Mental health problem or one of the grieving stages? Death and denial.

I asked her what she would do if someone she knew had started to say that their father had not died when everyone else including her knew he had. She said "You mean, forgot?" I said "Whatever the reason, they just suddenly start talking as if he never died and was just missing. What would you do?" She replied "Get them proof." I said "Such as go to a hospital and show them a record which indicates their father as 'deceased'?" She replied "Yes." I asked, "What if they said that the hospital was wrong?" She replied, "Well, that would be ridiculous!" I then paused and said, "But that's exactly what you're saying to me when the screen there showed him as deceased..."

The person decided she would go to the hospitals that last treated her father, to see if they know where he is (in reality, he is dead, of course).At the records office, the clerks told him that she would need authorisation from the patient before they can release any information. However, they did do a search on their system and apparently his details came up. The screen was some distance from the person, but she said there were 4 lines and she called those entries "suspicious".Immediately afterwards, I asked her what she meant by suspicious. She said she meant that it was odd that they called up the information on the system but then wouldn't let her know what it said. About half an hour later, when I asked her if she could read what it said on the 4 lines, she said it was the names of doctors familiar to her, plus some Latin terminology and the word in Polish for "deceased".I expected to have to comfort her at this point, but she said that the hospital had obviously made a mistake and the search would go on.

She did add that she'd believe it if she saw a Death Certificate but added "Don't even talk like that, he's not dead."The only bit of progress made is that she is starting to accept he's been absent for years and not just months, and she has started to recall that he gave her instructions regarding what to do with his things if anything happened to him. Whether she remembers the rest as we visit various hospitals he was in, will remain to be seen.

she made me a frankly fantastic smoothie