Ok, right, so to set the scene, my maternal grandparents moved from Manchester to a nice bungalow in a seaside town the north Welsh coast when my grandfather retired from being a minister. Sadly, as is often the case with men who stop suddenly after working hard for years, he died of a heart attack about six months later. I was about four at the time and my next sibling was about a year old.
My grandmother lived for nearly another twenty years in this town they'd picked out, moving after a while from the bungalow to a smaller flat, and later again to a single room in an Abbeyfield house. Eventually she died of cancer (a few other things had a go first, but she was stubborn), considerately doing so just after everyone had got home from my aunt's silver wedding celebrations. So, there is a funeral, and my mother and aunt do the clearing out of her room, and mostly manage not to fall out, and agree that they will fix a date to scatter their mother's ashes together. They are both really busy so this takes a month or two, but eventually she rings up the crematorium to arrange collection of Mrs Moffat's ashes.
"And will you also be collecting Mr Moffat's ashes at the same time, madam?" asks the person at the other end.
After a bit of bafflement and conversation, they establish that none of my grandmother, my mother or my aunt remembered to actually collect my grandfather's ashes after his funeral. But it was the same crematorium and they'd kept them safely and their record-keeping was good enough to put the two together, even after twenty years.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regna
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-03 09:06 pm (UTC)My grandmother lived for nearly another twenty years in this town they'd picked out, moving after a while from the bungalow to a smaller flat, and later again to a single room in an Abbeyfield house. Eventually she died of cancer (a few other things had a go first, but she was stubborn), considerately doing so just after everyone had got home from my aunt's silver wedding celebrations. So, there is a funeral, and my mother and aunt do the clearing out of her room, and mostly manage not to fall out, and agree that they will fix a date to scatter their mother's ashes together. They are both really busy so this takes a month or two, but eventually she rings up the crematorium to arrange collection of Mrs Moffat's ashes.
"And will you also be collecting Mr Moffat's ashes at the same time, madam?" asks the person at the other end.
After a bit of bafflement and conversation, they establish that none of my grandmother, my mother or my aunt remembered to actually collect my grandfather's ashes after his funeral. But it was the same crematorium and they'd kept them safely and their record-keeping was good enough to put the two together, even after twenty years.