar age had died at home. But the mosso “I suppose she identified her with the first DNI that appeared with that name, which was my mother’s,” she says. Sources from the police force consulted assure, however, that although at the level of the police database this problem could be generated and a person who is not “our data is not fed or turned over to other databases of the administration”. For this reason they consider that “the error comes from elsewhere”.
Mireya says that she wanted to file a complaint with the Mossos for having given her up for dead. “I wanted them to come to the house to check that my mother was alive,” she says. “Everyone was taking responsibility away,” laments this Barcelonan who also denounces the “monster that has been made of inoperative officials.” She regrets the little help she has received in this almost entire month of efforts and that nowhere have they given her the slightest apology for everything that happened. She assures that she has had to experience “surreal” situations and she criticizes that there is no compensation for the time that she has had to spend solving someone else’s mistake in addition to “moral damage”.
Last Friday, just the day that he reported the case in RAC1, he received the response by letter of the appeal filed with Social Security confirming that his mother was once again registered. It has been possible to resolve the issue of the pension and also the discharge of the workers. She also has the right to vote again and it remains to be seen what will happen to his ID.
Maria, Mireya’s mother, has gone through this process oblivious to everything due to her delicate state of health for which she has been hospitalized for the last week. At 89 years old, this woman, who for four years has been administratively dead, has been a “very active woman all her life,” recalls her daughter. She studied nursing and part of pharmacy and worked in her husband’s office, a neurologist. Asked how she would have reacted if this had happened a decade ago, with her mother in better health, she does not doubt it: “She would have raised a bigger chicken than me.”
