little urn

We collected Ma-in-Law’s ashes today - or at least half of them.  Mollymay with take them home to Australia to scatter at Matilda Bay, a place Ma loved and chose as a home for her ashes.  The other half will be scattered alongside her husband’s.

To make life easier for Mollymay to transport them, the funeral parlour offered to put them in a ‘little urn’.  See above.

Now Ma had a good sense of humour and was a great fan of Morecombe and Wise, so I think she’d have laughed at the idea of ‘little urn’.

She certainly laughed when I told her the story of what happened to my Mum’s ashes.

My Mum never specified what she wanted to happen to her ashes.  So she spent ages on the top shelf in the garage.  When Anniemay and I decided to get married, we ran away to Gretna Green.  And took my Mum with us.

After the wedding we took her home to the place she grew up, the small village of Redding, near Falkirk.  My grandmother’s house was on a hillside overlooking the River Forth - Grangemouth lay below and on a clear day, the Wallace Monument was visible to the North West.

A lot of new houses had been built in the village since I was last there, but I managed to find the field that backed onto the old house.  I decided that this would be the place -  she had played there as a child and I had played there too when I came to stay with my Grandparents.

We unscrewed the lid of the urn and scattered the ashes to the four winds.  The four winds decided to scatter most of them back.  Although we ducked, we did not escape entirely and so some of my Mum’s ashes eventually ended up in a dry-cleaners.

The moral of this story is to tell people exactly what you want to happen when your time comes.  Otherwise you never know where you might end up.