This is an actual piece of returned mail to a certain charity organization. Identifying details have been censored to protect the innocent my job.
Click on the image to see a larger version.
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I used to write that kind of stuff for a former boss who had lost her husband. The less reputable insurance companies kept trying to sell him life insurance, and we kept writing polite letters telling them he was dead, and they kept not reading them, or at least continuing to send us solicitations addressed to a dead man. I eventually took to stealing the insurance company letters out of the mail before my boss saw them (because she would complain, and make me write another polite letter), scrawling “NOT AT THIS ADDRESS – RETURN TO SENDER” on the envelopes, and mailing them back.
I should have thought to write “PUSHING UP DAISIES.” It would have been funnier.
I used to get a lot of those for my mother (who miraculously has come with us through two changes of address since she died). The ones that annoyed me most were the repeated fund-raising letters from some arm of the Episcopal Church (in one of whose, er, branches her funeral was held). After the first half dozen or so “Deceased — Return to Sender” notations, I wrote a nasty letter to the local bishop. His office replied with the usual “it’s so hard to scrub databases”, but the letters stopped until the next move.
Perhaps this is what Brautigan was really talking about when he wrote “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” .
I work for a marketing company that includes several large charities amongst its clientel, and they take that kind of thing very seriously. After all, it’s a waste of the charity’s donations to send mail to someone who isn’t in a position to donate (being dead’n’all), but it also potentially loses a supporter or two in the people who have to deal with the unwanted mail. So they tend to be more responsive.