It’s a saying “We all have skeletons in the closet”, but have you ever known someone that actually did? Since our return to the States, I got a few jobs as a housekeeper. And have had some wonderful experiences and some have been a little unusual.
Sometimes when cleaning for a family with kids in the home, I bring my own kids, and they get to spend the day together, on one such occasion, I was cleaning for a family with eight children, so of course, my kids always enjoyed coming with me. The mother was a chiropractor. The kids had a little creek that they could go to and play in. My son decided to make a homemade fishing pole and try to catch a fish. Rummaging around in the garage looking for string, he came across something else that was a lot more interesting. The woman had a client that passed away years before and had no one to leave his estate to. So, he left it with his chiropractor, including his remains. She had him cremated and had stashed his ashes on a shelf in the garage. To my son, it just looked like a vase. She said he almost knocked it off the shelf!
The plot thickened when the woman herself passed away never having told her family about them. I returned to their house to pay my condolences to the family. I couldn’t bring myself to inform her grieving husband of the ashes in his garage. He’s busy balancing a full household on his own, and I doubt he will ever find them.
The most tragic part of the story is that this man, the woman’s client had no one, no family, no church family, not even a neighbor, to leave his remains to, so he left them with his chiropractor! He was never paid any respects, his ashes were never even taken to the top of a mountain or scattered over the ocean. He is sitting on a shelf in someone’s garage waiting for a new homeowner to come across him, and perhaps mercifully pay him the respect of at least being buried.
What was this man’s family life? What relationships had been left unresolved that this man had no final resting place? The moral of the story? This man had no one to care for him, but he hadn’t cared for anyone either, or perhaps he would have been missed. Did anyone mourn his loss? Jesus said we are the salt of the earth. This man was the opposite of that. He was like the canister of salt left stowed away in the cupboard. What contribution to society could have been made? What talents did this man have that were kept to himself? What footprint in history was never left?
Live well, laugh often and love much! It’s what Jesus would do.