Priscilla Slack’s situation is one of those bureaucratic horror‑comedies where the punchline keeps getting darker. Yes — she really has spent more than two years being treated as legally dead, and every agency she deals with seems determined to keep her that way.
She was declared dead by a typo, and the paperwork kept burying her.
She tried to laugh it off at first — just a tiny clerical hiccup, a ghost‑in‑the‑machine moment — until the machine started insisting the ghost was her.
Priscilla even joked about it at first — because anyone can push the wrong button, until the wrong button starts erasing you.
But the mix‑up didn’t fade — it metastasised, growing from a tiny clerical hiccup into a full‑blown administrative avalanche that kept burying her deeper every time she tried to climb out.
Every time she thought the nightmare was finally over, another part of her life snapped shut — like the system was determined to keep killing her in instalments.
“First they cancelled my bank account, and they cancelled my credit card,” she explained — the opening notes of a bureaucratic death march that kept insisting she was gone even while she stood there, very much alive.
When she went to cast her ballot, she discovered her voter registration had been wiped clean — the system had quietly deleted her democratic voice because it believed she’d already left this world.
And now she’s stuck in a permanent bureaucratic relay race — batted back and forth between the Social Security Administration and the tax office, each one insisting the problem belongs to the other while she’s left proving her own existence on repeat.
The IRS then sent her a letter accusing her of filing a tax return using a dead person’s details — effectively scolding her for impersonating herself.
Priscilla believes the agencies should fix their own mess — not leave an 84‑year‑old widow to keep proving she’s alive every time another system decides to kill her off again.
“How am I supposed to deal with these agencies who can’t deal with each other?” she said — a living woman trapped in a system that keeps insisting she’s dead, while the people meant to fix it can’t even talk to one another.
The elderly widow says the mistake has repeatedly wrecked her finances — every “correction” followed by another shutdown, like the system keeps reaching into her life and switching off the lights one room at a time.
She was told the error had already been corrected — but every “fix” turned out to be nothing more than another ghost stamp on her file, leaving her alive on paper only until the next system decided to kill her off again.
If Priscilla robbed the bank, the system wouldn’t say “she doesn’t exist”; it would suddenly remember she’s alive very quickly. Nothing resurrects a person in government databases faster than a crime they definitely didn’t commit.
This is where the whole thing stops being funny and turns into full‑blown bureaucratic theatre — because she’s got every possible proof of life, and the system is still wandering around insisting she’s a ghost.
This is so awful. I hope she can get everything resolved soon — it’s far too much stress for one person to carry, and she deserves to enjoy her life, not fight with agencies that can’t even talk to each other.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 