You will either never look at it again, or it will be the most important thing you own.

Three. A death certificate is a document, not a fact.

I have said that to two rooms full of physicians and both times it was received badly, and I am going to keep saying it.

It is signed by one person.

It is filed electronically.

It is not audited at the point of filing, and in most states nobody independently confirms that the signing physician ever saw the patient.

The system runs on the assumption that a signature means what it says, and that assumption is correct virtually every time, and it was correct approximately three million times in this country last year.