Love and marriage can be of supreme importance when the Veterans Administration (VA) is considering an application for death pension from a surviving spouse. It is true that marriage is one way to document a veteran’s dependent, and this would mean an additional $332 per month to a vet’s pension in 2016. But failure to document a veteran’s marriage would certainly not be an outright bar to pension. By contrast, in the case of a surviving spouse’s claim, if you cannot document that the marriage between the surviving spouse and the veteran was valid, you have no claim at all, regardless of how eligible the surviving spouse may be otherwise.
