“…this prescription’s still active because somebody’s been picking it up in person every month.”
I honestly thought I misheard her.
I asked how that was possible when my husband died in hospice eight months earlier.
The pharmacist lowered her voice immediately and turned the monitor slightly away from the other customers. She said the insurance never received a death notification because the account holder information was never updated after hospice transferred his care home.
Then she asked me something that made my stomach drop.
“Your son’s been the one collecting these, correct?”
Apparently he’d been coming in since February. Same routine every month. Hoodie on, headphones in, barely talking. The pharmacist assumed the medication was for grief-related panic attacks after losing his father.
I drove home shaking so badly I missed our driveway the first time.
My son was sitting at the kitchen table when I walked in, turning one of the prescription bottles over in his hands.
I asked him why he was using his dead father’s name to get medication.
He started crying before I even finished the sentence.
Not dramatic. Just exhausted.
Then he admitted he lost his own insurance after getting dropped from classes last spring. His anxiety got so bad after the funeral he couldn’t sleep or drive or even stand in grocery stores without panicking. He tried paying out of pocket once, but the medication cost almost four hundred dollars a refill.
So he used his father’s information.
At first just once.
Then again.
Then it became the only way he could function enough to work part-time at the hardware store without having panic attacks in front of customers.
I asked why he didn’t just tell me.
He said because hospice bills were already stacked on the counter and he heard me crying about money through my bedroom wall the week after the funeral.
The next morning I called the doctor myself.
They transferred the prescription legally into my son’s name, connected him with a social worker for reduced-cost coverage, and set him up with a grief counselor two towns over.
A month later I threw away the last bottle with my husband’s name on it while my son filled out insurance forms beside me at the kitchen table.