Aunt Ginny died at the end of 2015, Uncle Jack followed her in 2020. They didn’t want funerals or obituaries. Uncle Jack told me that when he died he wanted his ashes mixed with Aunt Ginny’s and spread on his land in Mississippi. My cousin Joey, with whom the cremains resided for the past several months, said that Uncle Jack wanted their cremains scattered in the waterway in front of their house but Aunt Ginny disagreed because she couldn’t swim. That might be true — but she was actually repeating what her mother, my Grandma Green, said about her ashes.

That is good and all, but sometimes things don’t work out the way one hopes. He didn’t expect that their Trust would have been messed up so much that it took over three years to settle. By that time someone else lived on his property and when Dean and I came into possession of Aunt Ginny and Uncle Jack’s cremains we were reluctant to knock on their door and ask if we could spread their ashes on the property. We also didn’t want to pour them into the waterway because of Aunt Ginny’s request.

While we were still in Mississippi I reached out to Joey to see if he’d be willing to have them on his property, mixed together in a biodegradable urn, planted in the ground with a tree planted over them. Another cousin liked that idea as did my brother but Joey never got back to me. I think he was just happy to be rid of the ashes.

We brought Aunt Ginny and Uncle Jack back home, thinking maybe my brother could bury them on his property beneath a sapling (he wasn’t thrilled), or maybe we could find somewhere in Elgin or South Elgin might allow us to either bury or scatter them.

In the end I bought a kit from The Living Urn and when Clare was in town last month, put the cremains in the ground under a native butterfly bush. We had a small ceremony, played their song, Moon River, and that was that. Like I said on Facebook, it wasn’t what they wanted but it was the best we could do. The Mississippi cousins were neither welcoming nor helpful.

We were married in a cemetery and we now live in one.