The Slice: Sometimes the answer is right nearby

Sometimes there’s no decision to be made when it comes to choosing a burial site.

The family has a reserved spot in a cemetery, and that’s where everyone’s remains wind up. Done and done.

But what if there is no such arrangement? And what if the deceased individuals lived the end of their lives far from their hometowns, distant places to which they no longer had much of a connection?

I’ll get to that.

My parents moved to Spokane from New England in late summer of the year 2000. My father, a retired Air Force officer, died in the fall of 2007.

His cremated remains, stored in a flag draped box, stayed in my basement for years. On a shelf with some sports equipment.

It was always assumed his ashes would be joined by my mother’s when the time came. Just where was an unanswered question.

My family never had any sort of group plot arrangement. My parents had a couple of reserved spots in a Quaker cemetery back in my mother’s New Jersey hometown. But I’m not even sure if other members of her family were buried there.

After my parents had moved to Spokane, my brother died in Colorado and my sister died in California. The disposition of their remains was handled by their families.

Some time after my father died, my mother expressed an interest in seeing the veterans cemetery out by Medical Lake. So one afternoon, we drove out to the rural site, which was in the early stages of development.

It quickly became apparent that my mother didn’t really want to be actively involved in making this decision. So, after she died in early 2015, it fell to me to decide and to my wife and I to make the arrangements.

My mother had been a U.S. Army Air Corps nurse in the early 1940s. She met my father at a bomber base in Kansas, where he was back from North Africa and transitioning from B-24s to B-29s. He was headed to the Pacific.

My brother, noting their white hair, unsteady gaits and irascible personalities, used to refer to them in conversations with me as “the World War II veterans.”

So, after ruling out several other options, I decided on the veterans cemetery here. For the most part, the only people who might want to visit their graves are in the West. And at the end of their lives, when they needed the most help, it was people here who helped them.

Today would have been my mother’s 100th birthday. I think of her every day.

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com.