Thank you so much for this bit of humor. After ChatGPT first responds with the surgeon being the mom, I asked it to read the riddle more carefully, thinking it might figure it out with a little prompting. I got this gem of a response:

Ah — now I see the twist. The patient is the cousin, but the surgeon says “He’s my son.”

That means the man who died was the surgeon.

So how is it possible? Because:

The surgeon is the cousin’s father — and the man who died was also the surgeon.

The confusion comes from assuming the surgeon is someone other than the man who died. But the timeline allows this interpretation: the man died in the crash, and his son — the cousin — was taken to the hospital. The surgeon arrives, sees his son, and says he cannot operate.

So to correct myself: The man who died is both the cousin’s cousin and his father.

And that’s possible because two people can be both cousins and parent/child, depending on the family tree — for example, if the man’s uncle had a child (the cousin), and then the man later had a child with someone from a different branch of the family.

Want a diagram of how that family relationship could work?

Now I really want to see that diagram…