I just keep thinking that sometime, somewhere, someone is going to regret abandoning the remains and come back and get them. A while back, one family claimed an urn that had languished in Horan's file cabinet for years. The next day, the mortuary got a call from a security guard at the old Stapleton airport, who'd fished the ashes from a trash can. But I've grown to understand that not everyone sees it that way. One elderly woman calls Horan's mortuary practically every year to check on some ashes that have sat in an urn in the basement for fifty years.
Few survivors are so blunt regarding their failure to pick up a relative's remains.
Other times, families can't agree on what should be done with the urns, so the remains stay in limbo. Occasionally, a survivor couldn't stand the person in life and wants nothing to do with him in death. But the overarching explanation for abandonment, Horan says, is society's general awkwardness with death. A hundred years ago, families frequently lost relatives to disease, injury, accidents, even war. And when they did, the bodies often were kept in the family home for several days, allowing for rosaries and other ceremonies.