Imagine opening your mailbox, expecting another medical bill, or some weird thing your neighbours’ kids placed, but instead you find a letter from your hospital that says, “We’re so sorry you’ve passed away.”
Yeah, that’s not the kind of check-up anyone wants.
That’s what happened to 531 living patients when MaineHealth, the state’s largest healthcare provider, accidentally mailed out death notices meant for deceased individuals.
Each letter expressed condolences to the family and included instructions for how the next of kin could handle the patient’s estate.
Translation: They’re basically saying you’re dead. Here’s how to wrap things up.
According to MaineHealth, the bizarre mix-up started on October 20, when an automated system glitched and sent “estate vendor” notifications to hundreds of living patients.
The healthcare network, which runs nine hospitals across Maine and New Hampshire, quickly realized the mistake and scrambled to undo the world’s most awkward mail merge.
“MaineHealth sincerely regrets this error and has sent apology letters to all patients who have been affected,” the organization said in a statement.
“At no time were these patients listed as deceased in their medical records, and the issue has been fully resolved.”
One woman who received the letter told that it was “really shocking and upsetting.”
She said when she called the hospital, the employee replied,
“I’m glad to hear that you’re still alive and well.”
Her response?
“Yeah, me too.”
Honestly, how do you even top that conversation?
This digital oopsie didn’t affect patient care or medical data, just trust. MaineHealth has since “reviewed and corrected” the software that triggered the fiasco, promising this won’t happen again. (We’ll see. Machines have been acting up lately.)
I really do not get how things ended up this way. I mean, it wasn’t an email. These were physical letters. Actual condolence notices mailed to patients’ homes. The kind that lands in your hand, not your spam folder.
The system at MaineHealth automatically generated them through a third-party estate vendor mailing program, which handles printed correspondence for deceased patients.
A single unchecked process turned empathy into an error code. Nobody proofread the system that decided who was gone, and that’s the real glitch, not the software, but the silence behind it.
THE WHY: NEGLIGENCE
Weirdness Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Four out of five stars because this is a real hospital accidentally mass-mailing the afterlife. It’s the kind of bureaucratic nightmare that proves one thing: In 2025, even death can be a clerical error.
“Look, most of us want a normal life without any drama, but life in this world is always strange, and uncertain.
I don’t need your email. I don’t want to bug you with a billion notifications. All I ask is this, if you felt something here, if this made you think, laugh, or even shake your head in disbelief, turn on notifications or just bookmark ‘Averagebeing.com’ and come back tomorrow.
That’s it. No strings. Just you, me, and this stupid world.”
