The director told me the second name belonged to a woman who had been admitted to the crematorium that same morning. He pulled the intake sheet and showed me the handwriting. The name was unfamiliar, but the address beside it was not. It was the house where my sister had lived for the last six years. I asked him how that was possible, and he said the intake form had been completed before my sister ever arrived at the facility.
I drove straight to her house and started looking through the papers she’d left behind. Everything seemed normal until I found a folder hidden beneath the bottom drawer of her desk. Inside were copies of two identification cards, both belonging to women I had never heard of. One had my sister’s address listed as her residence, and the other had a photograph that looked enough like my sister to make me stop breathing for a moment.
There was also a handwritten note from my sister dated three weeks before she died. She hadn’t mentioned either woman by name, but she’d written that she’d been “keeping something that was never supposed to come back.” I called the funeral director again and asked him to check the intake records for the second name. He went quiet for a long time before telling me there was something else attached to the file — a document my sister had signed herself.
I asked him to read it to me. He said it was a release authorizing the crematorium to return both containers to the same person, and that person was supposed to be me. Then he told me the signature wasn’t dated on the day my sister died. It was dated four months earlier, and underneath it was a handwritten instruction that said, “Give her the second one only after she asks why I was afraid of dying.”
