Seven Years After My Daughter’s Funeral, I Followed Her Husband to a Rehabilitation Center—And Saw a Woman I Thought Was Dead

Nora.

A woman who had worked with my daughter.

A person with her own history.

Her own family.

For seven years, our family had mourned Melissa while remains belonging to Nora were identified under the wrong name.

I felt grief for someone I barely knew.

Not because I had lost the right to mourn.

But because another person had been hidden beneath our mistaken certainty.