Jeez. Well, I will preface this story by saying it didn’t happen to me, it happened to my Mum last month. And I will further preface it by saying that my Mum has had a bitch of a winter, so far. In November, she was knocked down by a bus while she was crossing the street in a crosswalk with the “walk” signal. She wasn’t badly hurt, the bus driver escorted her to the firehall that was right there, the paramedics checked her out and offered to drive her home, but she said no. She walked home - it’s a mile and a half. My Mum is 83. A tough lady, me Ma.
Then in December one of her brothers-in-law died, and another was finally placed in a nursing home.
But the worst blow, of course, was the completely unexpected and tragic death of my sister on January 11th.
Usually at Christmas my Mum goes to the cemetary where my Dad’s ashes are interred and she leaves a little poinsettia there and I suppose she sits and chats a bit with Dad. We aren’t a religious family (to say the least), but she finds it comforting to do this, and after all, they were happily married for 54 years before Dad died, and if she wants to talk to him, it’s fine with us! But this Christmas the weather was icky and she won’t drive in the snow, so she didn’t go to the cemetary then. She and my youngest sister went to the cemetary the Saturday after my other sister died, the 12th of January - and my Dad’s “marker” wasn’t there.
They looked everywhere, even wondering if they had somehow taken a wrong turn, etc., but no, they were in the right place. As if, after 12 years, Mum would make a mistake like that. Being a Saturday, there was no one in the office and no one answered the phone at the alternate number. So, Mum dug out the contract she had signed with the cemetary in 1996, and there, in the fine print, was the information that the cemetary “at its discretion” could move a grave, with the proviso that it would be in “just as nice a spot”. So Mum and sis figured this must be what happened and they were furious and upset that someone would do this without notifying the family.
My poor Mum. On top of my sister’s death, it was the last straw. I have never known her to be so upset and beyond herself, I honestly thought she might have what they call a nervous breakdown.
First thing Monday morning my sister phoned the cemetary office and they said, “No, no one has moved anything. We have no idea what happened.” So then Mum gets on the phone, very upset, and demands to know what they’re going to do about it. She suggested that maybe it was metal thieves, as people are actually stealing brass markers, etc., from cemetaries. The woman in the office said, “No, we haven’t had anything like that happen here.” So then, she goes on to say, “Has there been a family row of some kind? Could a family member have done this?”
Well, poor Mum was just gobsmacked. A family member steal it? I mean, I can hardly describe how upset she was.
An hour or so later the woman phoned Mum and said, “Don’t worry, Mrs. W., your husband’s ashes are still there, we have done a probe and we are sure of that.”
The next afternoon, Mum gets another call. “The marker is still there.”
It turns out that last fall the cemetary maintenance crew had put new sod down in places, the kind of sod that comes on a sort of mesh, and they had just flung it down over Dad’s marker and then neglected to cut out the area so the marker could be seen.
Mum was beside herself because the phone call assuring her that the urn was still there was bullshit, because if they had really done a probe that day they would have found the marker then. But she was relieved and she went down and sure enough, there it was, just as it should be.
The long and the short of this long story is that a week later the cemetary called my Mum and said they would give her the plot next to my Dad for nothing. This is worth about $2,500. She and my youngest sister went to the cemetary office and got it in writing.
