…we refused. She wanted an identical empty urn, so she could switch them without you noticing. We told her no. So she bought a copy online. This is it.”
I held the cheap urn in my hands. It was lighter than I remembered. I’d been too grief-stricken to notice.
Then the director, Mr. Hollis, said something that made me sit down. “Mrs. Patterson, your husband made special arrangements before he died. Do you remember?”
I didn’t. Those weeks had been a blur.
My husband, Frank, had asked that half of his ashes stay at the funeral home, in a sealed container, until I was ready to scatter them at the lake where he’d proposed. He’d told Mr. Hollis, “She won’t be ready for a long time. Keep me safe until she is.”
The urn my daughter-in-law, Stacy, had emptied into the trash had only held half of him. The other half was still there, in a quiet room at the back of the funeral home, exactly where Frank had wanted to be.
I cried in Mr. Hollis’s office for a long time.
Then I took the video to the police. In our state, intentionally desecrating human remains is a crime. Stacy was charged. My son, Greg, hadn’t known what she’d done. When the detective showed him the video, he walked out of the room and was sick in the hallway.
Greg and Stacy separated soon after. He asked me to forgive him for not protecting his father. I told him there was nothing to forgive. He hadn’t done it. But he would have to decide what kind of man he wanted to be now.
In the spring, Greg drove me to the lake. We scattered Frank’s ashes together off the old wooden dock where he’d gotten down on one knee forty-six years earlier. Greg held my hand the whole time.
