Nobody knows what happens to us when we die, though one man’s ashes now live in a very different place from where they started.
As mother Monica Long tells People, she had turned away from her three boys for just a few minutes, only to return and find that both they and her home were covered in dirt. Or, what she thought was dirt.
Days after she vacuumed up the mess, she noticed that the urn holding her grandfather’s ashes was now empty.
“I realized, ‘Oh my gosh, they got PawPaw and I vacuumed him up,'” Long says. “I couldn’t believe this happened. I love them to death but oh my goodness, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
Long then remembered seeing white dust on her children’s lips.
“I pieced it together. The littlest one, he figured out how to open bottles by biting and unscrewing them,” Long says. “So that’s why they had white dust on their lips. And I just dusted and cleaned them off, not thinking anything of it.”
She adds, “But they might have eaten part of their grandfather, which is horrifying.”
That disturbing thought aside, Long says that both she and her family members have been able to laugh through the situation.
“I called my grandmother and said, ‘MawMaw, I gotta tell you something.’ She goes, ‘Well what is it?'” Long says. “I said, ‘The boys got PawPaw and they dumped him out and I didn’t realize it was him so I vacuumed him up.’ She goes, ‘Oh no,’ but found it comical. She goes, ‘I bet PawPaw would have got a kick out of that,’ and then tells me, ‘Don’t worry, we have more PawPaw.'”
Somewhere, a screenwriter has started typing up a horror movie called PawPaw.