Bizarre! Officially considered dead, French woman fights to prove she's very much alive

It all started when the woman's family received a letter four years ago from a court mistakenly saying  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 her cleaning business

Saint Joseph (France): 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," says the 59-year old. She breaks into tears at times when recounting her ordeal - and what she plans for when she will officially be "alive" again. 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 anymore, 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. And this is hard," Pouchain says, speaking to Reuters in the house she shares with her husband Pierre-Jean in a small village near Lyon, in south-east France.