Dead relatives take a ride west....

[cliffordu]

My mother in law passed away recently after a long successful life by any standard and a very short illness and merciful passing by any other..

My wife was fortunate enough to be there for the end and was able to take care of a lot of the business that children and parents must take care of before the inevitable.

It fell to me to transport her ashes (along with long dead father-in-laws dust) from Indiana to here in Washington State in the car my wife inherited....

That's pretty normal on the face of it, but since we have gone without a car for the last 8 years as a kind of political protest, before I could go back, I had to go get a license, insurance and AAA....

Washington mails the real license to the driver, so I had a paper temporary license to take back east, along with a faxed set of insurance papers that when taken in sum looked suspiciously like something out of a beginning digital prepress class....

Easy Peasy, right?? Two days on the train, a day's travel to get the car and the ashes and the next day I'm busy driving a dead womans car cross country with no title, a faxed copy of current insurance and a fake looking paper driver's license and the remains of my dead relatives in the trunk with five very large bins of the last of my bride's crap stored at her mothers house, contents of the bins unknown..... I did NOT want get pulled over, figuring a trip to some county jail for three days till all of the truth could be gleaned from my little saga....And the inevitable "what's in these jars back here?????"

There is this horrifyingly comic nightmare vision of some county sherriff taking samples of Eddie and Gladys and swirling them in one of those little drug test kits that turn blue for heroin and red for coke, and I dunno what for inlaws that ran through my head dozens of times and I laughed till I cried more than once until I would re-realize exactly was taking place there....

There is no way to anticipate the creepyness involved in hauling fresh remains.....I found myself involuntarily concentrating on the urns in the trunk.....and wondering if I should actually take them into the motel rooms for safekeeping........and deciding not to.

So I told them jokes and tried to hold sing alongs and inquired as to their incessant hatred of me while they were alive.....

And, on occasion, when I felt less creepy and emboldened by the resentment over the way they treated my lovely wife...I yelled "I WIN BEEOTCHES!!!!!"

And I finally DID get them here, and still don't know what we're going to do with them they are still in the car.....probably singing the Bee gees......

As we were cleaning the car out my lovely wife realized that THERE ARE NO CURRENT TAGS ON THE GODDAMNED CAR.

Maybe the inlaws like me more than I thought they did.

[grantcart]

1. lol great story

Once I was sitting in my office in Singapore when a visitor from another station stopped by for a talk. We discussed all of the strange events of the last few weeks which included the passing of one of our co workers in the field.

He told me that he had last seen the fellow a few years ago and they had parted on bad terms.

He said that he always wished that he had one more opportunity to tell him how much he like the old boy.

I said "no problem" reached down and pulled up an urn from my desk and plopped it in front of him and said "there he is tell him what you really think".

As his eyes focused on the urn and the suddeness of meeting the remains of someone whose remains would be virtually "hot out of the oven" he found a reconciling speech a little demanding and I watched as the blood drained out of his face and he crumpled forward in a perfect faint.

The rest of the office staff came into my office to help and when I told them what had happened all of the Singapore staff thought it a great joke as I had used the urn of a departed refugee whose urn I was holding while we were arranging their return to Vietnam.

After a few beers the visitor was able to appreciate the deftness of pulling out the urn on perfect cue without breaking a smile.

[cliffordu]

2. LOL

We could start a funny human remains thread, but I guess no one else thinks the deceased is funny....

Which is odd, cause we're all going there. Some in a handbasket, some in a nice brass urn........

[Kali]

3. good story

:thumbsup: