How have the courts dealt with a claim for personal injury arising from the death of a plaintiff's daughter?

In Pagarigan, decedent was admitted to a convalescent hospital in a comatose state. Her two daughters signed arbitration agreements providing for arbitration of disputes between the resident and the facility, including negligence and medical malpractice claims. After decedent's death, her children sued the operators of the hospital for decedent's personal injuries as her successors in interest and for wrongful death in their own right. The court held defendants' petition to compel arbitration was properly denied because they did not establish a valid agreement to arbitrate. (Pagarigan v. Libby Care Center, Inc., supra, 99 Cal.App.4th at p. 301.) Decedent had not signed an arbitration agreement; there was no evidence decedent had signed a durable power of attorney. Decedent lacked the capacity to authorize her daughters to enter into arbitration agreements on her behalf at the time they signed. (Ibid.) The court rejected defendants' contention that the daughters' representation that they had the power to bind decedent conferred that authority. A person cannot become an agent of another merely by representing herself as such, and there was no evidence decedent ever employed her daughters as her agents or did anything to cause defendants to believe her daughters were authorized to act as her agents. (Id. at pp. 301-302.)