The man from the funeral home didn’t answer immediately. I heard him breathe into the phone, and then he asked me whether I still had the container I’d received. I told him yes, and he asked whether it had ever been opened. I said no, not since I brought it home. He told me not to open it either, and said he needed to check something in their records before he could explain what was happening. When he finally called me back, his voice was completely different. He said the amount I was describing couldn’t possibly represent the full remains of an adult man.
I went back through every paper they had given me and found something I’d overlooked. The cremation certificate listed my husband’s weight before the procedure, the date of the cremation, and the identification number assigned to him, but the number on the certificate didn’t match the number printed on the container I had brought home. I called the funeral home again and read both numbers to the director. There was a long silence, followed by him asking me where I had received the container. I told him it had been handed directly to me after the service, and he said that was impossible because the container associated with that identification number had been released to someone else.
I drove there with the ashes still in the sealed container, and the director met me in a private room. He pulled up the crematory records and showed me the original paperwork. My husband’s name was there, but beside it was a handwritten correction made after the cremation had supposedly been completed. The director said the correction shouldn’t have existed because the crematory’s system was supposed to lock the record once the remains were processed. Then he showed me another document: a transfer form signed the morning after my husband’s cremation, authorizing someone to collect a second container under my husband’s identification number.
I asked who had signed it, and the director turned the paper toward me. I recognized the signature immediately because I’d seen it on our household documents for twenty-three years. It was my husband’s handwriting. I told him my husband had been dead when that form was signed, and the director said he knew. Then he opened a separate file and showed me a photograph taken inside the crematory that morning. A man wearing my husband’s jacket was standing beside the collection counter, his face turned away from the camera. The director looked at me and said, “We assumed someone had made a clerical error until we found out your husband had apparently been cremated twice.”
