Ashes gathering dust clutter funeral home

Dead people's ashes are causing a storage headache for a South Auckland funeral home, which is appealing for them to be collected.

Yvonne Graham, from the Papatoetoe Funeral Cottage, said they were storing hundreds of urns containing the cremated remains of people whose funerals they had organised.

Some were being held at the request of relatives who were waiting for the other partner to die so the ashes could be scattered together but others had simply not been collected. Mrs Graham said they were now running out of space.

She said it was a problem common to funeral directors. Many families had simply not made a decision about what to do with the ashes.

"We have a service and suddenly they think it is over."

She said she was "flabbergasted" to find several hundred urns at a funeral director's business she took over. Many of those were placed at a memorial garden but without a name plaque, although all the names were registered with the crematorium.

Mrs Graham said if the ashes of people cremated before 2000 were not collected by the end of next month, they would be interred at the Manukau Memorial Gardens in Papatoetoe in April.

She said the problem was getting so big they were at a stage where the families would have to take the ashes back, even if they didn't want them.

"We are happy to scatter them on the rose gardens at the crematorium.

"We have got to let them go. We can't hold them indefinitely.

"It is very difficult because you see people when they are very vulnerable and you can't just throw them away."

Mrs Graham said they would continue to hold ashes if asked to by relatives.

She held the ashes of four World War II Harvard pilots for several years. Her husband had shares in a Harvard and during a flight he scattered the ashes, to the delight of the families.

- NZPA